Hellaciously fellatious
E-mail correspondent Bill Findlay recently came across this occurrence
of
fellatious in a
web
discussion of Intelligent Design:
To: Bellflower
"Don't bible at me in public school". Actually it has certain rhythm to
it and could be made into a song line. Designer is not logical - for
who/what then had designed that designer? In logic it is called
"reductio ad infinitum", and such arguments are fellatious.
[posted on 01/06/2006 9:42:29 PM PST by GSlob]
Perhaps GSlob meant to say, in a tasteful way, that such arguments suck
monkey dick, big time. (By the way, "suck monkey dick" gets 1,460
raw Google webhits this morning, and "sucks monkey dick" another
1,290. All the occurrences are, of course, both metaphorical and
disparaging; no monkeys or blowjobs are involved, even in the forum
where the proposition that "gay people suck monkey dick" was under
discussion.) Somehow I doubt it; could GSlob be that clever?
Findlay wondered if it was an eggcorn. But it's hard to imagine
that someone who can call up a reference to the reductio ad infinitum
would fail to connect the adjective in question to the noun
fallacy and instead hit on
fellatio as the related noun.
Fond though I am of eggcorns, my guess is that GSlob is just not a very
good speller; sometimes this is all that's going on. There is a
pattern of noun stems ending in
ac
(+
y) related to adjective
stems in
at (
democracy-democratic), so you might
guess that the adjective stem related to
fallacy works this way too.
Independently, there's a considerable tendency, which I reported on in
"Toadying
3", to spell the first vowel in
fallacious
with an
e instead of an
a:
fellacious. (I find this
astonishing, but there it is.) Put these two spelling errors
together, and you get the entertaining
fellatious.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at February 8, 2006 02:26 PM