Verboticisms

Created by: lplybon

Pronunciation: "Kun-EE-leeng-WIST"

Sentence: Everyone dreads the Thursday afternoon staff meeting: Bob, the office manager, makes what should be a 30-minute meeting addressing staff concerns a 2-hour lecture on correct grammar. Bob is such a cunnilinguist he spends more time correcting every little mistake people make when speaking than actually hearing what they are saying. If Bob reminds us that his name is a palindrome one more time, I swear I will scream!

Etymology: Combination of the words "cunning" and "linguist"

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COMMENTS:

Brilliant !!! - XMbIPb, 2010-06-02: 19:34:00

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Created by: mweinmann

Pronunciation: speek - ur - tweek - ur

Sentence: Margerie could not listen to anyone without "tweaking" their statements so that the speaker's grammar and voice inflection were correct in the context of the sentence. Her family and friends became loath to even talk to her for fear of being corrected. Other than being a speakertweaker, Margerie's biggest compulsion was playing Verbotomy every day and checking her scores every hour.

Etymology: Speaker (someone who expresses in language; someone who talks) + tweaker (a person who tweaks something) tweak (fine-tune: adjust finely)

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COMMENTS:

nice one! - galwaywegian, 2009-01-16: 11:41:00

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Created by: silveryaspen

Pronunciation: Rek ti fy

Sentence: Killsay was excellent at morphemes and constituents. He was born a Grammar. Killsay was very in tense, and always in the accusative. He was overly generous in sharing his grammar. Killsay would restruckture the speecch of any one. No was was safe from his guydance (guidance) ... shuffling his feet, waving his finger, tweaking your verbose, nitpicking through one's words ... he would wrectify everything said.

Etymology: RECTIFY, WRECK. RECTIFY - correct, amend, revise. WRECK - to damage and destroy with too much revision. --- (Morphemes are basic word-building units. Constituents are sentence-building units. They are true grammatical words, not verbotomies.) Killsay Grammar is a pun on actor Kelsey Grammer, star of the tv show Frasier.

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COMMENTS:

Bet she had a bad rectutation.... - Mustang, 2009-01-16: 04:17:00

After she irritates enough people, she might turn a wreckluse. - mweinmann, 2009-01-16: 08:12:00

Thank you for the clever comments. But Killsay is a he ... not a she! Men are guilty of doing this, too! - silveryaspen, 2009-01-16: 10:03:00

nice - Jabberwocky, 2009-01-16: 16:16:00

Killsay Grammar...love it! - Nosila, 2009-01-16: 20:43:00

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Created by: Nosila

Pronunciation: sin tax

Sentence: Joel knew that contant correction of his dreadful grammar by the lovely Davina was the sintax he had to pay for her affections.

Etymology: Sin (commit a sin; violate a law of God or a moral law) & Tax (set or determine the amount of (a payment such as a fine);use to the limit) & Syntax (the grammatical arrangement of words in sentences)

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Created by: Ismelstar

Pronunciation: (strunk-tĭf'ĭ-k-kāt'er)

Sentence: With my guest listening attentively, I hastened to the punchline of my story. "After rotting in the cellar for weeks," I crowed, "my brother finally brought up the oranges!" My friends chortled, but my wife rolled her eyes. "Your decomposing brother should stay far away from me!" she began to strunktificate. It was then I realized she was an evil robot, sent from the future with the sole mission of destroying dangling modifiers and misplaced modifiers.

Etymology: A mashup of "Strunk", the last name of the Cornell Professor, best known as the author of the first editions of The Elements of Style, and the verb "pontificate", to express opinions or judgments in a dogmatic way.

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COMMENTS:

Brilliant word, great sentence. Love it! - metrohumanx, 2009-01-21: 15:38:00

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Created by: Postdog

Pronunciation: Ped - anti - ling - wist

Sentence:

Etymology:

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Created by: readerwriter

Pronunciation: jak-grahm-mer

Sentence: In the Teacher's Room, out of her hearing, of course, the red-haired English teacher was referred to as "The Jackgrammar." Even the Physics teacher, a man of few words and much substance, laughed out loud at the label. The barrage of her daily correction was intolerable. Her red pen not only marked her students papers, but the notice board ("final grade's due on...") , the photocopy machine ("put xtra paper here.."), the Principle's (sic) suggestion box. Little did the teachers know that her boyfriend was a tattoo artist and that underneath her long-sleeved blouses, on the skin of her left forearm (unseen in the drawing), was a red and blue heart and the words, "Luv Conquers All."

Etymology: A play on "jackhammer," a pneumatic tool for breaking pavement and drilling rock.

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COMMENTS:

Laughed all the way through the sentence. Luv the way the etymology implies such people hit us like a hammar and break us. - silveryaspen, 2009-01-16: 10:08:00

Good one! - Nosila, 2009-01-16: 20:46:00

This one's destined to be a classic. - metrohumanx, 2009-01-21: 15:34:00

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Created by: artr

Pronunciation: grampä

Sentence: You could always count on Grammpa to correct his grandchildren whenever they spoke. Sometimes they could barely utter a word or two before he would jump in to rephrase what they had just said. Eventually the children stopped talking at all when he was around. Some think that was his goal in the first place.

Etymology: grammar (the whole system and structure of a language or of languages in general, usually taken as consisting of syntax and morphology) + grandpa (one’s grandfather)

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Created by: artr

Pronunciation: gramerkraker

Sentence: James hates e-mail, not for its intrusive nature but the way most people use it. Worse yet is text messaging. (He refuses to call it texting) When someone sends him a message, he replies with a corrected edition of the original message with commas, hyphens, spelling and proper verb tense. He won't respond to the content until the originator sends it back in its corrected form. His friends have started calling him a grammarcracker. He is amused by the term but won't actually type it because it isn't in the dictionary.

Etymology: grammar (the whole system and structure of a language) + cracker (a fine example of something)

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COMMENTS:

I h8 txtn 2. - wayoffcenter, 2009-01-16: 04:46:00

And a very nice play on graham crackers! - silveryaspen, 2009-01-16: 10:12:00

Show them no Grammercy! - Nosila, 2009-01-16: 20:44:00

Those purists can really contaminate our ebonics. - metrohumanx, 2009-01-21: 15:35:00

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Created by: werdnurd

Pronunciation: gra-mud-jun (n)

Sentence: Feeling slighted by the improper use of the word good, the gramudgeon could not help but interject: "You mean well."

Etymology: grammar - the way the sentences of a language are constructed; morphology and syntax. curmudgeon - a bad-tempered, difficult, cantankerous person.

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COMMENTS:

Very good blend! - OZZIEBOB, 2008-03-26: 17:50:00

Hey, your 'Gramudgeon' should hook up with my 'Linguistickler'. - Tigger, 2008-03-26: 22:32:00

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