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Post by Verbivore on Jul 8, 2021 3:24:08 GMT
Just thought I would mention that the name of the village of Puncknowle in Dorset in the UK is pronounced punnel. It rhymes with gunwale. A close relative, no doubt of Cholmondeley. Oz has some of its own weirdly pronounced placenames, too, e.g. Goonoo-goonoo, pronounced gunna g'noo.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Jul 10, 2021 0:54:47 GMT
>A close relative, no doubt of Cholmondeley.< Cholmondeley? Not that close. Cholmondeley is in Cheshire, a good day’s drive from Dorset! I was really only pointing out that Puncknowle rhymes with tunnel, funnel and, oddly, gunwale.
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Post by Dave Miller on Jul 13, 2021 7:55:06 GMT
LJH - I think Vv was meaning a close relationship with Cholmendeley, pronounced "chumley".
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Jul 13, 2021 8:44:54 GMT
Yes,I know. We have talked about Cholmondeley (and Puncknowle) before. We have dozens of similar extraordinary pronunciations in the UK. I hadn’t previously noticed the rhyme with gunwale, though.
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Post by Verbivore on Jul 13, 2021 21:43:02 GMT
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Jul 13, 2021 22:37:34 GMT
Vv: I have no idea whether I say champing at the bit for chomping at the bit. I notice that the dictation function on this forum allows me to say either (when it doesn’t prefer jumping). Maybe I say champing on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and chomping on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. On Sundays I probably use either depending on my mood. I will canvass the views of some of my kith and kin to see what they say. I do agree with one of the correspondents in the discussion in the forum to which you draw attention in that a horse does not “bite” on the bit so much as try to eject it from his mouth. Whether that is relevant to the question of champing and chomping I am not sure.
There was a lot of rubbish in the comments in the above forum about the pronunciation of the letter A. I agree that there is a north/south divide in this but as a north country lad I always say cat and rat and path and bath with the same short letter A. Seventy years or so ago my mother insisted on my having elocution lessons. The tutor (from the British Midlands) was very insistent that I should use a very slightly rounder A in path and bath than I used in cat and rat but she was equally insistent that it must never be parth or barth. I recall having to practise this. I wish I could recall more important things so clearly — perhaps the lessons were more traumatic than memory suggests.
If it is said that Dorothy Gale in the Wizard of Oz says “Onty Em”, I am quite prepared to believe that. It would be astonishing if a Kansas girl pronounced her words the same as a Lancashire lad. Similarly Scots boys, New Yorkers, Australians, and Pakistanis.
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Post by Verbivore on Jul 13, 2021 23:08:49 GMT
[...] There was a lot of rubbish in the comments in the above forum about the pronunciation of the letter A. I agree that there is a north/south divide in this but as a north country lad I always say cat and rat and path and bath with the same short letter A. […]
Indeed there was a lot of ignorant (and racist/culturalist) twaddle there, LJH: it's the internet after all. However, I thought the comments on chomping v champing relevant. In Oz, most of us who are descended from British convicts tend towards parth, barth, etc. Of course from those who use the th-fronting f, barth can be misunderstood: to ba(r)th and to barf are two distinct things.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Jul 14, 2021 20:42:57 GMT
I have canvassed the views of a few of my friends and relations on the question of whether it should be champing at the bit or chomping at the bit. Most of the people involved are elderly. All are English. Six think they say champing and four think say chomping but none seems very sure. Everyone mutters the phrase over to themselves and shrugs. My daughter who is forty-nine says chomping. My grandson who is sixteen has never heard the expression.
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Post by Dave Miller on Jul 14, 2021 21:35:58 GMT
As I had never encountered (or at least never noticed) the verb to champ, I’m confident that I’ve always said chomping.
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Post by Twoddle on Jul 15, 2021 9:48:57 GMT
I'd probably have said chomping if I'd ever used the phrase, which I don't think I have.
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Post by Verbivore on Jul 15, 2021 11:00:01 GMT
I've always known the term to be champing from my childhood on farms, where horses were said to be champing at the bit (i.e. trying to dislodge the uncomfortable item, the bit, from its placement between fore and hind teeth). It was only once I encountered town folk that I first heard of horses, or anyone else, chomping at the bit.
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Post by Verbivore on Jul 15, 2021 11:04:43 GMT
acyrologia / dogberryisms / malapropisms
I recently read a book wherein a character's main feature was her propensity to utter malaprops. Some of them are (to me) new, while others appear to have been borrowed.
▪ cereal killer (did he kill multiple cornflakes?) ▪ in local apprentice (in loco parentis) ▪ escape goat (a scapegoat) ▪ very close veins (varicose …) ▪ crushed Asians (crustaceans).
And here's one from former AU prime minister Tony Abbott, he of budgie smugglers fame: ▪ the suppository of all wisdom (repository …).
Anyone else have some?
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Post by Verbivore on Jul 15, 2021 11:07:14 GMT
Not a malaprop but a line that, for whatever reason, had me ROTFPMSL:
"[…] the calm was shattered when the door burst open. Had the gent not jumped aside athletically he'd have been sodomised by the doorknob."
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Post by Dave Miller on Jul 15, 2021 13:19:32 GMT
Malapropisms:
I know that the phrase “papier mache” is often pronounced (and even written) by many Americans, as “paper mache”, but a senior colleague, some years ago, had us trying to keep straight faces, with “paper machete”.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Jul 15, 2021 14:04:16 GMT
I don’t intend to write an essay on the choice of champing or chomping at the bit but I have had a look at maybe a dozen websites which discuss the matter and there seems to be a slight consensus that champing was the original version and chomping has become more usual now because champing in the more general sense of enthusiastic eating is archaic whereas chomping is still used.
But it has been suggested that, as clichés, both are to be avoided and that neither is really correct as both champing and chomping refer to biting whereas in fact the horse does not bite on the bit. A properly fitted bit apparently sits in a gap where a horse has no teeth between the incisors and molars and so the motion is more to do with slavering with gums and lips.
As you will see from the previous paragraph, I am content to begin a paragraph, never mind a sentence, with a conjunction. On the basis of this kind of personal responsibility, I have decided that chomping is the preferred choice for the idiom. And that is my final statement — for the moment.
An edit after Dave’s “like”: Except that for perhaps the first time ever, a few minutes after posting the above, I saw the expression used in print other than in a conversation about the use of the word. It was in an advertisement for Wessex Water which said, “With many of us chomping at the bit to get the barbecue running…”.
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