Thursday, September 05, 2013

Minced Oaths


From Sentence First: (If The National Lampoon and linguistics had a baby.)


I was glad to see some old favourites reappear, like the mytholingual encyclopedia boasting such fantastic beasts as Fryggyn’, the Norse goddess of minced oaths; Quetzlnhlxtzlchctlcoātl, the Mesoamerican god of difficult-to-pronounce consonant clusters; and the Abominable Synonym, a creature from Nepal and Tibet which makes people “pathologically doubt their ability to choose the right word”.