Come i Simpson hanno cambiato la lingua inglese secondo il blog degli Oxford Dictionaries.
The first episode of The Simpsons aired twenty-five years ago, on 17 December, 1989, and since then, English has never been the same. Homer, Bart, Lisa, Marge, and their friends in Springfield, Wherever-it-is, have given us fancy words of pure invention, worthy of Lewis Carroll, like cromulent 'legitimate, but not really', and words built from worthy English parts, like the blend of opposites in craptacular 'crappy, with attitude' and embiggening 'enlarging', as well as catch phrases like cowabunga, dude!, and Don't have a cow. Embiggening is the sort of word you make up from scratch when you're lacking the edumacation to know that enlarge already exists, and edumacation is the sort of word you use if you also use embiggening. The infix -ma- is a Homerism, and it's productive -- metabomalism, pantomamime, macamadamia, saxomaphone -- in words that already have too many syllables for Homer to handle. He hears and reanalyzes them in a rock-a-bye nursery rhyme rhythm. For all of Homer's verbal pyromatechnics, however, Ned Flanders is the series' king of indiddlyfixing.
LEGGI ALTRO...