The aim of this blog is to serve as a meeting point to those who study or have studied English philology and, more broadly, to all those who love literature and language.

15 Feb 2010

LOST CONSONANTS

Yesterday I read a mention about Lost Consonants cartoons in Language Play by David Crystal. Their author, Graham Rawle, bases the wit of his pictures and captions on the simple fact of altering the meaning of one word by leaving out one of its letters. Crystal tells in his book about the need to know the norm, the correct form of any linguistic form, when they are purposely modified in order to produce a humorous effect in the reader or listener. This can be a good exercise to test our lexical knowledge: to try and identify the original word and compare sentence meanings.

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