WORD PLAY: Trying not to miss the pun farts

HALLIE EPHRON: I love words. What fun to mess around with them, making up new words and transposing sounds to amuse myself.

In today’s paper, a piece about Leslie Jones performing in Boston: “We also learned that Boston Mayor Marty Walsh is a big fan of Jones. Hizzoner tweeted at the ‘Ghostbusters’ actress on Friday to invite her to lunch.”

Took me a few blinks to process: Hizzoner? Turns out I’m way out of the loop. It’s a corruption of His Honor, of course. Merriam-Webster traces it back to 1882.

Here are some of my favorite word corruptions, many of which run rampant in my family, brought to us by baby-talking parents and babies learning to talk.

Attacking it in one swell foop

Stop being such a gilly soose

Marauding runny babbits

Catterpiggles before they turn into flutterbies

Try not to miss the pun fart

Act like a jibbertyflibbit

Indulge in belly jeans

Explain to the ossifer that I wasn’t speeding

So mixed up I got it bass ackwards

Wearing a Thunderbra under my flaid plannel shirt

Where are my flop flips

Soap for the wishdawsher

Getting it done, dick and quirty.

Quit yer picknitting.

Tighten the nug luts

Freshen your stiplick

And then there are the words we like to mispronounce on porpoise…

Sharpen the skizzers

Eat your pisghetti

Load the hiccup truck

Take a ride in an upticopter

Put the milk in the fridgedator.

And every October 31 my husband wishes me a Hallie Happoween.

Please, share your favorite corruptions of the English language.

(And thanks to Edward Lear for the inspired nonsense of his drawings.) 

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