SHAM POO.

October 26, 2006 by 24 Comments

See back formation and morphological reanalysis in their full glory at this hilarious post (it would be worthless without the picture!) by Mark Liberman at Language Log. And while we’re at it, has anybody ever heard/used “an ahundred” (from the second part of the post)?

Comments

  1. Bridget says
    October 26, 2006 at 9:33 pm

    I’m pretty sure I’ve heard elementary school-aged kids use it.

  2. KCinDC says
    October 26, 2006 at 11:42 pm

    “A hundred” is just another way of saying “one hundred”, and presumably “He got a one hundred on the test” is okay, right? I don’t think I’ve ever said “an a hundred”, but I can’t completely exclude the possibility.
    How would you read “He got a 100 on the test”? Would you really read “100” as just “hundred”? Are there any other contexts in which you’d read it that way?

  3. tehgeekmeister says
    October 27, 2006 at 2:42 am

    I’d go so far as to say that I think I’ve used/heard “an ahundred” more than just “a hundred”, but only in similiar contexts, as a noun. Just my two cents worth.

  4. Siganus Sutor says
    October 27, 2006 at 3:44 am

    Two ahundred rups for a bottle of fake poo is certainly not correct.

  5. Siganus Sutor says
    October 27, 2006 at 3:59 am

    … but if it is genuine, it might be worth the money:
    Zoo auctions tiger poo
    http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/display.var.914877.0.zoo_auctions_tiger_poo.php
    “The park believes it will scare off cats and foxes if placed in people’s gardens.”

  6. language hat says
    October 27, 2006 at 8:42 am

    How would you read “He got a 100 on the test”? Would you really read “100” as just “hundred”?
    Yes, I really would, because the written form is just a representation of the spoken sentence “He got a hundred on the test.” If it were simply written “He got 100,” it would be ambiguous between “a hundred” and “one hundred”; the a is needed for disambiguation.

  7. The Ridger says
    October 27, 2006 at 8:55 am

    Googling “an ahundred” and “an a-hundred” turn up quite a few hits, actually, even allowing for the written dialect pronunciations where “an a hundred” turns out to be “and a hundred” or even “than a hundred”. It doesn’t seem to be formal anywhere, though. I can’t say whether I’ve ever said it – who pays attention? – but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it. I think “He’s got a temperature of an a hundred and two” sounds quite familiar. I don’t think anyone I know would write it, though. Heck, isn’t that what numerals are for?

  8. Siganus Sutor says
    October 27, 2006 at 9:27 am

    Only now do I realise that in some languages there is neither “a” nor “one” to mark the unity. For example it’s il a eu cent (not “un cent”) or une longueur de mille millimètres, and it’s when they are two or more that the hundreds and thousands literally begin to be counted — deux cents dollars, trois mille mots, etc.
    Incidentally, what’s the difference between “a hundred” and “one hundred”? I’ve counted several times on my fingers and each time I’ve had the same result.

  9. John Emerson says
    October 27, 2006 at 10:33 am

    I always say “That’s a whole nother story, with the “whole” inserted into “another”, but I have never dared write it even though I’ve often wanted to.
    I also have seen a Sono-English sign “Danger / Wei Xian” where the English word was treated as a binome, “Dan + Ger”.

  10. David Marjanović says
    October 27, 2006 at 12:37 pm

    The Slavic languages don’t count a single hundred or thousand either. In German it’s regional (I, in Austria, never say “einhundert”). In Chinese — uh, Mandarin, anyway — it’s obligatory, BTW; this may be related to the fact that for 200 or 2000 the form of “2” that goes with classifiers is used, not the ordinary numeral.
    The “a whole nother” phenomenon may not be unique. In my dialect it is usual to say what translates at “a such a”.

  11. language hat says
    October 27, 2006 at 2:01 pm

    I always say “That’s a whole nother story
    Me too, and for a long time I didn’t even realize it was “wrong” — it just sounded so natural! I presume that’s the case with the “an ahundred” folks, but that one sounds strange to me.

  12. zhoen says
    October 27, 2006 at 2:46 pm

    Fanf***n’tastic. Just another example of re-ordered words becoming other words. Another whole story of a whole other story.

  13. Jimmy Ho says
    October 27, 2006 at 2:55 pm

    Isn’t that tmesis?

  14. Conrad says
    October 27, 2006 at 5:39 pm

    “Isn’t that tmesis?”
    Dang, beat me to it. One of the finest words in the lexicon.

  15. Conrad says
    October 27, 2006 at 5:41 pm

    Actually the most bothersome example for me, for some irrational reason, is insertions in the middle of “half an hour”–“I’ve waited half a bloody hour” is all wrong–what you would really want is “I’ve waited half a bloody n’our”.

  16. maureen says
    October 28, 2006 at 6:07 am

    Battle Hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe
    “I have seen him in the watchfires of an hundred circling camps”
    (What will I be capable of when I’ve had TWO coffees this morning?)

  17. language hat says
    October 28, 2006 at 8:52 am

    That’s just the standard traditional treatment of h- as a vowel; you see it throughout 19th-century works.

  18. Ben says
    October 28, 2006 at 6:46 pm

    To paraphrase an old chestnut: “Sham poo for my real friends and real poo for my sham friends.”
    If you haven’t heard the original, here’s a hint: it’s a toast.

  19. Alexei says
    October 30, 2006 at 5:03 am

    “The Slavic languages don’t count a single hundred or thousand either.” In formal Russian, “одна тысяча” can be used, but not so with сто. (Unless it’s одна сотня, where сотня is a noun indicating something made up of a hundred units.)
    “That’s just the standard traditional treatment of h- as a vowel.” As mute, perhaps?

  20. language hat says
    October 30, 2006 at 10:41 am

    Yes, exactly.

  21. Ryan says
    October 30, 2006 at 11:08 am

    Hm, funny. “An ahundred” really doesn’t sound unnatural to me, at least in the cases he’s used it in. I wonder if I’ve used it…!

  22. language hat says
    October 30, 2006 at 1:21 pm

    If it doesn’t sound funny to you, you almost certainly have, I’d say.

  23. xiaolongnu says
    October 30, 2006 at 3:33 pm

    OK, I’m a college professor and I hear “an a hundred” a lot with respect to grades. I think it is an extension of the usage “an A,” “a B,” “a 93” etc. In this case “a hundred” is not used as a quantity but as a grade. It only sounds funny because of the reduplicated article: “I got a one hundred on the test” doesn’t (I think) set off our language-error radar in the same way. Some proof of this may be in the fact that I’ve never heard the article used when grades are expressed as a percent (“I got 83 percent” not “I got an 83 percent”).

  24. Ryan says
    December 4, 2006 at 1:17 pm

    Just caught myself saying “an ahundred dollar bill” 😉

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