[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Brianna

why is phonics spelled p h o n i c s and not fonix?

Good one. Why do we spell anything phonemically? Well, the sober answer is etymological reasons, and etymology itself is at least as fascinating a hobby as entomology. <--"Eek! A big bug!"

And 'onanism' doesn't mean what you think it means, either.

Inasmuch as usually when we do it we're not spooging on the ground after coitus interruptus, no. Nobody knows why, but it seems Onan really didn't like his sister-in-law. Well, soon enough, she didn't have to deal with him.

There are two accepted pronunciations of Uranus -- and you can make a shitty or a pissy pun with either. Unhappy planet! (Probably not as depressed as downwardly mobile Pluto, though.)

Dude, that's [hacienda] not even an English word.

It was probably some English professor whose name is unfortunately lost to history who woke up a freshman-English class with, "English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them on the head, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."

Memorable if not fully descriptive; we've been cross-pollinating other languages for decades if not centuries. For about a millennium English was half French; now French borrows Englishisms right and left. Russian had been tentatively sipping at English words -- often for Communist Party doings, of all things -- and with Communism's fall the floodgates are open -- kompakt disk isn't even Russified with prefixes and suffixes in a manner hitherto quite typical. A foreign root-word might be accepted into general Russian use after being buffered, bracketed fore and aft, with a Russian prefix and a suffix. The suffix is at least understandable as a linguistic adapter to fit an alien word into Russian grammar easily; the frequent use of a prefix is less easily explained. A vivid example: Russian has the word park as a city park, right enough. Russian émigrés in America, getting around to owning cars after leaving Soviet privation, coined zaPARKovat' as the verb for to park their car. Verb prefix za (which can mean a bunch of things depending entirely on the verb -- long story) plus the foreign root-word, plus the addition of one of the less usual verb endings and its associated conjugation! What's more, I think that's the imperfective aspect of the verb. Oy. Gev. Alt. Because I'm not sure of the perfective form. Zaparkat'? Some other verb prefix?! Mustn't tear my hear... not that much left.