2005-03-25

trochee: (Default)
2005-03-25 07:26 pm
Entry tags:

spoonerisms de la façon française (sp?)

contrèpetrie (also possibly: contrèpeterie, since google has many more hits for "contrepeterie", also possibly without accent grave): "spoonerism", at least according to my recent dictionary purchase.

This word is thanks to [livejournal.com profile] imtboo, who explained that the pair toutes mes felicitations and toutes mes ficelles de caleçon are a contrèpetrie.

Interestingly, Babelfish attempts to translate contrèpeterie as contrepetery (but not contrèpetrie, which it leaves as is), but Google doesn't think "contrepetery" exists, and I am inclined to agree. This suggests that there is some hand-coded morphology rule in the Fr->En SYSTRAN engine that maps -erie to -ery regardless of whether the word is lexically available.

In other (related) news, I have worked out how to use the "Compose" key under SCIM and KDE to get accented characters.