The Shaman
First Post
Never mind...
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When did "Medireview" = Medieval???
- Thread starter Hand of Vecna
- Start date
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Very first reference on Google explains it, too: http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=02/07/16/19370156;mode=nested
Bagpuss
Legend
Pbartender
First Post
Bagpuss said:
Psst... that news article is 3 years old...
Yes it is a valid way to pronounce the word, even though it originated in an erroneous pronounciation. Pronouncing toadstool as "bunny" would also be perfectly valid if people "agreed" to do it (by agree I mean simpkly start do it and understand that "bunny" = toadstool).
If you do not agree with this I would like to know which you'd use of "berfry" and "belfry"? The second one is "incorrect", but is the accepted one in Modern English.
Brad Hindman
First Post
Baragos said:
I would like to see an explanation of this statement. This isn't an attack; I am genuinely interested. According to dictionary.com the modern word "belfry" comes from the Middle English "belfrei".
Not seen as an attack 
The explanation is:
Middle English Belfrey, alteration (one sound replacing another) of Berfrey, from Middle French Berfrei, meaning "bell tower" or "siege tower". There's more to be said about the origin of the word, but this is the important part.
Anyways...at some point in time an English person has heard to word Berfrey, probably introduced by some Norman nobleman, used about a bell tower, and said to himself: "did he say belfrey?"...then he has used that word (or the erroneous version he thought he heard) when speaking with friends, to sound smarter...slowly this trend has spread and voila, a new word has entered the English language...this is how many words enter foreign languages...
The explanation is:
Middle English Belfrey, alteration (one sound replacing another) of Berfrey, from Middle French Berfrei, meaning "bell tower" or "siege tower". There's more to be said about the origin of the word, but this is the important part.
Anyways...at some point in time an English person has heard to word Berfrey, probably introduced by some Norman nobleman, used about a bell tower, and said to himself: "did he say belfrey?"...then he has used that word (or the erroneous version he thought he heard) when speaking with friends, to sound smarter...slowly this trend has spread and voila, a new word has entered the English language...this is how many words enter foreign languages...
Marius Delphus
Adventurer
Peeves, Please, Jeeves
I can't pass up the opportunity to ring in with a couple of my own, from the corporate world:
Using the tilde (~) to mean "approximately"
Using apostrophes to pluralize word's
Using "vice" to mean "versus" (I'm losing this battle)
Saying "notably," "importantly," or "surprisingly" when starting a sentence, when the subject of the sentence is not notable, important, or surprising
Spelling "voila" semi-phonetically: "wa la" (in more than one business proposal; yes, I'm serious)
Confusing word forms, as in "set up" (a verb) and "setup" (a noun)
Mixing up "assure," "insure," and "ensure"
Employing any of the various (wrong) forms of "user ID"
Using "drastic" to mean "dramatic"
Faulty parallelism in a bulleted list
And, to keep this at least tangentially on topic for the board:
Mixing up "horde" and "hoard"
I can't pass up the opportunity to ring in with a couple of my own, from the corporate world:
Using the tilde (~) to mean "approximately"
Using apostrophes to pluralize word's
Using "vice" to mean "versus" (I'm losing this battle)
Saying "notably," "importantly," or "surprisingly" when starting a sentence, when the subject of the sentence is not notable, important, or surprising
Spelling "voila" semi-phonetically: "wa la" (in more than one business proposal; yes, I'm serious)
Confusing word forms, as in "set up" (a verb) and "setup" (a noun)
Mixing up "assure," "insure," and "ensure"
Employing any of the various (wrong) forms of "user ID"
Using "drastic" to mean "dramatic"
Faulty parallelism in a bulleted list
And, to keep this at least tangentially on topic for the board:
Mixing up "horde" and "hoard"
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