Hot to spell skedaddle movie#

Many of the ker- words date to nineteenth-century American usage, when it would have been quite likely for to represent schwa, since more Americans were non-rhotic back then, especially in the Northeast. These initial elements can attach to -chunk, -flop, -plunk, -slam, -slap, -slash, -souse, -swash, -swosh, -thump, -whop, and more. More examples along these lines can be found in the OED entry for ker-, defined as 'the first element in numerous onomatopoeic or echoic formations intended to imitate the sound or the effect of the fall of some heavy body.' Spelling variants include ke-, ca-, ka-, che-, and co.

The OED draft entry for kaboom gives this example from Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island (1995): 'Brightly pulsating machines, some of them playing electronic tunes or making unbidden kerboom noises.' Bryson was born in Iowa but has spent most of his adult life in England, and his book was originally published by Doubleday in Great Britain, so I would guess the spelling of kerboom is either his own Briticization or his editor's. (For more on this point, see Heidi Harley's recent post on phrasebook pronunciation and my post from last year, ' Pinker's almer mater.') For instance, a British speaker could represent the onomatopoetic kaboom as kerboom. To these we could add two-letter sequences with, particularly and, which can be used by non-rhotic speakers to represent the same unstressed vowel. The Wikipedia article on ' schwa' gives examples for all six letters typically used in English to render vowel sounds: Then again, skidoo is probably derived from skedaddle (by way of the variant scadoodle), so why not skedoosh?Īll of these are potential spellings of, since the unstressed mid-central vowel, a.k.a the 'schwa' sound, is notoriously fickle in its orthographic representation. But skidoosh might make more historical sense, since Jack Black was inspired by the old slang expression (23) skidoo.

I went with skadoosh since that's the way it appeared on a T-shirt designed by a crew member (as I learned from my high school friend Mark Osborne, who, as luck would have it, co-directed the movie). There's no fixed spelling for the word (at least not yet), since it started off as an unscripted ad-lib from Jack Black, the voice of Po the Panda.

Hot to spell skedaddle movie#

In today's Boston Globe it's my honor to pinch-hit for a vacationing Jan Freeman, who writes a fantastic weekly column called ' The Word.' I took the opportunity to write about a word popularized by the new movie 'Kung Fu Panda': skadoosh.