Rebracketing Puns

According to wiktionary: "inception" comes from the Latin "incipiō" ("I begin"). The morphemes of the modern English word are thus "incep" and "-tion".

After the 2010 movie Inception, the word was reanalyzed as "in" and "-ception", with the newly created suffix "-ception" taking on the meaning of recursion or multilayeredness. This led to slang words like "turkeyception" and "foodception".

Interestingly, the suffix "-ception" already existed in words like "reception" and "proprioception", where it ultimately comes from the Latin word "capiō" ("I take"). However, this word is also where "incipiō" comes from! It's just fascinating, how circular and mutable words can be.

Inspired by Starkey_Comic's post about rebracketing.

EDIT: The morphemes of the modern English word "inception" are actually "in", "cep", and "tion" (thanks u/xanthraxoid!). So, what happened here isn't actually rebracketing, since morpheme boundaries were respected (thanks u/irieben!). It still feels like something strange happened here though, and here's my take:

It feels most natural to me to build the word as "in" + "cep" = "incep" first, and then doing "incep" + "tion". The boundary between "cep" and "tion" feels bigger than the boundary between "in" and "cep" (supported by other English word pairs like "receive" -> "reception", "conceive" -> "conception"). So extracting the suffix "-ception" out of "inception" feels to me like breaking a morpheme boundary, even though it really isn't.

Lets talk about snakes. These creatures are called by many names in Modern English. Sometimes they are referred as serpents. However today we are interested in a certain name that used to be more popular; Adder. The word seems usual until you notice a curious difference between this word and the German version. In German, snakes are called "Natter". The n-beginning word is also sometimes used in English, as the dialectal variation Nedder. German also has the variant Otter. So why does the German version have an extra N? Or more precisely, why did English lose the N?

This is an example of what is properly known as rebracketing. In rebracketing, the meaning of the word or the word itself may be changed when it is reanalysed by bracketing it to different parts. This is what happened with Adder in English. The indefinitive article stole the N. Thus A nadder -> An adder (Note that this process happened a long time ago when the words where different, so this isnt completely what happened, but the actual explanation would break the pacing). The opposite happened as well. An ickname became A nickname (actually it was originally ekename). This is evident in words like Danish øgenavn.

Other words where this happened include Newt and Humble pie (originally A numble pie). Do you know any more examples? If so, let me know.

More etymology posts by a certain person known as JsMeansJauhesammutin:

About Finnish word lohikäärme (literally, Salmon snake):
https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/h9kf49/dragons_in_finnish_is_lohik%C3%A4%C3%A4rme_which_means/
About Gospel and why it is called Evangelium in other languages:
https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/ha1j60/gospel_is_called_gospel_in_english_but_why_does/
About the Finnish word riippumatto (additional question, why carpets?):
https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/iag1i8/riippumatto_not_as_simple_as_it_looks/

Mine Nuncle --> Mine Uncle --> My Uncle

An Ik-name --> a nick-name

:.

An Amyr --> a namer

Too far? after all the Not tally a lot less and some similar impressive wordplay It feels like something Pat could do, would do, and he's certainly aware of the phenomena in englisht...

Do your worst!

For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.

I said "hey look, an escaPEA"

No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!

Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂

They’re on standbi

I definitely think they rebracket the clubs when the multipliers hit. They fervently deny it but I’ve seen plenty of proof to suggest otherwise. What do you think? Does anyone have screenshots to support this theory?

It really does, I swear!

Pilot on me!!

Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.

This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.

If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.

Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.

What did 0 say to 8 ?

" Nice Belt "

So What did 3 say to 8 ?

" Hey, you two stop making out "

When I got home, they were still there.

I won't be doing that today!

REANALYSIS

Reanalysis is a process where speakers take words or morphemes that frequently appear together and break them down into different parts than the ones they were originally built with. This often involves rebracketing, where some old morpheme boundaries are lost and new ones are drawn.

In English, the indefinite article is ‘a’ before consonants and ‘an’ before vowels. There are a number of words that originally began with the letter n, but lost it after speakers reanalyzed it as being the last n of ‘an’ rather than the first n of, say, ‘napron’ or ‘norange,’ giving us modern English’s ‘apron’ and ‘orange.’ The reverse happened too! The n from ‘an’ in ‘an apkin’ and ‘an ewt’ moved on over to give us ‘a napkin’ and ‘a newt.’

There are some examples where this happened more than once to the same word! The French cognate of ‘unicorn’ is licorne, but it’s from the same root! The word started out as ‘unicorne’ (with the silent e at the end, cause ya know, French). That got reanalyzed as ’une icorne’ with the feminine indefinite article ’une.’ The definite form of that would be ’l’icorne’ with the definite article ’la’ contracting with the vowel-initial word until…that got reanalyzed as part of the stem itself! So now the stem is ’licorne’ with definite and indefinite forms ’la licorne’ and ’une licorne.’

Reanalysis is common with borrowed words, as speakers try and adapt them to native structures. English borrowed the word ‘helicopter’ from Greek, where the ‘helico’ part means ‘spiral’ and the ‘pter’ part means ‘wing’ (since they have wings that move around in a spiral shape). But pt- isn’t a legal onset in English, so speakers figured the word couldn’t possibly break down as helico-pter, and was probably something like heli-copter. So words derived from helicopter often use a prefix heli- (helipad, heliport, heliskiing) or a suffix -copter (quadcopter, hydrocopter).

Borrowed words can also be interpreted as having native derivational morphology and have morphological boundaries inserted where there weren’t any before. The Arabic loanword kitabu ’book’ in Swahili was rebracketed as the singular prefix ’ki-’ plus a root ’-tabu’ and takes the native plural prefix to give a plural ’vitabu’. Cantonese borrowed the English word ‘okay’ as ’ou1 kei1’ and treats it like native verb+noun and verb+verb compounds in allowing you to form questions by copying the first part of the verb with the negative particle, to g

You take away their little brooms

This morning, my 4 year old daughter.

Daughter: I'm hungry

Me: nerves building, smile widening

Me: Hi hungry, I'm dad.

She had no idea what was going on but I finally did it.

Thank you all for listening.

There hasn't been a post all year!

It’s pronounced “Noel.”

After all his first name is No-vac

What, then, is Chinese rap?

Edit:

Notable mentions from the comments:

• Spanish/Swedish/Swiss/Serbian hits

• French/Finnish art

• Country/Canadian rap

• Chinese/Country/Canadian rock

• Turkish/Tunisian/Taiwanese rap

There hasn't been a single post this year!

(Happy 2022 from New Zealand)

Bob

So that I could frequently say, "I am going to walk 5 miles now."

Edit: My most popular post on Reddit! 😀 Thank you for the awards.

Just to clarify, 12345678

Me grabbing a soda from my (what I thought was) half full 12pk...

Notices there's only 2;

Me: "Awe man... This is a damn bird box!" Her: "What the hell does that mean?!" Me: (Pulls both cans out & shows them to her) "It's only got Toucans."

I'm not ashamed to admit the look on her face was glorious.

I was just sitting there doing nothing.

“BOOM”?!

"That's what they're fighting about."