Tuesday, May 25, 2010

/l/-deletion

This is the packaging of a car-care product.  What could conditional possibly mean?  It turns out that this product is actually a conditioner.  Quite obviously, the misspelling arose because the owner of the business, or the person in charge of marketing the product, does not pronounce syllable-final /l/, hence making conditioner and conditional homophones in his or her speech.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Recent Comments