JuanSeiszFitzHall
yet another
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2019
- Posts
- 1,066
I’m sure we’re all familiar with the term ‘gaydar,’ said to be the ability to sense that someone is gay. It’s permuted from ‘radar,’ and it was probably thought of as clever or funny, at first. But there’s another data-gathering ‘-ar’ term, sonar. Does there already exist a term for sensing that someone has an erection, ‘bone-ar?’ If not, I hereby coin it.
The spelling above is the one I expect to use in a story I’m working on. It guides pronunciation better than ‘bonar’ would, and also gives a clear idea of what’s being discussed. In time, if the use of ‘bone-ar’ catches on, ‘bonar’ might be used routinely. New terms need time to settle in. There are plenty of once-hyphenated terms that have shed the hyphen, like ‘e-mail’ becoming ‘email.’
Interestingly—to me, anyway, maybe not to anyone else—‘sonar’ is pronounced with a long o (oh), while the word ‘sound,’ from which sonar is derived, has a different first vowel sound (ow). Did the development of sonar indicate a progression from pain to surprise?
The spelling above is the one I expect to use in a story I’m working on. It guides pronunciation better than ‘bonar’ would, and also gives a clear idea of what’s being discussed. In time, if the use of ‘bone-ar’ catches on, ‘bonar’ might be used routinely. New terms need time to settle in. There are plenty of once-hyphenated terms that have shed the hyphen, like ‘e-mail’ becoming ‘email.’
Interestingly—to me, anyway, maybe not to anyone else—‘sonar’ is pronounced with a long o (oh), while the word ‘sound,’ from which sonar is derived, has a different first vowel sound (ow). Did the development of sonar indicate a progression from pain to surprise?
