I stumbled across the word 'epenthesis' today, and found it wonderfully descriptive of my 4-year old's speech patterns.

Epenthesis is defined by M-W as "the insertion or development of a sound or letter in the body of a word (as \&\ in \'a-th&-"lEt\ athlete)"

it would stand to reason that there'd be a term for the opposite phenomenon, such as Wens-day or - one of my pet peeves - 'Jewl-ry' (i won't even *mention* my annoyance at the further bastardization of jewelry, as in "jewlery"; i guess that'd be an epenthesis compounding the whatever-it-is-that-means-the-opposite-of-epenthesis... and come to think of it, is there a word for overuse of hyphenization? and please don't just say "annoying" )


bridget=)

Ipsa scientia potestas est ~Bacon