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From a friend: "I had to look up "paraprosdokian". Here is the definition : "Figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected; frequently used in a humorous situation." "Where there's a will, I want to be in it," is a type of paraprosdokian. A choice of examples: 1. Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience. 2. The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it's still on my list. 3. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak. 4. If I agreed with you, we'd both be wrong. 5.. War does not determine who is right - only who is left. 6. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. 7. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research." Link
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 I LOVE these! The statements, that is; I'm not convinced that paraprosdokian is a legitimate word. I ran it through Onelook, and I'm not satisfied. But on the one acronym site I saw a statement that made me curious: You know, there are only a few thousand natural languages in use by humans today, yet among these, there are a few in which the child's word for father is mama. Does anybody know whether this is true? mama
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if you don't believe the research done by the wiki guys, how about this from Michael Quinion - I'd particularly note this: The phrase para prosdokian occurs in classical Greek literature, meaning “contrary to expectations”, but at some point the two words have been run together. well, that doesn't happen much, does it‽ [note interrobang, used often now for rhetorical questions] edit: I predict that we'll some day soon see both paraprosdokian and epicaricacy in the OED[online]
Last edited by tsuwm; 06/02/12 02:55 AM.
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Besides looking to the OneLook collection, I always put a word in my general browser. There's 10 pages of entries about paraprosdokian. ( no, OneLook does not have it )
Your mama-link gives a list of words starting with P . Where am I supposed to go from there to get to pappa?
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But on the one acronym site I saw a statement that made me curious: You know, there are only a few thousand natural languages in use by humans today, yet among these, there are a few in which the child's word for father is mama.
Does anybody know whether this is true? According to this paper it is.
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>OneLook does not have it I can remedy that! 
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I know this is only a matter of time. 
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