{"id":684,"date":"2008-10-21T16:16:13","date_gmt":"2008-10-21T06:16:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=684"},"modified":"2008-10-22T10:36:33","modified_gmt":"2008-10-22T00:36:33","slug":"butterfly-verbing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2008\/10\/21\/butterfly-verbing\/","title":{"rendered":"Butterfly Verbing"},"content":{"rendered":"

The sign at the butchery advertised “Butterflyed Chicken”.<\/p>\n

I smiled to myself wryly, and thought: That should say “Butterflied Chicken’- no, wait… “Butterflown Chicken”… err… maybe it should be “Butterflyed” after all.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wikipedia<\/a> currently agrees with the butcher.<\/p>\n

However, Google ranks it Butterflied > Butterflown<\/a> > Butterflyed<\/a>. Google seems to have been influenced by proper noun versions of the verb version of the noun.<\/p>\n

Just an observation; no punchline.<\/p>\n

In researching this, I found the folk etymology for butterfly that I was told when I was a child – that it is a spoonerism for “flutter by” – is not correct. It was always unlikely, but it would have been nice if it was true.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The sign at the butchery advertised “Butterflyed Chicken”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[306,307,105,370,94],"class_list":["post-684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-observation","tag-etymology","tag-grammar","tag-linguistics","tag-observation","tag-signs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=684"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":689,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions\/689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}