Super Fun Linguistics

Last night I was sitting with a group of friends outside Wonderland bar sipping on an IPA (which is my favorite beer both for the hops AND because its acronym is the same as that of the International Phonetic Alphabet.)

By the way, when you google them, they come up in this order:

The conversation last night turned to talk about a "super fund" site out in California. The guy discussing the topic used this term about 6 times, and each time I pictured this: 

What the guy was really talking about, of course, had nothing to do with super-fun-roller-coaster land at all. He was talking about the EPA's Superfund. The problem with the term is one that a linguist would have been able to predict; when the word is used in its most common context - namely, before "site," - it creates a consonant cluster. 

This is because speech is continuous; while written sentences show spaces between words, there are no pauses between words in speech. We pause to take a breath, think, mark a clause, etc., but not at word boundaries. And, in conversational speech, we are not going to bother with the task of pronouncing three distinct alveolar consonants that are clustered together. It's too much work, and we prefer to reduce the cluster, so only the "n" of "Superfund" and the "s" of "site" are fully articulated. 

The result is that, to someone who has never seen the words spelled-out (I was that person last night), it sounds like "super fun site," which is incredibly unfortunate given that that is almost the exact opposite of what the actual term refers to. Maybe Congress could hire a linguist for any future naming activities they do.

And this concludes another post on why linguists should have jobs.