{"id":17374,"date":"2018-04-25T08:54:17","date_gmt":"2018-04-25T15:54:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17374"},"modified":"2018-04-24T19:55:04","modified_gmt":"2018-04-25T02:55:04","slug":"words-contained-in-other-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2018\/04\/25\/words-contained-in-other-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Words contained in other words"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I\u2019ve been hearing joke phrases like \u201cWe put the fun back in dysfunctional!\u201d most of my life, but somehow I\u2019ve apparently never written about them here, nor tried to put together a list of such phrases.<\/p>\r\n<p>Fortunately for me, Morgan Friedman has put together such a list, at their <a href=\"https:\/\/westegg.com\/wordsinwords\/\">Words in Words<\/a> page.<\/p>\r\n<p>(Interestingly, that list uses the \u201cin\u201d phrasing instead of the \u201cback in\u201d phrasing. I\u2019ve heard both phrasings, but I think I\u2019ve most often heard \u201cback in.\u201d I feel like this joke template may have come from some specific advertising slogan, but if so, I don\u2019t recall what.)<\/p>\r\n<p>Here are some that I\u2019ve come up with that aren\u2019t on that page:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>Putting the pro-life back in proliferation.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Putting the corpora back in incorporation.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Putting the twerk back in netwerking. (Or: Putting the twerk back in Kraftwerk.)<\/li>\r\n  <li>Putting the put back in computing.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>A 2011 <a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=3465\">Language Log post<\/a> suggests that this kind of joke is only funny if the contained word is semantically\/etymologically unrelated to the containing word. I\u2019m inclined to agree, but if you do a Google search for [\"putting the * back in *\"], you get a bunch of pages that take the opposite tack, as in \u201cPutting the hedge back in hedge fund\u201d or \u201cPutting the social back in nonprofit social media,\u201d apparently suggesting that the contained concepts are no longer as strong a part of the containing concepts as one might assume. (\u201cPutting the Christ back in Christmas\u201d is another common phrase along those lines.)<\/p>\r\n<p>Comments on that Language Log post make clear that a lot of these jokes depend on regional pronunciations; for example, \u201cputting the ape back in apricot\u201d doesn\u2019t work for people who pronounce <i>apricot<\/i> with an <i>app<\/i> sound.<\/p>\r\n<p>Commenters there also suggest \u201cWho put the trophy in astrophysics?\u201d and \u201cI put the usage in sausage.\u201d The earliest citation of the format that the commenters came up with is from 1912: \u201cI would give a whole lot to see the man who put the \u2018fun\u2019 in fundamentals.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>Do you have any suggestions for other words-to-put-in-words?<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jokes","category-snowclones"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17374"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17380,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17374\/revisions\/17380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}