On Facebook yesterday about the on-line word game Spelling Bee:
— Polly Jacobson: on a free version (spellsbee) it wouldn’t accept ‘clitic’. (but oddly accepted ‘clit’)
— John Beavers > PJ: I am still annoyed about clitic.
— PJ: oh I got ‘clitic’ rejected in a slightly different game. I guess they all have the same word list!
— AZ > PJ: As the author of “On Clitics” [Indiana Univ. Linguistics Club, 1977] and other works on clitology [see my survey paper, “What is a clitic?” (in Nevis, Joseph, Wanner, & Zwicky, Clitics Bibliography, 1995)] (and the proud owner of a Put Your Clitics in Second Position t-shirt), I would like to protest this enormity in the strongest of terms. … I see that my old t-shirt eventually devolved into rags after years of hard use. I have ordered a new, spiffier version, to be unveiled when it arrives in a week or so. Watch this space.
You don’t have to wait. Here’s the design as I created it (from a bewilderingly large menu of choices):
