Democrat, Illinois - The ElectroLounge

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on how the word lobe ends with “the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed).”
A century later, A. H. Fremont’s Alphabet Flip Chart (1974) noted that B’s “make bubble
sounds in words,” and that the little b even “has a ‘ball’ or ‘bubble’ at the bottom of the
letter. The big B has two bubbles.” Pop! Bam! Boom! Bang! There go the bubbles! That’s
another “salient characteristic” of B: “loud noises,” the sounds of inflated-looking things
exploding (bursting, blowing up), being hit (beaten, buffeted, boxed), or creating semiarticulate
noises (bawling, braying, babbling).
Bingo!
“Big round things,” “silliness or contemptibility,” and “impact and loud noises”—I
have written elsewhere that these three B qualities are identical to the three “nasal-stop”
qualities I described in “The Most Lively Consonants in the World” (VERBATIM, XXV/3,
Summer 2000 2 ). Nasal-stop words contain consonant-combinations like mp, ng, nk, and nt,
which yield noisy thumps, round rumps, and slobbering drunks—compare B’s bumps, butts,
and boozers. I remarked that the first of those words, bump, was “the most typical and
versatile” nasal-stop word of all, for it embraced each of the three potential nasal-stop
meanings. That makes bump a perfect B word too, since it variously denotes “impact or its
noise”, “rounded thing,” and “amusingly contemptible thing” (“lay there like a bump on a
log”).
I also observed in my earlier article that English nasal-stop meanings are often
matched in Indonesian nasal-stop words, like dentang for English clang. This happens to be
true with many Indonesian B words as well, like besar for “big,” bundar for “round,” bulat
for “ball, circle,” and bahak for “burst of laughter.” Indonesian even matches English by
supercharging some words with both features, a B plus a nasal-stop: buntut “butt”
(mentioned earlier), busung “bulging,” banting “to hit,” bentet “to burst,” and bising “noise.”
These are extraordinary parallels for two unrelated languages.
What are we to think, except that B is a cosmic prankster who uses earthlings as
ventriloquist’s dummies to tell its jokes? In March 2001, when the airplane manufacturer
Boeing suddenly announced that it would be leaving its longtime headquarters in Seattle, a
local TV station promptly dubbed this the Boeing Bombshell. So reported The New York
Times on Mar. 22, and three days later it illustrated its weekend summary of the Boeing
story with a photo of a jet flying out of Seattle. The picture’s caption? “Buh-bye”!
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! "See http://www.verbatimmag.com/26_2.pdf"
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