Practice is nicer than practise

This exchange appeared in my facebook the other day. I don't know any of the people involved, and as always, I'm just commenting interestedly, not making fun or criticising them.

The image shows a conversation in response to someone mentioning 'practicing', with that spelling. Assuming that things haven't changed since I learnt this, that's a valid spelling in American English. British English would traditionally prefer 'practice' for the noun (as in We went to practice tonight) and 'practise' for the verb (as in Are we practising tonight?). In practice (ha!) this is very variable and it's probably one of those things that's on the way out really, and both spellings can do both jobs.

What interested me about the above, though, is that even though 2 out of the 3 people having this discussion obviously care about this spelling rule (otherwise they wouldn't be discussing it), they don't seem to be very clear on which it should be.

Person 1 says 'practicing with a c, though' indicating that they know it's spelt incorrectly, and sharing a link to that effect. Person 2 doesn't really notice the spelling comment (unless I'm missing some more subtle joke?) and comments on the content of the original post, spelling it with an 's' for both the noun and the verb (Some sides don't practise [verb] wilst half drunk, so it could well be 'intoxicated dance practise [noun]' for a newbie...). Then Person 3 brings it back to spelling and quotes the rule, presumably in response to Person 2 as much as the OP, to which Person 1 replies, agreeing, and saying I think it's nicer to think of it as morris 'practice' rather than 'practise'. I realise it's incorrect :). 

But it's not incorrect! Both spellings are right depending on which 'morris practi{c/s}e' is intended (noun or verb).  And here, the commenter is probably actually correct, because with the pre-modifying 'morris', it is far more likely to be the noun, so 'practice' is the right spelling to use.

And – most baffling – why is it 'nicer to think' of it with a 'c'??

Fusilli bolognese

I had the good fortune to be on a train full of children, maybe about nine or ten years old, the other day. I mean, literally full, there were two of them in the seat next to me.

They were off on a residential visit somewhere so meals were involved, so they started talking about their various fussy eating foibles. One said she couldn't eat steak, to which the teacher responded with admirable restraint 'It's OK, we're not having steak'.

Another was alarmed when she heard one of the meals would be spaghetti bolognese (or 'skabetti', as the teacher called it, which I always find an adorable pronunciation), because she doesn't like spaghetti. Fortunately for her, it turned out that the spaghetti to be used was in fact fusilli (the spiral one), which she did like. For me, spaghetti is specifically the long, thin, solid, cylindrical ones, and any other pasta shape has to be called by its own name (or just 'pasta'). But spag bol is special, because it's the pasta meal most British people encountered first, so it's kind of a meal in itself. I'm not quite sure how to describe its cultural role, actually, for people that don't already have the same cultural knowledge of it. I mean, Heinz sells it in tins, is probably the most meaningful thing I can tell you about it. So I suppose for her, spaghetti isn't a thing in its own right and it could be used as the generic term for pasta as long as it's with that particular sauce.

Tin of Heinz spaghetti bolognese

Pasta words are one of those semantic fields where there's a lot of overlap and variation, by the way - 'noodles' for me has to be in an Asian dish, like chow mein, so even though they're long and thin, I couldn't call spaghetti noodles. For some people 'noodles' covers all kinds of pasta-type foods. 

Yo, Samity Sam!

Brilliantly, the tweet I am going to be famous for (at 200+ likes at the time of writing), is one in which I present myself as an idiot.

My entire childhood I heard that character's name as "Sammity Sam", like some sort of cutesy reduplication.

— Laura Bailey (@linguistlaura) July 10, 2019

Lane Greene said that American kids learnt how to pronounce 'Yosemite' because of the Looney Tunes cartoon character 'Yosemite Sam'. Despite plenty of exposure to this character, I did not similarly acquire the correct pronunciation of the word, because I interpreted the name as 'Sammity Sam', a sort of reduplicated nickname form of the name Sam. This is not unreasonable, as I'd not seen it written down and never heard of the place Yosemite. Other people did the same thing, and basically heard it as 'Yo, Sammity Sam'.

But here's the thing: I didn't interpret that first syllable as anything at all. 'Yo' wasn't specially in my vocabulary as a child in 1980s UK. So I just kind of heard it as a meaningless syllable. I'm not an acquisitionist so I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure this is NOT how language works. There are not meaningless syllables that consistently occur adjacent to a specific word. I should have definitely called on my pattern recognition skills and interpreted that sound as part of the name, or as being part of the phrase, as others did ('Yo!'). But I didn't.