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.