Chicken Mentor

SAT question: Q. Emeral Legasse is to kitchen mentor as Colonel Sanders is to ________ ________. A. chicken torment. I didn’t realize flip-flopping syllables was so much fun until many years ago when a non-native speaker told me he had two chickens in his house – he meant kitchens. It was strange to me that the chicken/kitchen conundrum had never occurred to me. Not that I’m pidstu…

I get that torment /mentor is cheating a little - what with the 'T' being used twice - also, I get the folly of the comparative where one is a title of a person and one is an act but this isn’t a real SAT question to be challenged for validity so let’s move past all that. We're all about breaking the rules here at ByteBlog. I still think it is funny that words I have literally known since I could speak would become interesting because the flippage of them had never occurred to me. I’m far too lazy to think of others right now which is sorta the reason I haven’t written about this before – or maybe it is just that it never occurred to me to blog about something so inane.

I did think of butthead/headbutt but that one is really obvious. I am convinced that more of these will naturally occur to me as life accumulates. I heard torment the other day and it flipped voluntarily in my head – much to my delight. I heard about the chicken/kitchen one literally 28 years ago in Japan. The guy who told me this was an English teacher at the high school which meant his English was only rotten, not atrocious. It was actually quite good, but not near idiom-level of understanding (although I’ve spoken to many folks who aren’t at idiom-level of understanding as a native speaker…). But because he studied English, and must have some affinity for it, I can see how this could happen to him being an inept speaker of a foreign language myself.

This phenomenon cannot be broadened to include the joke format: What’s the difference between a boxer and man with a cold? One blows his nose and the other knows his blows. This is a broader format consisting of a phrase that flips – a much less amusing occurrence. Word flipping? Now that’s entertainment.