ABSTRACT
The examples surely confirm an intuitive feeling that the form is highly colloquial, perhaps somewhat facetious or whimsical, and possibly most widespread in children’s language. This might well be the reason why the form is not to be found in the list of irregular verbs given in Bloch English appears to be rather well endowed with monosyllabic taboos ending in /k/, it is rather surprising that there is not some variation in the form. The form could well have led an underground existence for a long time previously. Thus the chronological mismatch is far more likely to be apparent than real. The theoretical linguist, who, even if he does recognise such phenomena as phonaesthemes and ideophones, appears to consider them as being peripheral to normal linguistic activity, should note that we have here yet another case where such phenomena play a far from unimportant role in the development of the language.
