Soitenly not!

I’m no Three Stooges expert, but I’m familiar enough with the canon to know there’s something funny about this New York Times headline:

 

 

Not funny ha-ha; funny peculiar. Even if you could somehow give “cointainly” a soft-C sound—violating the general rule of hard C before A, O, and U—what’s that first N doing there? What the heck does “coin-tainly” mean?

If I had written the headline, I’d have rendered that cherished Stoogeism as soitenly. That is in fact how it’s spelled on a six-DVD collection, Soitenly Stooges, and in headlines in the San Francisco Chronicle and on the CBS News website. Heck, you can even buy a “Soitenly” license plate.

 

 

I wasn’t the only one to raise an eyebrow over the Times headline. Diego Sorbara works on that paper’s national/foreign copy desk, whose long arm evidently does not stretch all the way to Arts & Leisure.

 

 

When I retweeted Diego, the response was prompt and, under the circumstances, predictable.

 

 

Read the Stooges story here. In the print edition “cointainly” appears a second time, in the headline on the jump page.

UPDATE, April 10: The headline has been changed to read “Three Stooges, Two Farrellys? Soitainly.” But there’s no mention of it in the online corrections column.

Comments

[Stan]

That's very odd. "Cointainly" suggests "contain" and "coin", not the (presumably) intended variant pronunciation.

[heydave]

This travesty... will not stand!

[Gina]

But, still...

They look like the real thing.

Just sayin...

[4ndyman]

At the risk of stating the obvious, I don't think it's hard to see where this came from -- the writer was thinking about syllables instead of the whole word. The word being replaced is "certainly." The writer kept "c---tainly" and rewrote only the "ert" sound. By that reasoning, it should be "coitainly." I can only guess that the writer thought having a word reminiscent of "coin container" was better than having a word that mixed "coitus" and "taint."

But I'm only guessing.

The writer's mistake, though, was in thinking that the Stoogefied spelling of "certainly" had not yet been tried and, to a certain extent, agreed upon.

[Nancy Friedman]

@4ndyman: It wouldn't be hard to understand "coitainly"--replace "cer" with "coi"--but COIN-tainly is just bizarre.

[Namer X]

Spread out!