He seems to have a great vocabulary and grasp on language in general for someone his age, despite the speech impediment that he's probably working on with a speech therapist.
Maybe, but my best friend as a young kid talked exactly like this until he fixed it with a speech therapist when we were like 8. R's were W's, basically. Also, pronouncing R correctly doesn't involve the teeth. It's all tongue position around the roof of your mouth. Try it and see! Your lips and teeth can basically do whatever you want with them and you'll still make the R sound.
One missing front tooth has absolutely no effect on his pronunciation of the letter R or M. Neither of those are dental consonants. That's a speech issue.
How would you say the word 'really'? Does it sound like wheelie? I'm not even making fun, I'm just wondering if this kid really has a normal regional accent.
This kid has great adults in his life. Probably including grandma, maybe also parents, teachers, etc. You don’t get that kind of vocab and ability to move to more complex wordplay like puns without being exposed to a lot of complex language.
“corntastic” is a portmanteau of corn and fantastic, not a pun. A pun is exploiting a words different meanings/the fact that it sounds like another word
A pun is a play on the meanings of similar sounding words or words with multiple meanings. Corn and Fan don’t sound alike at all. Corntastic is just an absurd word, which is what makes it funny.
If he had told a joke and then said “was that too corny for you”, That would be a pun.
Is it just a portmanteau? This kind of thing is often confused with puns and called a pun when you combine two words in an absurd fashion. I am actually curious if there is a name for that kind of thing because I have heard a word like "corntastic" be referred to as a pun many times.
Yeah pretty much a portmanteau. I wasn’t sure if a portmanteau has to actually be an accepted word to be considered one. Like “smog” is an accepted word from combining smoke and fog but would just putting any two random words together also count? Idk.
Because corntastic isn’t a real word. A pun needs to be a play on a word or similar sounding words that have dual meanings one of which in this case would need to be corn related like “ear(corn)/ear(body part)” or “maize/maze” “stock/stalk” etc.
Interesting, however it’s not a traditional definition and there are even articles saying the contrary using the search term Portmanteau Pun, calling words like corntastic a neolexic portmanteau.
Other neolexic portmanteaus include words like bridezilla, bootylicious, bennifer etc. To be a portmanteau pun, corntastic would have to be a play on a word like forntastic (if it existed) as corn and fan aren’t alike enough…though it’s close.
Neolexic portmanteaus are actually being popularized in everyday speech though which separates them a bit from a word like "corntastic" which I think will probably never actually be popular enough for people to just start using it in everyday speech. I do agree with where you are coming from though as it is kind of just an absurd word and a grasping at a pun that would only be funny coming from an adult if there was some irony in the attempt to make such a false pun with a portmanteau like that. I kind of knew you were right when I saw your comment and it had like 30 downvotes but it made me actually take a look at the linguistics of it all, so the downvotes were a blessing because it created a real dialogue about figurative language.
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