Nothing Can Suage Curiosity

Rather than being assuaged by the word "assuage", James McElroy plunges right down the rabbit hole of research....

I notice the tendency to equate suage with either sewage or sausage, though they have nothing to do with one another - not onomatopoeia, but malapropism:

Marc,

I really liked the Non Sequitur comic strip you posted. When I saw it in the paper I immediately thought of several persons to send it to, and got discouraged. Wisdom from the mouths of children, eh. The Emperor (Big Science) is neckkid as a Jaybird.

What really set me off though was Noel's comment. I love the word "assuage". It is very onomatopoetic(1), if you sit quietly and repeat it several times you can just feel the guilt, stress, and worries roll off your shoulders. I started to write a comment to that effect but needed to look up the spelling of "onomatopoetic" (actually, it seems that "onomatopoeic" is linguistically correct) and things rapidly got out of hand.

One of the things I found (other than that research is hazardous to your sanity) is the existence of a valid word "Suage", a transitive verb meaning "to assuage". This brought me up short. Suage is not onomatopoetic. The only example of usage I could think of was, "I'm gonna suage the crap outa that SOB!". This led me to look at several definitions of "suage" and perforce, off on another tangent.

One of the latter innovations of the internet, text based advertising, has intrigued me for some time. I like looking at the ad placement and trying to figure out the keyword relationships. Some are obvious, others are not so much. I was looking at the add placements for the definition of suage and noticed a surprising trend exemplified by the following page:

=================================================
http://www.webster-dictionary.net/definition/Suage

Definition of Suage
v. t. 1. To assuage.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Advertisement
Ads by Google

More Sources - Better Results Metasearch Big Sausage Pizza now!
webcrawler.com/BigSausagePizza

Emergency Water Removal Services For All Industries
retailmaintenancemanagement.com

Use The Same Septic System Solution Used In Municipal Wastewater Plants
www.aero-stream.com

Find user-reviewed Septic & Sewage in your city or zip code!
national.Citysearch.com
==================================================

What's with that?!

(1) In rhetoric, linguistics and poetry, onomatopoeia is a figure of speech that employs a word, or occasionally, a grouping of words, that imitates, echoes, or suggests the object it is describing, such as "bang", "click", "fizz", "hush", "buzz", "hiss" or "murmur".