Guilty as charged

1. What’s red and smells like blue paint?

Red paint!

2. Two muffins are in an oven. One looks at the other one and says “Is it hot in here to you?” and the other one looks back and says “AAAH! A talking muffin!”

Wait, what? Who doesn’t like Salt and Sanctuary? One of my favorite games of all time.

Revenue is one of the least useful metrics for judging something like this.

Not supposed to say the quiet part out loud

I love puns! I just thought this was a good opportunity to drop some interesting linguistic knowledge about prosody.

My comment was based on fluent speech, not careful speech.

I’m entertaining the idea that some of the commenters here may speak varieties (or even idiolects) where the two pronunciations have merged, but I think the more likely explanation is that they’re laypeople who (like many native English speakers) aren’t easily able to detect stress contrasts without at least some training.

This is a good point worth commenting further on.

Idiomatic phrases usually (but not always) retain a stress pattern that corresponds to the prosody of their original syntax even after they lexicalize. See: “the CAT’s out of the BAG” vs. “the CLAM’S out of the POND” and “kick the BUCKet” vs. “beat the MONkey”.

So, while I agree with you that “time being” (and probably all of “for the time being”, for that matter) is idiomatic, its prosody has fossilized from its original syntax in which “being” modified “time”.

“LET’S put it aSIDE for the time BEing”
“LET’S put it aSIDE for the man EATing”

Also, even if the stress has neutralized from “time BEing” to just “time being” over time for some speakers (which is certainly possible), it would still contrast with “TIME being”.

It’s really interesting that they sound the same to you! I’d expect both to have merged to the “for the TIME being” stress pattern in that case - does that match your intuition?

In isolation, no. But in this meme they are pronounced differently because intonation is different between the two phrases, and as exemplified here: inTOnation is AN inteGRAL part OF lanGUAGE.

“for the time BEing” vs. “for the TIME being”

In both cases you’re stressing the modifier, but in the former “being” is the modifier, while in the latter “time” is, so we get a prosodic stress contrast between the two.

Edit: Note that it’s actually somewhat unexpected to stress adjectives that come before like this (“*I did it for the BIG apple” is weird in a neutral context where you’re not contrasting with a small apple, for example), which makes me think that “TIME being” may actually be an example of compound stress. Here’s a comment I wrote a while back with some more info about English compounds for anyone interested.

Any phonologists that specialize in prosody here who can shed more light on this?

Jokes that only work in text.

Edit: Also, I appreciate you @[email protected] - you’re doing the Lord’s work!

Tankie chuds fuck off!

Tankie chuds fuck off!

Tankie chuds fuck off!

Tankie chuds fuck off!

Tankie chuds fuck off!

Tankie chuds fuck off!

Tankie chuds fuck off!

Tankie chuds fuck off!

Tankie chuds fuck off!