Sunday, January 10, 2010

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Did he mishit the rimshot?

The other day, I heard someone refer to a “rimshot” to punctuate a trite joke, and I thought that was the wrong term. So, of course, I looked it up — and it is the wrong term: a rimshot is a drum sound made by hitting the rim of the drum with the middle of a drumstick and the head of the drum with the tip of the drumstick at the same time. Here’s an illustration.

The “joke” sound, which you can hear here, is correctly called a “sting”, thought calling it (incorrectly) a rimshot, as that web site does, is very common.

Anyway, when I looked “rimshot” up on dictionary.com, I got this:

No results found for rimshot:
Did you mean mishit?

No, I didn’t, of course. But I have to say that when I first read “mishit”, I did not parse it as “mis - hit”. “What on Earth?,” said I.

2 comments:

Frisky070802 said...

Even having briefly read "mishit" in the title of your post, when I went to read the details, I read it the same way you did. LOL...

Laurie said...

Being in a band, I know what a rimshot sounds like, but I didn't know that the Buh-dum-Ch sound was called a sting.

When you look up rimshot on the thesaurus part of that website, it asks if you meant remit, not mishit. Much less easily mis-parsed.