>>Um, sorry, I was distra... distraught? distressed?... I forgot you already corrected that one.
>
>DISTRACTED?

That!

>Discombobulated? (an early American addition to the language), before verbs like "to leverage" and "to fragrance" became the norm)

Don't forget "under punishment" (sub poena) as a verb. You're watching CSI - you've heard of guys being subpoenaed.

>The sound is more akin to the modern standard US female high school kid's stock expression of disgust (usually followed by "GROSS!"), without the emphasised "W" at the end. Voila!

Phonetics can't be conveyed by means of English languages, Q.E.D.

How can one pronounce a "W" at the end? Which sound does that represent? A short -u- as in "what", or the short ooh in oh-ooh as in "row"?

>>This mutual attempt to explain sounds to each other by means of English alphabet, which is so divorced from the sounds it supposedly represents, is the reason I brought up the E.T. analogy.
>
>Whereas the Serbian alphabet is IDEAL for ET words, esp. Klingon.

Somewhat. We lack a few guttural sounds, like the Dutch g or Hebrew ch (or the Klingon "I got a live worm stuck in my throat" sound), we have only five vowels plus r-as-vowel-if-surrounded - no umlauts or angstroms, sorry - and we don't have sounds for w, th and th. We also lack the Russian shch (though š+ć comes quite close). But I figure we'd manage ;).

>If we're playing Jeopardy then strictly the question to the following answer should be "In what state is a man who comes out of the water?" (you answer "New Jersey" and I'll smite you from here!)

Nah, it's the same old jersey, only wet.

>I still don't see how this pertains to what you said OR, indeed, to teh phonetics discussion.

This is a branch into the E.T. dialog analogy (because of my frustrated attempts in trying to find a common set of phonetic tools). This branch is concerned with the lack of word for "kakav" in English... as in "~~ is X?" which would require an answer by not a noun, but an adjective. "What is X like" comes close, though it doesn't really ask for any quality, it asks for a similarity with something.

So I've heard "what" used instead of this missing word so many times that I thought it is one of its regular uses. Checking at Merriam-Webster now (or if you'd have a better dictionary link, please let me know), I saw that this meaning isn't listed at all. So any of "what's this ball - it's green" that I heard is then probably irregular. But as we saw at the root of this thread, what was once irregular may be a rule soon.