>>>Um, sorry, I was distra... distraught? distressed?... I forgot you already corrected that one.
>>
>>DISTRACTED?
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>That!
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>>Discombobulated? (an early American addition to the language), before verbs like "to leverage" and "to fragrance" became the norm)
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>Don't forget "under punishment" (sub poena) as a verb. You're watching CSI - you've heard of guys being subpoenaed.

We've been there
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>>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!
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>Phonetics can't be conveyed by means of English languages, Q.E.D.
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>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"?

The latter

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>>>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.
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>>Whereas the Serbian alphabet is IDEAL for ET words, esp. Klingon.
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>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 ;).
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>>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!)
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>Nah, it's the same old jersey, only wet.
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>>I still don't see how this pertains to what you said OR, indeed, to teh phonetics discussion.
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>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.
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>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.