As with flailmen, you've put a syllable break (and a morpheme break!) between the L and the M. This will make continuing the sequence into -ailml- impossible, since an English syllable can't start with ml-.
Interestingly, there's nothing wrong in general with starting a syllable with ml-; it's fundamentally the same mouth motion as starting with bl- or pl-, both of which are common in English. But ml- isn't allowed.
This plays into a pet observation of mine, which is that an underappreciated constraint on the space of words that actually exist in a language -- as opposed to the space of words that could conceivably exist -- is that by and large they must descend from older words in an older form of the language, so that even if a word like "plailm" obeys the rules for modern English syllables, it can't exist because its precursor word would have violated the rules for older English sounds. (I don't know if this is actually true as applied to "plailm", but the phenomenon (of possible sounds failing to exist due to their precursors having been impossible) is real.)
Milord and milady do not involve syllables starting with ml-. They involve a reduced vowel coming between the /m/ and the /l/, making milord two syllables and milady three. They also aren't spelled "mlord" or "mlady"; your options are "milord", "milady", "m'lord", or "m'lady".
Yes. That is why I used the word “;)” at the end there. And, yes, I know ;) is not a word.
I’ve been splained that one of the reasons “humor” sometimes doesn’t play well on HN is that people here have such a wide diversity of English grok. I didn’t anticipate someone could have too much knowledge, but, huzzah, there 'tis, one small step f’r ’man, and so forth.
In that case, you might wish to know that putting a smile at the end of a comment like that is also a common way of calling the person you're talking to stupid.
Welp, it was a wink, not a smile. The intention was good-natured. Just havin' fun on the internet with my new pal, Thaumasiotes, who is plainly the only other person among the swarming billions who found this tiny quirk of language worth blethering about with me. I hear you, mostly people think this sort of mishegas is nutballs. Their loss.
Flailmen: Awkward males, made uncomfortable and rendered incoherent by the close proximity of a romantic interest. Also, medieval warriors wielding flails.
