2057: Hurricanes vs. Typhoons Aug 2, 2020
Basically, a hurricane and a typhoon are the same thing insofar as they are tropical storms. The main difference really is where they originate, with hurricanes coming from the Atlantic and particularly the Caribbean, and typhoons originating in the Indian or Pacific Ocean; based on the respective colonial history, the former is more American (and Spanish) and the latter is more British. That said, if such a tropical storm hit Guam and then Hong Kong, it would not be referred to locally as a hurricane first, but a typhoon for both because it is in the Pacific.
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1512: 'Expat' vs 'Immigrant' Feb 1, 2019
The terms 'expat' and 'immigrant' hold a huge amount of extralinguistic connotations, but looking at how academics use those terms could help to diffuse some of those problems perhaps. There is a popular belief that "expat is only for white (or generally privileged) people", but this isn't quite true. In technical senses, an expat is any person who lives in another country for economic reasons but holds citizenship to another with no intention of giving it up; usually this will be someone moved by his or her company. An immigrant refers to anyone who has moved to another country, usually in search of another job and or citizenship to that foreign country. Often these terms can overlap, and especially get confused due to migration agreements in places like the European Union, but, in an academic sense, these are not simply based off of class; in popular usage this might have extra connotations however.
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1387: Ground vs Grinded Sep 28, 2018
In a dictionary, it will list the forms of 'grind' including the participle 'ground' and "(rare) grinded". Some spell-checking programs will even count 'grinded' as a misspelling, but this is becoming less accurate. 'Ground is still used dominantly for most grammatical objects, but in newer usages of the word the preferred participle is 'grinded'. This tends to crop up when the subject matter is about dancing, sex, or relating to marijuana, for which any form of 'grind' is fairly new. This could be because people don't care about traditional grammar, or because they are consciously trying to distinguish the two.
1308: Stomp vs. Stamp Jul 10, 2018
With the exception reference to postage-stamps, the verbs 'stamp' and 'stomp' are more or less interchangeable; this is even true of phrases such as "stamp/stomp out" or "stamping/stomping grounds", which is much rarer of synonyms. The reason for this is that 'stomp'—even though it is more widely used—only came to be as variation of 'stamp' in the 19th century, and so all of those phrases with such interchangeability have used both. It is likely that soon 'stomp' will be included in more of its own senses, both as an ordinary verb and as part of a phrase, but 'stamp' is still widely used today, particularly outside of the US. Which would you use in those phrases?
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1216: Periphrastics: Roundabout Speech Apr 8, 2018
People tend to know when use 'more' and 'most' for the comparative and superlative, and when to use '-er' and '-est', because it relies upon phonetics, but there is some discrepancy. While no native speaker would say 'beautifuler', 'lovelier' and 'more lovely', for example, are both acceptable ways of speaking, even though 'lovelier' is more conventional both historically and linguistically. When a full phrase is used such as 'most happy' or 'more funny', it is referred to as the periphrastic.
The periphrastic refers to anything that, to put it simply, is stated in a phrase when it could be one word. This also happens with verbs, such as 'let's talk' versus 'let's have a talk', or 'he pushed the door' versus 'he gave the door a push', which can be stylistically useful, but does not have any defined linguistic benefits necessarily. These commonly involve 'have', 'do', and 'give', but also 'take'. If you have examples with other words, write it in a comment.
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1039: Flexibility among Nouns Oct 13, 2017
English is fairly flexible when it comes to syntax. Not only is it possible to make many verbs into nouns and vice versa by simply putting it in the sort of context that a noun or verb takes, giving us the ability to say "I'm going to walk" and "I'm going on a walk", but different types of words within one lexical class, such as mass nouns like 'milk' or 'glass' and count nouns like 'shirt' are also somewhat interchangeable, with understood variation in meaning. Though generally mass nouns do not take a pluralizing '-s' like count nouns do (e.g. 'a dog' and 'dogs'), when they do, it means "varieties of", so 'milks' would not refer to an quantity of milk but could denote kinds of milk like whole-fat, skim, chocolate etc. On the other hand, singular count nouns take articles like 'a' or 'the', but when they don't, and are used like mass nouns, it can have several different meanings. For animals, English-speakers can refer to meats by using the singular version of the word with no article, e.g. "I like horses" versus "I like horse". Other times it can mean "bits of", such as, "after that car-crash, there is car/deer/tree/street-sign all over the road", which functions like a mass noun.
626: Backformation Aug 25, 2016
Plenty of words have no logical antonym: a topic that has been covered several times on this blog. When a word does not follow a pattern, usually reassuring affixation, it is possible to create words. The '-er' suffix, for example, can be used to indicate agency, among other things, but the word 'buttle' was made through backformation from 'butler'. Additionally, the prefix, 'dis-' usually has a positive form, but in the case of 'disgruntle', 'gruntle' was only created humorously in the 1920's.