1264: Aptagrams May 27, 2018
Anagrams are quite famous, but there are multiple varieties. Palindromes are similar but there are also so called aptagrams, which is a semantically relevant anagram. A few famous examples include 'moon starers' for 'astronomer', 'notes' for 'tones', and 'dirty room' for 'dormitory'. The list of those is fairly short, but it can be expanded to cross-language anagrams, such as 'ars magna' (Latin for 'great art') as an aptagram for 'anagrams'. Debatably, the best of all of them is "twelve plus one" and "eleven plus two" which not only is relevant being within the field of mathematics, but is also accurate.
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1263: Brown Willy or 'breast swallow' May 26, 2018
Brown Willy is a hill in Cornwall which comes from Cornish meaning 'breast swallow'. This is neither the first thing named 'willy' to come out of Britain, as their first-ever tank was named 'Big Willy', nor is it the only place in the UK named after a breast, as that list includes other hills and even 'Manchester'. The name in Cornish for the hill in question today is 'Bronn Wennili' (effectively "hill of swallows"), however people tend to change words foreign to them into something more familiar lexically (bronn --> brown), or phonetically (wennili --> willy), both of which happen to be demonstrated here.
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1262: Churchillian Drift May 25, 2018
Anyone can be misquoted posthumously of course, but it is quite rampant regarding those of political figures and other famous people throughout history. There are many reasons for this, ranging from relatively innocent general ignorance, or it can have certain political effects. However, there is a point when it might enter the general populous, after a real quote was attributed to the wrong person, or it was entirely fabricated, when the term 'Churchillian Drift' may be applied, so named after so many false quotes were attributed to Winston Churchill. An example of Churchillian Drift is that there is little evidence to suggest that Mark Twain said "golf is a good walk spoiled", since the first known record of anyone saying it was some 38 years after he died.
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1261: Clusivity May 24, 2018
English lacks a lot of the semantic variety that pronouns in Spanish have. To start, English has neither a distinction for formal pronouns nor second person plural, both of which are present in Spanish, but there are still many more facets which neither language have. Clusivity is a feature of language in which something can either be inclusive (of interlocutors, tense etc) or exclusive. For instance, 'we' is both inclusive and exclusive; it has the ability to include everyone—either literally each human, or just a speaker, addressee, and third person—or it can exclude the addressee, such as in "we like you" where 'we' does not include the listener. Other languages include this distinction, and will have three first-person pronouns, which may be wholly distinct pronouns, or sometimes will coincide with the informal and formal forms for the first person.
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1260: English's Mysterious Abundance of Synonyms May 23, 2018
Arguably, English has more words that any other language, though this is not to say that English speakers use more distinct words than other peoples. A common, though overstated, reason for this is that there are so many loan words, and words of foreign origin, but this only goes so far. For instance, the fact that English has an abundance of both Germanic and Romantic vocabulary might explain why there are 'big' and 'large' (which when originally adopted from French meant 'wide; long'), but this does not account for 'small' and 'little' (and questionably 'tiny') which are Germanic.
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1259: Discovering a Language from a Parrot May 21, 2018
All languages are from humans, but one was retrieved from a parrot.
Alexander von Humboldt, known for many things including his work with electricity also spent a great deal of time in South America, as well as documenting native groups from the Amazon. There was one tribe which was said to have been eaten by Caribs (cannibals) but there was a parrot that survived. Humboldt went with someone who spoke, Maipures, a similar language to the extinct Atures and learned around 40 words from the parrot. Along with the Maipures speaker, he was able to reconstruct a small amount of the language.
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1258: Creoles vs Languages May 20, 2018
What separates creoles and pidgins from whole languages with heavy influence from other languages?
Some languages are very pure in their grammar and vocabulary, such as Icelandic which stays incredibly true to its Germanic roots, and other languages take elements from all over, such as Haitian Creole, which uses French as the lexifier language (i.e. where it gets its vocabulary) but with a lot of influence from West African languages. However, what separates a language like Haitian Creole from a non-creole language like Yiddish, is that while Yiddish has a lot of influence from Hebrew and Slavic languages in its vocabulary, phonology, and morphonology (which includes affixes and things like that) but its core vocabulary is Germanic, and so is the grammar. This definition has historically raised a lot of questions about English.
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1257: How to Verb a Noun: Phrases (LITW 2) May 19, 2018
The question for today: how do you verb a noun?
Well as any native English speaker should realize, that is merely a rhetorical question, but it is still an interesting and perhaps entertaining notion. Unlike in Salish, because English syntax relies almost exclusively upon word-order, placing any word, including a noun, adjective, or even preposition in the position of a verb, it will become a verb. What this leads to is a sort of test to see if something is one word or multiple. As you can see in the attached photo, "social justice warrior" (so long as you can overlook the hyphen-misuse) is used as one verb, even though it appears as three words. However, because of the social and linguistic connotations, it has now developed meaning as one word (usually a noun, though here a verb).
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1256: Does It Matter How Many Words You Know? May 18, 2018
Shakespeare is often lauded for his immense vocabulary in his literature, but does this matter? In a previous post from Word Facts, it was discussed how many rappers would have equivalent or even larger lexicons than Shakespeare, even if they aren't thought of that was necessarily, but an important followup-question to that is: so what?. Reportedly, an average issue of The Sun—which for the sake of this post will be assumed to be considered lowbrow—contains roughly 6000 words per issue (this does not include repeated words). For reference, the both immensely longer and more academically renowned The King James Bible contains roughly 8000, though it is regarded as incredibly well-crafted and prestigious. People make this same point about US Presidents, stating how Wilson used around 1000 words in his addresses whereas those of George W. Bush could have around a mere 250, but as is hopefully clear from the first example, the number of distinct words really has no correlation with intellect, and there are also many more factors to eloquence.
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1255: I Before E Except after C? May 17, 2018
"I before E except after C..." is not only prescriptive and irrelevant, because English spelling is particularly arbitrary, but also usually wrong. There are in fact more exceptions to the rule than words which conform to the rule, in fact, there are 21 times as many words where "I before E except after C" is broken than those that conform. Reportedly, there are 923 words where this is the exception, including 'species' and 'weird'. Even extending the rule "...except when it says [ei] like in 'neighbour' and 'weigh' ", the rule is very much in the minority of relevant words. Indeed, this has recently stopped having been taught at schools, but for a very long time this was the norm in lower education.
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1254: Prawo Jazdy: be careful with translation May 16, 2018
In Ireland, the Garda reported a criminal with a long list of speeding-tickets and parking-fines from all over the country, but each time it was under a different address. There was nothing else on his rap sheet, so this raised a lot of red flags about the need for false-identities. Prawo Jazdy was in the system for more than 50 offences, until someone pointed out that 'prawo jazdy' means driving license in Polish. This was a big embarrassment for the Irish police, but the Polish residents reportedly found this very amusing.
1253: The King James Bible Didn't Speak Its Greek May 15, 2018
Those translating The King James Bible (KJV) weren't familiar with Koine Greek: the language it was written in; at the time people didn't know it existed. This may sound impossible: how do people translate from a language which is unknown?
Well, it is not as if the translators for the KJV were only familiar in English (or even ecclesiastical Latin) and translated from no background, but at the time, people believed that Koine (common) Greek, as what they were all familiar with: Classical Greek. In fact, up until more scrolls and other documentation was found, it was thought that the Greek used in the New Testament was unique, and moreover a divinely-inspired dialect. This was proved false in the 17th and 18th century by the existence of thousands of items in Koine Greek, mostly on papyrus. So while the translation is one of the most-trusted, it was beyond the grasp of the translators, and should—more than most translations of other things—be taken with more consideration.
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1252: Triple Entendre (bei mir bisti sheyn) May 14 2018
People often talk of double entendres (except the French who don't use this French phrase). This only means that a word or phrase has two meanings but it isn't too difficult to find words with three or more meanings. For instance, the Yiddish song "Bei mir, bisti sheyn" (בײַ מיר ביסטו שײן) is easily translated into German "Bei mir bist du schön" but notoriously hard to translate into English. Though it is usually written "to me you are beautiful", "bei mir" means all of "to me", "by me" (i.e. "beside/near me"), and also "compared to me". While the final meaning-option is least likely given the context it is still a consideration. This makes the phrase "bei mir" a triple entendre. If you can you think of other triple or quadruple entendre, in any language, write it in a comment.
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1251: The Nuance of Proof May 13, 2018
There is no harm in seeing that words can have multiple and even conflicting meanings, though there are some words for which a misunderstanding can lead to communicational problems with deep social and cognitive effects. The word 'proof' for instance has the sense of sounding as if it means something has been confirmed as a fact. Indeed, often this is the way in which the word is used, but as is evidenced (proven?) with the statement and expression "the exception that proves the rule", if 'prove' meant "confirm as factual" then the statement would not make sense, as exceptions make rules invalid. Instead, what 'prove' means 'to test'. To say this is all it means though would be prescriptivist; due to past misunderstanding and misinterpretation, the word has gained a more objective sense of sounding infallible, and this may lead people to be critical of the uncertainty of proof. At this point however, all one can do is to be mindful of both.
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1250: How Turkish Words Get So Long May 12, 2018
Turkish and Finnish agglutination were brought up in the latest the latest Word facts video, but no example was given. In the video it showed how Germanic languages allows for compounding of terms within a single lexical class (e.g having strings of nouns acting together as one word) and polysynthetic languages can attach affixes to indicate meaning that connotes ideas that would belong to multiple lexical classes, but synthetic languages are somewhere in the middle. Turkish, for instance, can pack a lot of information into one word very similarly to polysynthetic languages. As you can see in the chart below, shows that affixes, particularly suffixes (and then infixes) can be added to one word in order to indicate meaning which in English would have to involve prepositions (which is also true of less agglutinative languages like Latin), verbs, and adjectives. There are still more limitations to this than in, say, Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), but are still more productive than in English
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1249: Semantic Diversion: verklemmen, farklempt, and clam May 11, 2018
To see effect of time and culture on language, loot how one root develops in two languages; this is best exhibited with English's 'black' and French's 'blanc' (white) coming from the same origin. Less directly than that, though still notably, the Germanic 'klammjan' lead to the Modern German 'verklemmen' meaning 'to jam/press', the Yiddish 'farklempt' (ווערקלעמפּט) meaning 'grieving' (although in Jewish English it only means 'emotional'), and the English 'clam'. All of these go back to a root that meant 'block', but were taken different ways. The original meaning was probably closest kept in German, but in English it was applied to an animal with a tightly shut shell. The meaning in Yiddish, however, emphasizes the emotional side to this word, and it is by no means the only one; other terms in English such as 'choked up', or indeed 'clam up' convey the sense of having a sort of emotional or mental blocking up. Ironically, there is the expression "happy as a clam".
1248: contronyms May 10, 2018
A contronym (also contranym) is a word that has two opposite definitions, and there are two main reasons how these come to be. Sometimes this is due etymology; the word 'cleave' means to split apart—leading to the knife, 'cleaver' and also 'cleavage' (via geology)—but also it means 'to stick together'. They both have different participles 'cleaved and 'clove' respectively, and come from different words in Old English: 'clēofan' and 'cleofian' respectively. In the case of 'inflammable' and 'unlockable', this comes down to morphology; 'inflamable' can mean "not able to be flammable' or "able to be inflamed" and depends upon which affix would be added first. If you know other contronyms, write it in the comments.
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1247: Parenthetical (Nonrestrictive) Clauses
Whats the difference between:
"The man, who I met earlier, is funny...
The man—who I met earlier—is funny...
The man (who I met earlier) is funny" ?
In effect: nothing really. All of these have examples of a nonrestrictive clause, meaning that it is modifying clause nonessential to the rest. The difference is that commas are used to separate many types of clauses, including generally main clauses from subordinate clauses. However, m-dashes also are used for this, though more specifically for parenthetical clauses when the information can be thought to interrupt the rest of the speech, and moreover, parentheses are used for—obviously—parenthetical clauses. Since the sentence cannot be rearranged to be "the man is funny who I met earlier" because that sounds odd, so the parentheses aren't as jarringly parenthetical as they could be, but there is some overlap in usages. There will, however, be editorial preferences when writing.
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1246: How are Sounds Related?: [t] and [k] May 8, 2018
It is hard to judge the two most similar pairs of sounds in English. Looking at the place of articulation for sounds, it could appear that [p]/[b] is a lot closer to [t]/[d] than [k]/[g], with the former two being pronounced at the front of the mouth (lips and teeth respectively) and the latter produced towards the back, but there is a higher frequency of eggcorns produced from confusions over the sounds [t] and [k] than with [p]. This can be evidenced with 'buck naked' being misheard as 'butt naked'.
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