Word Facts

The headline "Sessions ‘Hate, Hate, Hates’ Kushner’s Prison Reform Plan, Pardon Push" makes use of what's called emphatic reduplication  regarding the word 'hate'. Moreover, because English has very little inflectional morphology, such as the '-s' ending on 3rd person verbs, in the childly question "Do you like him, or do you like like him", it is unclear whether the verb is being doubly conjugated, or indeed has no conjugation, as happens in small clauses . This headline, which uses the verb in the 3rd person, answers this question. Indeed, it shows not only is the verb only conjugated once, but that unlike in phrases like 'fancy-schmancy', with the verb, the original stays at the end, and not the beginning. This is the third part in a new segment called Linguistics in the Wild (LITW), and you can see the other 2 here: https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/search?q=LITW

As can be seen in this map of US women's suffrage from 1919, the state abbreviations are not what they are today. In fact, there were no official abbreviations until 1963, though the post office still accepted many common ones. Moreover, the problem was not that there needed to be clearer abbreviations necessarily, but to make sure that there are was enough room for the postcodes and city-names together: up to 23 characters. Initially, there was also a conflict with the US Government Printing Office (GPO) and the Coast Guard's respective abbreviations; the GPO adopted the Post Office standard, but the Coast Guard has not, which leads to some discrepancies. For more Linguistics In the Wild: check out this link: https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/search?q=litw

Contronyms certainly do exist, when a word is its own opposite, like 'inflammable', but there are also words that have negating prefixes and mean the same thing, again like 'flammable' and 'inflammable', which can—though not necessarily will—mean the same thing. A common misconception is that 'invaluable' is synonymous with 'valuable', but this is not really true. Given that 'invaluable' means that it is so indispensable as to make it impossible to put a value or price on it, it is more precious than something merely valuable. In this way, while 'inflammable' and 'flammable' can synonymous or antonymous, 'invaluable' and 'valuable' are never truly synonymous, though neither are they totally opposite. For more Linguistics in the Wild, see this: https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/search?q=LITW

Memes are changing the way that people speak. A formula for a common type of meme is to start with the phrase "me, when I [do such-and-such action]' followed by a picture or video illustrating the point hyperbolically. The meme in German below says just that, translating as "me, when I must go out all day acting like a [decent] person". However, in German, it begins with 'ich' which is used for subjects whereas English uses the object form 'me'. From a grammatical standpoint this makes no inherent sense, but consider that people also say " it was me " in English all the time, and do use the wrong case for the pronoun at times, but memes are certainly adding to that to the point that people have begun to speak in this way as a way to signal informality and camaraderie. This is another instalment of Linguistics in the Wild. For the rest, click here: https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/search?q=LITW

Slang has turned the noun 'goals' into an adjective. If you've missed this in the last couple of years, people have been using the word 'goals' in structures only fit for adjectives. In the photo below "her British accent is goals af", 'goals' is a predicate adjective (i.e. it follows the linking verb 'to be'. Notably, while someone can say 'her...accent is goals' or theoretically 'her accent is pretty', there is not the option to say the 'goals accent' in the same way as 'the pretty accent', at least for the time being. Moreover though, it precedes 'af' [as fuck] which is only possible for descriptors. It is also notable that while 'goals' is plural when a noun, as an adjective it has no grammatical number. This is the fourth segment on Word Facts entitled Linguistics in the Wild (LITW), and you can see the rest here .

Mishearings, such as that featured below, have the ability to affect spelling. Sometimes this is called an ' egg-corn ' (from 'acorn') when one person misunderstands a word and replaces it with another existing one. However, this has also happened through history in a way that eventually became permanent, such as with " Elephant and Castle " in London. This is also particularly prone to happen with foreign loan words. In this case, the writer presumably meant to say 'folklore". For more Linguistics in the Wild, click here .

In the below 1883 map of world religions shows the word "fetishists" and—though problematic in some ways—this is not entirely pejorative or even always reductive. 'Fetish' originally denoted idols, in particular from West African magic, and for a long time in a variety of languages such as English, French and Portuguese the word simply connoted general sorcerous, animistic, or idolatrous practices. The word is also related to 'factitious'. NB: the term 'Mohammedan' (also 'Mohammedanism') refers to Islam . For more Linguistics in the Wild, click here .

There is a rumour " 'rhythm' is the longest English word without a vowel" and disregarding the 'y', it does show the way that English-spellers view vowels. 'Rhythm' is two syllables not one, so assuming the 'y' represents the sound [ɪ], there would seem to still need to be another vowel somewhere in pronunciation to make the middle of the second vowel . This comes down to what is called ' syllabic consonants ', and this can be thought of like the [ə] in words like 'the' or 'gum' (sort of). However, in words like 'rhythm' and 'column' the vowel is even shorter and less prominent, such that it it thought of as only being a byproduct of moving from one consonant to the next while still breathing out. So, while the number of syllables doesn't change, there is some truth in saying there are fewer-than-expected vowels, though certainly not zero.

The # MeToo movement has since done a lot to highlight language-use, but the post today doesn't relate to PC language . Although certainly not exclusive to this word, MeToo eventually became a verb, but what this shows is not only the manner in which not only a phrase like 'me too' becomes one part of speech, but how it becomes a single word. No doubt this was helped by the commonality of the phrase in a variety of contexts, but also it was removed of distinct linguistic context as it is used in a hashtag. Once it is used as a hashtag, it doesn't need to fit into a sentence in the same way as another phrase would. For evidence, here is a tweet from Lena Dunham, though her assessment of the grammar is wrong. This is Linguistics in in the Wild #8 Don;t forget to vote here before the 1,500th Word Facts blog-post. https://www.patreon.com/posts/1-500th-blog-23683917

The purpose of language is—at its core—to convey an idea, being an image, a command, or whatever, to someone else. That means that while people tend to follow certain conventions—abiding by general definitions for words, and using grammar that is accepted by many—not everything said has to be entirely logical. Looking at initialisms, one can see that people tend to follow grammatical conventions with the (perhaps subconscious) notion that the initialism was its own word , at least in terms of conjugations, but even more basically one could notice that certain initialisms take on a meaning of their own, despite the lack of sense that would come of saying what each letter stands individually within the given context. For instance, the phrase "OCD enough" as in "I'm still OCD enough to correct myself" conveys the idea of extreme obsessive behavior, but saying *"I am obsessive compulsive disorder enough..." does not make sense; one would say "obsessiv...

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). To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit  Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video too:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqYX2heE0T0