131–140 of 144 posts
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Seems arbitrary. Why does “get to the other side” mean to cross over from life to death. You’re saying it like it’s obvious.
It is easy to find references [1]. I always thought it referred to the Greek mythological river Styx, where crossing the river meant going to the underworld. [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/other_side
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As far as I know the most common name is "hink pink", if anyone wants to look this up (or sometimes "hinky pinky"). Here's a 1981 book, https://archive.org/details/hinkpinkbookorwh00burn/ and here's a short description from the 50s, https://archive.org/details/realbookofgames0000unse/page/134... Searching further, apparently Hink Pink was the name of an 18th century pirate ship; I'm not sure if there's a relation to…
I made a daily game version of this https://rystaf.github.io/hinklepinkle/
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Our family plays "Match Three" during long drives where one person comes up with three words and whoever correctly answers with a word that can complete or precede any of them becomes "it" and chooses the next set. Homophones and proper nouns are considered acceptable. So for example: (Fox, Lone, Crossed) The answer would be: Star Star Fox - a well known rail shooter originally on the SNES Lone Starr - the only man w…
Love it! Does the person who comes up with three words have the connecting word in mind from the beginning, or no?
There have been occasions where the answer was not the intended one, but it still fits all three and that's considered fair game!
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"Fruit flies like a banana" is arguably the quintessential example of ambiguity in English grammar. It shows that the grammatical structure of a sentence (which words are nouns, which are verbs, etc.) cannot be reliably recovered even if we know the meaning and possible grammatical categories of every word. Both ways to parse it are grammatically sound: (Fruit) (flies) (like a banana) (Fruit flies) (like) (a banana)…
Would marking compound words resolve this? As in germanic togetherwriting of things that form one whole, as in English' noun-that-they-modify-preceding adjectives, or as in some other language: some way of signaling this?
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My understanding is that that interpretation is an urban legend. Wikipedia attributes the joke to an 1847 article, which is phrased in a way that clearly isn't intended to have some deeper meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_did_the_chicken_cross_the_...
TIL, thanks!
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My family calls that game "pink mink"!
As far as I know the most common name is "hink pink", if anyone wants to look this up (or sometimes "hinky pinky"). Here's a 1981 book, https://archive.org/details/hinkpinkbookorwh00burn/ and here's a short description from the 50s, https://archive.org/details/realbookofgames0000unse/page/134... Searching further, apparently Hink Pink was the name of an 18th century pirate ship; I'm not sure if there's a relation to…
i have five clean references to "as a mason jar" so my collection is fairly complete ;-)
note: ripgrep 4.079s wall; ag (silversearcher) 5.916s wall; grep 6.940s wall
The part about dad joke square theory got me thinking about this classic scarecrow joke, which feels like an example from some higher order version of square theory: "Why was the scarecrow given an award?" "He was out standing in his field." The fact that a scarecrow's job is to be "out standing in his field", and that excelling at one's job can be phrased as being "outstanding in his field" is an incredible linguist…
Also, My friend accidentally drank a bottle of invisible ink... she's at the hospital now, waiting to be seen. "Waiting to be seen" having slightly different meaning with respect to hospitals and invisible ink.
The success of that initiative remains to be seen.
Is what you reminded me of. Technically first it was "fuckin' Mitch!" Because Hedburg sprayed reappearing disappearing ink on someone's shirt.
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Would marking compound words resolve this? As in germanic togetherwriting of things that form one whole, as in English' noun-that-they-modify-preceding adjectives, or as in some other language: some way of signaling this?
It would definitely help with written English, but I can't see it helping with spoken. (Is there some rule in German that disambiguates togetherwritten nouns when spoken?)
No, in speech we seem to get by without spaces, and that's in every language that I'm aware of, but then we also don't have commas, parentheses, apostrophes, or capital letters. Somehow, intonation and emphasis must replace these (or rather, writing encodes our speech somehow) but I'm not sure how they map exactly. Question marks indicate a rising tone for example, that's about the extent of what I know
As a child learning to write, I had a phase where I put whole sentences together because that made sense to me as the next step after we learned to write letters together to form words. It took quite some convincing before I believed that adults don't secretly do this and they're only telling us to add space because they think we're not ready for the next step. I guess I innately thought words belong together and we only add a pause between sentences
There is one speech pattern where spaces can be heard though. Like in English, when you enunciate very clearly because the person isn't understanding (for example, if their English is very poor, or when you're shouting across a long distance), similarly in germanic languages I'd add time between each word, and nearly none if it's a compound word. Like how you'd pause between "get" and "out" if you want to make yourself extremely well understood, but afaik not/barely between "handy" and "man" or "quag" and "mire" because the parts haven't the same meaning, or aren't understood at all anymore, in isolation
Now I'm curious actually, might English native speakers also add less time between compound nouns/adjectives in this speech mode? So not like "quag" and "mire" but something that's commonly written apart, like "bottle cap". Do they (you?) identify and indicate things that form one concept also by separating them less, and only the written encoding is different between the languages, or do they feel like the words are fundamentally separate things in the same way that "go" and "home" are separate parts of speech?
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As far as I know the most common name is "hink pink", if anyone wants to look this up (or sometimes "hinky pinky"). Here's a 1981 book, https://archive.org/details/hinkpinkbookorwh00burn/ and here's a short description from the 50s, https://archive.org/details/realbookofgames0000unse/page/134... Searching further, apparently Hink Pink was the name of an 18th century pirate ship; I'm not sure if there's a relation to…
for the record, i can't find any combination of those words in my transcriptions of loveline shows, although i don't have them all, and it is possible there are up to 50% transcription errors. there is 1 reference to "Stinky Linky" but it appears unrelated, "what's the linky?" "freckles" - i got excited that i found it but looking at the context it was in vain. i have five clean references to "as a mason jar" so my c…
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It would definitely help with written English, but I can't see it helping with spoken. (Is there some rule in German that disambiguates togetherwritten nouns when spoken?)
I actually wrote about speech but thought it distracted from the question and removed it again No, in speech we seem to get by without spaces, and that's in every language that I'm aware of, but then we also don't have commas, parentheses, apostrophes, or capital letters. Somehow, intonation and emphasis must replace these (or rather, writing encodes our speech somehow) but I'm not sure how they map exactly. Question…
I think the hyphen removal follows the typical speech pattern in which the syllables are rushed together just like the syllables of other words, but I'm not sure.