Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetThe Jargon File's prefatory matter discusses several kinds of expressive morphology (though not by that name) which do not appear in your 1987 paper:
Doubling a verb to create a peculiar sentence type: Lose, lose 'This is a losing situation', Win, win, Chomp, chomp, etc.
Distorting proper names to insult their referents: Microsloth, Windoze, Internet Exploder. The phrase for hysterical raisins 'for historical reasons' also belongs here, as the original phrase is often used to justify infelicities.
The suffix /pi/, a novel inflection that puts verbs (often verbs that are nouned, often with strange meanings) into the interrogative mood, otherwise unheard-of in English: /ˈfudpi/ 'Do you want food?', /ˈsplɪtpi ˈsup/ 'Does anyone want to split a bowl of soup with me?' (with a pun on split-pea soup).
Many examples are also provided of "extending [affixes] to contexts where they don't usually go": mysteriosity, dubiosity, ferrosity, obviosity; winnitude, lossitude, lameitude, disgustitude; hackification; bogotify 'make bogus'. In some cases, inflectional affixes are similarly overapplied, such as cabeese 'cabooses', boxen 'computers, seen generically as mere "boxes"', frobbotzim (plural of frobbotz 'small component of uncertain purpose'), Unices 'variants of Unix', semicola 'semicolons', polygoose 'mongooses'. It's not clear that the last is in active use.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetIt's probably a trivial customization of the software to adjust the pronunciation of particular words. Recognizing pinyin (especially tone-free pinyin) embedded in English and substituting a separate set of pronunciation rules, though not intrinsically difficult, is almost certainly beyond what off-the-shelf talk-to-speech software can be made to do.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetBiochemist: sick and tired is used in AmE too, but only with of, not with with, whereas for me at least fed up demands with.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetAaron Toivo: Nothing pseudo about the word anti-disestablishmentarianism: it's the political beliefs of those who were (successfully) opposed to disestablishing the Church of England (that is, making it cease to be the established church), or alternatively of those who were (unsuccessfully) opposed to disestablishing the Church in Wales.
Why in Wales as against of England? A parsing error. The Act of Parliament which disestablished the Welsh branch of the Church of England referred repeatedly to "the properties of the Church in Wales", meaning the church buildings and lands and what not belonging to the Church of England but physically within the boundaries of the Principality. The resulting separated organization which took ownership of those properties believed that by statute its name was "The Church in Wales", due to the misparse of "properties (of the Church) (in Wales)" as "properties (of the Church (in Wales))". And so it remains.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetBy report, though, the Mac-style menu really sucks when you have two screens, because it sticks firmly to the primary screen even when the app window is on the secondary screen. There is probably a way around this, though.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetHodometry and odometer, the distance-measuring gadget in your car, are close relatives: the original Greek word was "hodos", but the h-sound was dropped on its way through French.
That said, hodometry doesn't actually appear in the OED, though hodograph, hodometrical, and hodoscope do. As does hodymoke, which has absolutely nothing to do with the above. It's found exactly once in the known history of English, in a 1450 instruction manual for parish priests: "Hide it not in hodymoke, let other(s) more read this book" (spelling modernized). Nobody has a clue what hodymoke means specifically, though the general import is clear: don't keep this under wraps, spread the word, brother, spread the word.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetPeter: Yes, I overstated the case for simplicity's sake.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetHistorical correction:
Xerox's claim to have invented the folder is firm. The 1983 Lisa was the first Apple computer with a GUI (including folders), but the Xerox Star was first sold in 1981, and it definitely had folders. I was not on the inside for this, but the closest thing to it: at one time I was the only commercial third-party Mesa programmer between Boston and Baltimore, Mesa being the "missing link between Pascal and Modula-2" that was used in Star programming.
I was also the first person to release third-party freeware for the Star. I still miss the little app I wrote that started up Star's Notepad-analogue with a hierarchical list of directories and files when you dropped a folder or file drawer (disk/network device) onto it. You could rearrange the files however you wanted, and when you closed the editor, the folder hierarchy would be rearranged to suit.
There were a lot of common elements between the Lisa and the Star, most notably the fact that you had to boot a different OS altogether (Tajo/XDE on the Star, Workshop on the Lisa) to do development. That meant, at least on the Star, that every time the debugger stopped your program on a breakpoint, it had to swap memory images, taking about three minutes to do so!
So Jobs did not give us the folder, and (given how the concept has proliferated) Jobs is most unlikely to take it away either. Hierarchies don't have to be rigid to be useful.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetPrithee, sir
Boy, does that reek of subtext. The clash between addressing someone as sir, appropriate to a servant, and using the familiar second person forms prithee and dost thou means they practically have to be lovers.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetTo be second to none is not to be first. If you are first, you have no equals (which is what gives the phrase first among equals its slightly paradoxical feeling), but if you are (only) second to none, you may and often do have equals. Consider this sentence from Bruce Schneier's book Applied Cryptography:
[Organizations] can write their own [cryptographic] algorithms, based on the belief that their cryptographic ability is second to none, and that they should trust nobody but themselves.
The belief attributed to these organizations is that they have no superiors, not that they are necessarily superior to everyone else.
[(myl) OK, right. The post is now edited to reflect this. It remains true that Mr. Atkinson's phrase has one too many negatives — he meant something like "we can't be second to anyone", not "we can't be second to none".]
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetI'm reminded of how in Greek au eu have become af ef before voiceless consonants.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetI suspect he said Babel rather than babble, but with a TRAP (rather than FACE) vowel so that the Australian transcriber didn't know what it was.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetA (probably apocryphal) telegram: FUCK YOU STOP INSULTING LETTER FOLLOWS.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetFair enough to remove the four comments, since they referred to a version of the piece no longer extant. Not so fair — in fact, crappy — not to acknowledge the commentators by name. Unlike the "anonymous reviewers" who get thanked at the bottom of lots of papers, they didn't sign up to be anonymous. "Credit where credit is due" is a very important part of both academic and blogging ethics, so please restore the four names.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetI take it that -γ is meant to be a baby gamma, ɤ, rather than a plain gamma, ɣ in IPA? I find it difficult to believe in a dialectal opposition between a mid-open front vowel and a voiced velar fricative!
As soon as I saw the word "igli" I immediately thought of Peanuts, where Linus says "one igloo, two igli".
