Sometimes when rushing through a puzzle app, swiping words so quickly, the actual words can become a blur. I am used to telling Anne about alternate American/English versions of words, like COLOR (Am) vs COLOUR (Eng) and NITER (Am) vs NITRE (Eng). So I got into a blur where I ended up thinking BYRE and BIER were the same word, just different dialect spellings.
But no, a BYRE is a shed for a cow, and a BIER is a typically wooden platform for carrying the dead. So, if you have cattle, you can get them into the BYRE, but if you have a corpse or coffin to carry to a gravesite, a BIER would be the thing.
In German, BIER is just BEER.
And while swiping those letters, I misspelled BIER as BRIE, which is a soft spreadable cheese, like cream cheese. I can't remember the last time I actually had some, but I seem to recall it looked like cream cheese but tasted skunky and awful.
There is a certain amount of linguistic Zen that comes from playing simple word unscrambler games, spinning around the question of why some words are accepted and others are not. A few nights back we played UNRULY, and for fun, I tried RULY on a whim, and the game accepted it, when I know other games have rejected it. I tried explaining it to Anne. It felt like a word to me, and it's in Merriam-Webster with the same example I thought of at the time: "I have seen some ruly crowds." It turns out that MW has a fascinating story about these two words, see here . "Ruly" did exist for centuries, got replaced by UNRULY, only to come back as a back-formation from UNRULY to fill the gap it once filled. It turns out that these cases are considered "Lost positives", words where the positive root word has faded from usage while the negation of the word is still going strong. Here is a video from RobWords that gives a good overview. I have been enjoy...
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