WordFixx

On the radio on the way home a few nights ago, we had Mark Thompson filling in for Tim Conway Jr, and the show came back from a commercial break with an mellow old-school rap song intro, and he improvised his return with "Yo, yo, yo!" ... and then immediately got self-conscious about it. It turned into an actual linguistic discussion about where "Yo!" came from and where it's at today.  He felt it was an 80s or 90s thing.  It was never really a replacement for "Hello," but technically an interjection, and specifically used to get someone's attention. The other guys at the station felt it was outdated and confrontational.  Oddly, they might still use it to call attention to something, or to show surprise at something, but they would never use it in text messaging.  Or they would find it comically lame when older people used it in a text.  I thought it was interesting that usage can be so specific that a word leaves different impressions depending on...

New words are always appearing, but most of them disappear before ever making it into a proper dictionary.  Each individual has their own unique overall set of words and pronunciations, known as their "idiolect".  The next step above that is how small groups of people who get together regularly may share a few unique phrases within that group, but when they try to speak to people outside the group, those phrases will fall flat.  With our hyper-connected world, there are so many layers of language, it gets confusing. I'm regularly surprised that none of the word games we've tried will take NOOB or DERP.  I have been hearing people calling each other noobs for 5-10 years now, or saying "derp" as a sort of "oops", and calling things "derpy."  I suppose this is mostly in the realm of video gaming, but it spilled over into regular conversations a while ago. An interesting case that's currently developing is YEET.  I first heard it while pl...

After watching more word history videos and reading more articles, I have had this phrase stuck in my head all week long: "How do you get a clowder of cats from a chaos of kittens?" There are a lot of bizarre names for groups of animals (and people) in English.  Most of us have heard of a FLOCK of sheep or birds, a SWARM of bees, or a SCHOOL of fish.  Maybe you've heard of a MURDER of crows.  But believe me, this list goes on and on (and on), with weird and wild phrases that come as go as language evolves.  Here's a good overview video from Rob Words . One of the earliest big lists of these can be found in "The Book of Saint Albans" from 1486.  It was one of those gentleman's guidebooks that have been with us for centuries.  Here is an edition from the Gutenberg Project - you can get to the list by doing a text search for "Swannys", just after the halfway point in the document.  This list has extremely antiquated spellings, but some of the col...

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...

Sometimes while resting, by brain feeds me word exercises.  Apparently, relaxation is not an option in there.  So I roll with it.  I will often do word unscrambles in my head: mostly 4 or 5 letter words, so if I see one of those in a puzzle, I can rattle off all the words within it. A different exercise which is good not just for unscramblers, but also for Scrabble (and related apps), is to pick the end of a word and run from A to Z finding all valid words.  So, for "-AR", it would go like this, with real words in uppercase: BAR CAR dar EAR FAR GAR har iar JAR kar lar MAR nar OAR PAR rar sar TAR uar var WAR xar yar zar.   It's funny how the mind spins off related items along the way.  I would almost certainly hear CHAR and TSAR in between the 3-letter words, and would probably insert BRA after BAR since it uses the same letters.  The word assocation throws all kinds of things at me, as it decides which combinations qualify as "real words".  Dhar i...

Here is something that popped into my head randomly while trying to sleep last night ... Back in the late 90's, I was in my one and only Scrabble tournament.  It was a local fundraiser at the Escondido Public Library.  My wife-at-the-time was on my team, and two close friends were a couple on another team.  There were about 30 players, and our entry fees went to a literacy charity. I won a few rounds, and as I recall I made it to the round where there were only 2 games being played.  So if there were 32 players to start, round two would be 16, round three would be 8, round four would be those two games.  That all adds up (in my head). My fresh opponent started by saying, "Let's not add up the scores each round, so we can focus on the game.  It's such a hassle." I didn't know if there was an actual rule against doing that, but I figured I could ignore the total score.  Why should those numbers affect my choice of words anyway? In the end, we ...

Okay, so the Zen Word game doesn't have the "best" dictionary.  No online game will have the same word set that my brain has stored.  This game is missing older versions of key verbs, so HATH and SAITH are not there, however many times they show up in the Bible.  But THEE and THOU ar(t).   It's weird when a singular or plural is accepted but not both.  So it accepts MEDS but not MED, REC but not RECS.   Don't ask me how it accepts GLOP but not GLOOP, takes BONG and BING but not BOING.  WONK and THO and VAIL are ok but NAV and ZIN (short for Zinfandel, the wine, a valid Scrabble word) and LITH are not?  As far as artifacts go, TOR (the monument) is okay but TORC (the necklace) is not? Each game decides on what to censor.  This game accepts PEE, PEED, PEES, POO (etc) and PORN where the other word unscramblers did not.  Words that are considered racist, or gender-related insults are blocked, and I won't type those here.  But it does ta...