Hey, Vsauce. Michael here
In 1934 Webster's dictionary gave birth to a new word
by mistake. Their chemistry editor
Austin N Paterson submitted a simple entry: "D
or D abbreviation for density".
Nothing wrong with that, but the entry was misread
and 'dord' was added to the dictionary.
'Dord' was an accidental word for thirteen years before the mistake was
discovered
and its wordship revoked. Let's have fun with words today,
but first, what's the deal with first?
Or for that matter, second? If you were in position three
you're in third place. Position 5, fifth.
Position 197
one hundred and ninety-seventh. Pretty simple.
So why do positions 1 and 2 give us first and second?
Shouldn't they be 'oneth' and 'twoth'?
Well, maybe. But English loves
collateral adjectives. Adjectives derived from different roots than the nouns
they describe. There are plenty of derived adjectives, don't get me wrong.
A bunch of clouds
make the day cloudy, friends are friendly,
poets are poetic. Things with a lot of smell to them are smelly
but the Moon is not Moonly.
The Moon is lunar.
Collateral adjectives are everywhere.
Mouth stuff is oral. Bees are apian.
Some nouns have both. Fathers can be
fatherly or paternal .
And a setting filled with fog can be foggy or brumous.
It's often said that no word
rhymes with orange. Is that true?
Well, rhyming can be controversial because it often depends on pronunciation,
accent and can be forced. Especially if you use multiple
words, you can force orange to rhyme with door hinge,
if you want. But what we want is a perfect rhyme.
A perfect rhyme is what occurs between two words
like tickle and pickle. They are perfect rhymes because the final stressed
vowel sound and all the sounds afterwards are identical.
Identical doesn't rhyme with pickle, because even though they both
end with 'ickle', identical has it stress in the wrong place.
We could rhyme them if we pronounced it not identical
but instead identical. With that in mind,
orange does have perfect rhymes. They just happen to be extremely obscure,
like 'Blorenge', a hill in Wales.
Silver also has a perfect rhyme: chilver, a female lamb.
Think Fact delineated even more words we often say don't have rhymes but
actually do. Point is, orange does have
perfect rhymes, and even if it didn't, well,
that wouldn't make it special. Sure, monosyllabic words
tend to rhyme with other words. It's believed there are only about 100 single syllable
words that have no rhyme.
For instance, wolf, sixth, depth and filmed.
But considering words of all lengths,
it's been calculated that most English words
don't rhyme with anything. Don't believe me?
Well, leave a comment below. The word 'comment'
rhymes with nothing, nor does husband, sandwich,
liquid, penguin, chimney, empty,
and, of course, 'nothing' rhymes with nothing.
Identical rhymes are even more perfect
than perfect rhymes but they become so identical at that point
it's a little obvious and not really appreciated.
Identical rhymes occur when the consonant sound before the final stressed vowel
between two words are also identical.
Sun and gun are perfect rhymes. But gun
and begun are identical rhymes. So are
offend and defend, or homonyms like
son and sun. You could call the people who watch over, and monitor, the police
'the police police'. Who watches over them? Well,
'the police police police', of course. You can string together
any number of police's and always create a sensible,
though clunky, title. You can even use
the word police by itself to create a grammatical sentence. It takes
eight of them. Police police police police police police police
police. Here's what the sentence means. Police police,
which police police police watch over, police police.
Add any multiple of three more police to this stream
and you preserve the grammar. The most that fit on Twitter
is 20. If you say police enough times it starts to sound like its not even a
real word.
That is called jamais vu, the reverse of deja vu,
when something familiar all of a sudden feels new
and novel. I've covered it before but let's be clear.
If you don't practice obediency to the police
you may wind up in J L. Escape, and you're an SKP.
Letters, whose names said together some similar to words,
are called Gramograms. You can't hear
a pterodactyl urinate because it's silent 'p'.
But every letter in the alphabet is silent sometimes.
And some letters are used more frequently than other letters
in English words. Scrabble provides more of those letters and people guess them more
often when playing hangman. Next time you play hangman you can take advantage of this.
People will guess more letters incorrectly if you choose a short word
that has few different letters. John McLuhan
ran 15 million computer simulations of hangman
and he found that the most difficult word for people to guess
is jazz.
Phantonyms aren't ghostly undead words, they're words that appear to mean one thing but
actually mean something completely different.
Enervate sounds like it means to fill with energy but it actually means to
drain of energy, to weaken.
Noisome appears to mean really noisy but it actually describes something that has an
extremely offensive smell.
In 2005, the New Oxford American Dictionary published a new word:
esquivalience.
They said it meant the wilful avoidance of one's official responsibilities.
But it didn't. They made it up
as a copyright trap. If anyone copied their dictionary
the stealer wouldn't be able to explain how esquivalience wound up in their dictionary
without admitting that they had copied it. Map makers often insert fake
features for the same purposes. Streets and towns that only exist
to trap copiers that only exist on paper,
Paper Streets & Paper Towns. The author of The Trivia encyclopedia even placed a fake fact
in one of his books because he was certain
that the Trivial Pursuit board game was taking their questions
from his book. Sure enough, later the board game included his fake fact
as a real question. Similarly, the esquivalinece trap was used to catch
Dictionary.com.
But here's the thing: authorities don't tend to respect copyright traps
built out of fake facts.
Facts cannot be copyrighted. They belong to, and can be used by,
all of us. US federal courts have argued that
fake facts presented as real are not protected, because if they were,
no one could share real true information without fear
of sharing something protected by copyright. That said,
stylistic decisions like how the facts are selected or arranged or articulated
can be copyrighted. When the automobile association was caught mimicking
the stylistic features of ordnance surveys, they were forced to pay up
twenty million pounds.
You cannot own a fact
and you cannot own a lie you made up, if everyone believes it.
But you can own how you tell them.
Puns are great, and in 'The Pun Also Rises'
John Pollock relates a fantastic story. Puns can be traced
all the way back to be epic of Gilgamesh, where people are warned
of an upcoming giant flood. They are told that the skies will soon rain
kibtu and kukku. Words that mean
corn and the sound corn makes when falling on the ground.
But in the story, the words are actually puns
on words for misery and suffering.
People who got the pun prepared and saved their own lives,
but those who failed to recognise the pun perished in the flood,
which means the very oldest pun on record
was literally corny. Is that ironic?
No. Irony is one of the most
debated figures of speech. The Oatmeal[.com] famously lamented that if anyone refers
to anything as being
ironic, the hip thing to do right now is to call it out as being not ironic.
Situational irony is what we tend to mean when we say something is ironic.
The Oatmeal defines it as "when something happens and a reversal of expectations occurs".
Dig.com's recent article on the subject uses an even stricter definition,
saying "situational irony is a direct result of an
action intended to produce the opposite effect".
Their example is really good. If the elevators
at in elevator repair school are out of order,
that's not really situational irony. Instead,
what would be really ironic is that if the elevators were out of order because the
experts at the school had done something to them
they believed would make them run forever and never be
out of order. Alanis Morissette wrote a song called
'Ironic', whose lyrics contain situations but
famously no situational irony.
People love pointing this out.
"A traffic jam when you're already late." Not situational irony,
that's just a bummer or a sad coincidence. Patrick Cassels cleverly
rewrote the song's lyrics to contain situations that are actually
situationally ironic. For example, a traffic jam
when you're already late to receive an award from the municipal planning board
for reducing the city's automobile congestion
eighty percent, or a black fly in your chardonnay
poured to celebrate the successful fumigation of your recently purchased vineyard in southern France.
Now that's what I call situational irony.
But regardless of what Alanis intended,
a close reading of the song's lyrics reveals that irony
is occurring, just not the situational kind it's hip to argue about.
Instead, her song is all about dramatic irony.
When someone is, often hilariously,
unaware of the significance of an event, while other people are.
Take a look at the lyrics for 'Ironic'. The situations she describes are never
explicitly labeled
ironic. At the most, they're simply stories and similes and metaphors for it:
life.
And, she adds later, life is also
ironic. Dramatically ironic. These things sound like cruddy scenarios, but they
actually figure, they actually make sense.
Ironic is not a list of examples of situational irony.
Instead, it's a treatise on dramatic irony,
the difference between what life knows we need
and what we think we need.
What's ironic isn't 10,000 spoons when all you need is at knife. It's the fact that,
as Alanis believes, you have all of those spoons,
because unbeknownst to you, but known by life, what you really need right now
is only spoons. Or, the last thing you need right now is a knife.
On the subject of overanalysing pop songs,
analysis of dog mitochondrial DNA has revealed that
all dogs may be traceable to a localised event.
The species is believed to have resulted from the domestication of
wolves about 11,000 to 16,000 years ago,
in what is now Southwestern China.
So, Baha Men, to answer your question, it was the Mesolithic Southwestern Chinese
who let the dogs out.
And as always,
thanks for watching