So, timesout, huh? This is strange because we typically cannot pluralize the first constituent in a compound. Take, for example, doghouse. I don’t know anyone, or any reference, that has said dogshouse (cf. doghouses) is grammatical or even meaningful for that matter. Sure, you can refer to a dog’s house, but that is not the same as the compound structure doghouse which has a head and a complement. Or if you’re inclined to say that doghouse is a transparent compound and therefore transparency plays a role in pluralization, we can take the example honeymoon. Here, too, we cannot say honeysmoon, bur rather honeymoons. So, it does not appear as if transparency has any role whatsoever in this process of pluralization.

So why the timesout? It’s a great question but also interesting regarding the circumstances in which it was said, now that I think back to the moments it was uttered. The announcer was not referring to multiple timeouts being taken, or the wish for multiple timeouts to be taken. No. Instead, he was just referring to a single timeout (something to the effect of, “…he should have called a timesout at that point…“). So the fact that he was even considering a pluralized form is beyond me.

The interesting part in this is that it shows we think, and possibly compute, words morphemically and not as whole-word chunks, especially English compounds. If this were false, then we would not make such mistakes because, in compounds, there would essentially not be any “parts” to be considered; the theory, then, would hold that compounds are monomorphemic elements/constituents in our language.

Edit: Someone in an online thread was trying to make the argument that timesout is indeed grammatical because we can, and apparently do, say runs batted in. Clearly this is an error in judgment. Here they are literally comparing apples to oranges. We cannot compare compound structures to phrases. Once again, as noted above, that’s like saying dog’s house. Yes, it’s a real thing and it’s grammatical, but it’s not comparable because we’re not talking about the same thing. If we want to pluralize a doghouse, then with the logic put forth by that person, we should clearly be able to say, *I painted the dogshouse today (cf. I painted the two, or more, houses that the dogs reside in), and it’s clearly ungrammatical for that intended meaning. Or, for that matter, we should be able to say, *During the game, team X called 4 timesout.

The scenario: the screen is split in four and shows four underarms putting on deodorant. All four views shift the photo to landscape and the underarm becomes animated. The first is said to be fresh. The second is said to be fresher. The third is, of course, the freshest. Here’s where it gets interesting. The fourth is said to be freshershest. Now, let me say that this is what I heard. I’ve only seen this commercial one time. I believe I heard correctly, but I will pay closer attention next time the commercial airs. Anyway…

I find the process of forming a “super-superlative” quite interesting. First thing that strikes me is that to do so, they would return the form to its -er form, add -sh, and then the superlative -est. Two questions: (i) why go back to the -er form, and (ii) what is this -sh form?

It appears that their logic went something like this: since we had the form freshest, to add another superlative level to it, why not add -er? We do not want to reduplicate -est because it will just sound silly and not “cute enough” for television (freshestest). But where can we add this -er suffix? Freshester? No. It seems like meaning would be taken away in this form. So it must be infixed in the word. But where and how? Let’s create fresher again and try removing the boundary of the two morphemes fresh and -est, namely -shest. This, then, gives us freshershest. The question still remains, though: why this boundary? What is it about this form rather than, say, freshester. My guess is that is has to do with the prosody of the latter when compared with the former. The former, somehow, sounds more likely to fit like real words that exist (e.g., freshest).

Okay, sure, people will say it means, I need this paper immediately! And that is reasonable, sure. I don’t disagree with that. But Where in APAP (As Soon As Possible) is the immediacy stressed? This is an honest question, folks. I just don’t see it.

If I were to do something for a professor and they tell me, Do this as good as you possibly can, what does that mean? It means that, to the absolute best of your ability, you should perform the said task. How do we know that? Because the sentence states it should be done as good as I can. That, to me, means that that statement is subjective and limited to the hearer’s abilities. So if I were to do something as best as I possibly can will almost certainly be different than someone else’s “as best as you can.”

So, what’s different about As Soon As Possible? As far as I see it, nothing. It’s still limited to the hearer’s abilities. To the hearer, it means they should take into consideration matters such as their current schedule. If their schedule permits them to finish the ASAP request immediately, then immediately it is. If not, then the ASAP request will wait until it’s possible (after all, the request is essentially, Do X for me at your earliest convenience). If my earliest possible time available is not until three days from the request, then I’m sorry, the request will have to wait three days. Again, there’s nothing in the request that states any immediacy whatsoever.

The argument some people give is that it’s pragmatic. We just know that ASAP means Do X for me right this instant. Then there are certain requests like, Get in my office, ASAP! That request, usually in an angry tone, stresses immediacy not in its structure, but tone. Moreover, I think it’s used in correctly. The person requesting should say, Get in my office immediately! if they want to stress importance or immediacy. So I don’t think it’s as much pragmatic as much as it is incorrect usage of ASAP.

One of the myths being tested was that ginger can prevent motion sickness.  The way they go about testing their hypotheses is relatively satisfactory (i.e., a control group and an experimental group), but this one had one huge glitch.

When testing, they properly gave some participants a placebo, which is great, ergo preventing false positives.  When the teacup ride was over (8 minutes, I believe), the group that had taken the ginger pills were not as sick as when they performed the control (where no one had taken anything).  The conclusion: taking ginger before motion-related events does indeed prove helpful and will make you less sick.  Not quite…

What they failed to do was test other spices and/or other perennial plants (I can’t say for certain which ones as I’m not very familiar with its similar species aside from what’s listed in the Wikipedia entry).  All they had done on the show is prove that ginger could potentially help with nausea produced by motion sickness, but it wasn’t conclusive that ginger is indeed the main factor in attenuating the nausea.  In my opinion, this is a huge flaw in the show’s scientific reasoning.  

Similarly, in my thesis, I must prove that complex morphological decomposition does occur and that the effects are not due to semantics (e.g., deduction-deduct), morphologically apparent words (e.g., hideous-hide), or orthographic overlap (e.g., brothel-broth).  I must use such conditions or else my results cannot be conclusive.  I cannot just, say, use morphologically complex words (e.g., stupidity-stupid) and a non-related control (e.g., pepper-friend) and conclude that complex morphological decomposition does indeed occur in early stages of lexical access/processing.  

Not only would this be silly of me and my claim, I would look like a fool.  But I suppose if it’s good enough to be on television, people must believe it.

This stems from a recent prescriptivist blog I accidentally came across: language and grammar.  This guy (Paul, I presume) has this idea that wanna speakers are lazy and that

Wanna isn’t a word; it’s a verbal laziness, same as the non-wordgonna. It started as only a spoken error,…

I need clarification of what “being a word” means.  Is it in the dictionary (and I’m referring to a REAL dictionary, i.e., Oxford English Dictionary)?  A quick look tells me it is (NOTE: a quick Google search on both words, wanna and gonna, both reveal an average of 222,500,000 hits  Moreover, when you do the search, there is a link at the top that allows you to go to a definition.  Go figure).  So, I guess we can scratch that out.  Is it spoken and understood by more people than just your local friends?  Seems to me to be the case.  Can we produce some awkward sentences with this “word”?  Yes sir we can.  

1. Who do you want to feed the dog?
2. *Who do you wanna feed the dog?
3. I’m going to New York.
4. *I’m gonna New York.

These examples show we know something inherent about this word and its usage possibilities.  It’s not so “haphazard” and/or “lazy”, as Paul (and many other prescriptivists out there!) seems to suggest.  

Prescriptivists will stick by their decisions because they claim they’re “saving our language.”  From what?  Furthermore, I don’t care what they claim because the most annoying thing about them (yes, I’m referring to ALL of you) is the following: I will bet every penny I have and all of my possessions that if you were to follow a prescriptivist all day–and I mean you are right there next to him/her listening to every word from sun up to sun down–they will say MANY constructions that they are so vehemently against.  Why do you think that is?  Simple.  Because language is so engrained in us that we use it without thinking back to what we “learned” (I’m using this term VERY loosely) in Freshman English class.  We have such a vast knowledge of language that it requires no thinking.  And when I say we “know” a language, I’m referring to everything about a language–the semantics, phonology, syntax, et cetera.  And for those who know anything about linguistics will know that reasons for constructions such as wanna and gonna are hugely phonological in reason.

One last thing.  On the matter of “laziness,” why does the author use other contractions such as isn’t, it’s we’re?  Oh, let me take a guess: because they’re words!  And maybe because they use an apostrophe?  :-)

Define “word”.

Anyway, I’d like to start posting here more often in order for me to get out some ideas (or other psycho-neurolinguistic matters).  My interests have slightly changed since my last post almost a year-and-a-half ago.  I’m much more into (English) lexical processing now.  So I now do things like masked priming studies (psycholinguistics) and EEG experiments (neuro).  My thesis will be on the decomposition of morphologically complex words in English, primarily productive and unproductive suffixes.  I’d like to post more of this soon.

I hope to get some feedback from anyone on this topic either now or when I start posting some topics.  It will help to clear out my thoughts.  :-)

The real phraseology of that should have been that a woman has many more communication events a day — gestures, words, raising of your eyebrows.

I think it’s a pretty weak Q & A session, but that’s just me and my criticalness towards this matter. But what they hey…we’re all entitled to our opinions, whether ignorant or not. She’s very opinionated, so I, too, will be opinionated (after all, two wrongs may not make a right, but it makes you feel better). Personally, I don’t like her looks. But I sometimes judge arrogance on looks. She could be the identical twin to a philosophy professor I once knew. She, too, was arrogant. But this is not the issue at hand. I just thought I’d give my two-cents worth of opinions.

n*****as
n*******as
n***as
n****as

(yes, they are all the same word. The only question is which one is which?)

I am always annoyed by this. Maybe it’s a virus…

These degrees are supervised by Professor X, and result in a written research thesis of around 80,000 words.

Wow. 80,000 words? Okay, so that’s roughly 320 pp, so why couldn’t they say 320 pp? In this publications defense, it is from the UK. But then that makes me wonder about the way they perceive not just situations differently from the way we do here in the states, but the way that advanced degree programs are perceived. Personally, I think this is torture only because it’s harder to look at and absorb such a large number. Would you rather hear 80,000 or 320? I would choose 320. But that’s just me.

It is true that we have to keep in mind that although 80,000 is large, it is measured in words, as opposed to pages. There’s a difference. Conceptually, a page (or pages, whatever) is larger than, say, a word, since words are the things that fit onto a page. So something seems to happen when we say 320 pages as opposed to 80,000 words. Something in our mind neutralizes these numbers and they somehow become one-of-the-same. My guess is that it happens because since the concept itself is large and that includes a small(er) number,  it becomes of the same level with 80,000 since that large number is part of a small measuring unit (words per page).

So does this mean that concepts are scarier than the words? Or is it that they are the same? Do they play off of each other? Neutralize each other?

Weird. Maybe someone knows something about this.