1025: They Sep 29, 2017

The pronoun 'they' has a few different uses. In addition to the standard usage as a third-person plural pronoun, there is also the somewhat 'singular they' which stands in for the arguably more cumbersome "he or she" and any other declensions thereof in constructions like "if someone is hungry, he or she should eat" or "...they should eat". This is especially disliked by prescriptivists, but it is perfectly understandable, and has been present in English for a long time. Also, some people elect to be called 'they' individually, so this usage is also more inclusive. The pronoun, however, has taken on an even more hypothetical role than just being a substitute for "he or she", and people use it in hypothetical statements, or ones relating to the future, such as in this quote taken from the Twitter account of Solomon Georgio, "you think getting friend zoned is bad, imagine your creepy male friend thinking you owe them something" in which "them" stands in for a singular, but that singular has been specified as 'male'. If you have other examples of this or any other usage, feel free to include them in a comment.

1024: knuckle down Sep 28, 2017

Because language has to rely on multiple people understanding the same references, one of the best way to create new words and phrases is to draw from things many people know. This happens with kennings that draw from mythology, and sometimes jargon, which initially only has meaning for those with a specific occupation, makes its way into common lexicon. The phrase "knuckle down" meaning to apply oneself to a task draws from the game of marbles. In that game, which was once very popular, putting ones knuckles on the taw could help make a better shot.

1023: Wh- Questions Sep 27, 2017

English has several pronouns—'who', 'what', 'where', 'when', 'why' 'which' etc.—that all introduce the same sorts of clauses, and all begin with the same two letters when spelt. They go by some different names including "'wh-' questions", and introduce both questions, and relative clauses. Some people also classify 'how' as a 'wh-' question, because it has the same functions as all of the rest. And while 'how' does not start with the initial 'wh-' and is not pronounced with a /w/ like 'what' or 'which', 'who' is pronounced with an /h/ like 'how, even though it retains the spelling.

1022: Adjectives as Submodifiers Sep 25, 2017

Affixes are a valuable and often necessary way to indicate syntax in a word, but depending upon context and convention, they aren't always obligatory. Suffixes such as '-ly' or '-y' that can indicate that a noun or an adjective become an adjective or an adverb respectively are often dropped off from certain words, especially in certain dialects. For instance, the word 'real' is an adjective more often than it is an adverb, but in the sentence "that's real funny" it acts as a submodifier. There is no reason that any word must necessarily be one part of speech for another, so while it may not be as formal for certain occasions or certain written pieces, it is understandable to native speakers.

1021: x-mas Sep 25, 2017

People use plenty of abbreviations, initialisms, and acronyms, but almost always these will take the beginning letter or letters of a word, without changing them. 'Christmas' however is often, informally written as 'x-mas' which neither sounds much like nor is spelt as the beginning of the original word. Instead, the X represents the Greek letter chi, which in lower case looks like χ. This letter actually does act as the initial, but it comes from the Greek word 'χρῑστός' ('Khristos') meaning ‘Christ’. There are indeed a lot English words for Christian terms, often coming from the Septuagint.

1020: Mucosa Sep 24, 2017

There is somewhat of a stereotype that opera singers are larger than average. Though generalizations like these are often unfounded, David Drexler et al. from the University of Iowa found that a certain amount of fat on the vocal cords can help a singer sound better. A mucosa on the vocal chords softens the impact when they come together, but extra amounts can improve the quality of sound. It was also found that the mucosa can add more vibrational energy to air as it is exhaled, which also allows opera singers to perform better. There are many other factors that come into this as well, and it is not at all the case that all opera singers are overweight at all, but having extra fat in general could mean there is some extra fat on the mucosa. Also, sometimes when one has scarring on the throat, surgeons can inject more fat onto the larynx for this same reason.

1019: Physical Adaptations for Speech Sep 23, 2017

Though other species do have the ability to communicate in a number of different ways, none have as sophisticated a method as human speech. This is for a number of biological reasons, including the fact that humans have such large brains, but quite importantly as well, we have a nerve in the brain that allows for much more control over the tongue as compared to other animals, and also, about 60,000 years ago, the hyoid developed which can better support the larynx, used for creating sounds. This all together allows the wide range of sounds that can be recreated that humans use, but unfortunately due to the configuration of the glottis and other parts of the throat, humans are much more likely—up to ten times more likely than other primates—to choke. Whether or not you think that is a fair trade-off, you'll still be able to voice your opinions due to a series of biological adaptations within the last few hundred-thousand years.

1018: Reproducing Interrogatives Sep 22, 2017

Though somewhat controversial, it can be said with reasonable certainty that children acquire language from studying and reproducing what they hear around them. Partly this is a matter of memorization; being able to associate a collection of sounds with an idea is how words are used, but also children will follow patterns that they feel they understand, sometimes too much as seen by adults. The sentence "I holded it" rather than "I held it" is ungrammatical but is arguably more sensible than the alternative. It would perhaps appear reasonable to assume that it is common for children to follow every pattern they observe, such as placing a verb before the subject nominal phrase makes a question, like "the man is painting" versus "is the man painting?". Nevertheless, it has been shown that children do not make errors in following this blindly, as would happen with "the man who is painting is happy" becoming something like "is the man who painting is happy?". This idea was proposed by Chomsky as one of many explanations as to why grammar must be innate, but the issue with his point is that children are not producing sentences like that because, among other reasons, children would not be exposed to a ungrammatical interrogative such as that one. Unlike 'holded' which is one of a few exceptions to a very basic pattern, "is the man who painting is happy?" is not a lexical issue, but a systematic issue that is more complex, and would never be presented to children to mimic anyway.

1017: £ Sep 21, 2017

The symbols for the currencies euro, €, ruble, ₱, won, ₩, and the yen and yuan, ¥, and many others including the no longer used Dutch florin, ƒ, are all at least partially based upon the first letter for the name of the currency, though the euro is also said to be from the Greek lunate epsilon, ϵ, as Greece is said to be the cradle of European civilization. Still, the dollar-sign, $ and the pound-sign, £—though the symbols are not arbitrary—do not appear as obvious necessarily. The £ comes from the first letter of the name for the currency as many others do, but in this case the name is from Latin, not the native language. The Latin word for 'pound', as in a weight or balance, was 'libra', related to other words from Romance languages like the French 'livre' of the same meaning, as well as the source of the abbreviation 'lb.' for pounds when referring to weight.

1016: Omitting Redundant Words Sep 20, 2017

Though in general people rely on numerous grammatical and lexical conventions in order to understand what is being said, people are also very good at supplying information on their own that is left out. For instance, if someone were to say "I have coffee before work", it is understood that there is an implied '...starts' after 'work', or "...going to..." before 'work', or something such as that. Even though 'work' is not a time in the way that 'Tuesday' only relates to dates, people can assume from context or from habit what the intention would be. This also happens because of grammar, quite often. Sometimes, if the verb is obvious—perhaps within a relative clause when the verb was already supplied—it will simply be omitted from speech, to little or no confusion on the part of the listener. In some languages or dialects, the verb 'to be' used existentially will be left out because it is sensible given the context. Speakers of both Latin (when it was spoken) and African American English would leave out the existential 'to be' because in constructions such as "he is smart", the verb is obvious enough to be unnecessary, making "he smart" just as understandable, and more efficient to say. In other languages where the subject is indicated by the verb like in Latin, subjects like 'I' will often be omitted because it would be redundant (to say).

1015: "OCD Enough": Illogical Connotations (LITW 1) Sep 19, 2017

The purpose of language is—at its core—to convey an idea, being an image, a command, or whatever, to someone else. That means that while people tend to follow certain conventions—abiding by general definitions for words, and using grammar that is accepted by many—not everything said has to be entirely logical. Looking at initialisms, one can see that people tend to follow grammatical conventions with the (perhaps subconscious) notion that the initialism was its own word, at least in terms of conjugations, but even more basically one could notice that certain initialisms take on a meaning of their own, despite the lack of sense that would come of saying what each letter stands individually within the given context. For instance, the phrase "OCD enough" as in "I'm still OCD enough to correct myself" conveys the idea of extreme obsessive behavior, but saying *"I am obsessive compulsive disorder enough..." does not make sense; one would say "obsessively compulsive" or simply "obsessive" (or any other adjective) in that case. It is only because people already carry connotations to the word 'OCD' that it can be used so freely; at its most basic, arguably, language is simply about being able to call shared connotations to mind. If you want to see more examples of "OCD enough", there is a link to an advanced Twitter search here.

1014: runcible spoons: New Etymologies Sep 18, 2017

Etymologists are able to do a lot of work in tracing back the roots of a word, sometimes thousands of years. Indeed, it is in certain ways more difficult to find the etymology of newer words for a few reasons. First, while some words that are invented recently will draw from other languages like Latin or Greek, at other times it can be unclear where something was drawn from. Second, because etymology relies a great deal on looking at related words, either in the same language or other ones, without much time to study them, there isn't as much information for experts to use. There are also a few problems caused by the word not having as many uses in text on account of its not existing for a long, but even with words from the 19th century like 'runcible' as in 'runcible spoon' it can be difficult to agree on one etymology. One theory is that the word, coined by Edward Lear, comes from the much earlier word 'rouncival' that denotes a variety of pea, which could possibly explain why there is no word 'runce' to which the suffix '-able' would be attached, but it is also quite possible that the word was just made up to sound silly.

1013: Syntactic Ambiguity: Present Participles Sep 17, 2017

English syntax, with the exception of a few pronouns, relies on word-order to provide syntax. Most of the time this is fine for both speaker and listener, but in addition to confusion that arise from relying on prepositions carrying multiple senses, and therefore provide two different surface structures such as in "she hit the man with flowers", the fluidity of English lexical classes and participles can lead to clauses that are syntactically ambiguous. For instance, the sentence "visiting relatives can be boring" has two possible meanings, because 'visiting' could be a present participle, for which someone could substitute 'to visit', but also could act adjectivally, modifying 'relatives'. In speech the distinction is usually made with tone, but there is no guarantee of that this will happen; in writing, there is no way to get around this issue in that example except by opting for different words, even were someone to try to use punctuation.

1012: disheveled Sep 16, 2017

Generally, affixes do not change the sound of the words to which they are bound, though sometimes the affixes will change in order to be easier to pronounce, such as 'in-' becoming 'im-' in 'impossible'. Therefore, words that take the prefix 'dis-' do not change, as is the case with 'dishonest' from 'honest' being pronounced with an /s/, even though normally in English orthography, 'sh' represents the sound /ʃ/ as in 'shoe'. Nevertheless, 'disheveled', which does have the historical 'dis-' prefix', has the '-sh-' pronounced as /ʃ/. This is because, not only is there not a Modern English word 'heveled', but also the word from which 'disheveled' originates was already pronounced with the /ʃ/: the Old French 'chevel' meaning 'hair'.  Initially, the sense that the word carried was 'having loose or uncovered hair', but because of what people associated with that idea, it eventually came to mean 'disorderly' or 'messy'.

1011: Semantic Bleaching Sep 15, 2017

Semantic bleaching, also known as semantic reduction or semantic loss, is the name for the loss of certain meaning of a word totally, such that it becomes unspecific or merely intensifying etc. This happens in words like 'awful' or 'terrific' which no longer retain at least one of their original meanings. There is no way to predict when or how this will happen, but in those two cases this process occurred because people exaggerated the initial senses of those words, and then the hyperbolic use became more generic. This happens too when people use curses emphatically, such as 'crap' or 'shit' in the invented example "I bought a new house but now I have to move all of my crap/shit". This also happens in phrases like 'have got' in 'have got (to)' or arguably 'how' in 'how are you' which do not carry much if any meaning when considered in isolation. This is not the same, however, as semantic change, as happened to words like 'nice' which describes when a word changes meanings, possibly losing the initial sense, but still has a specific definition.

1010: metathesis Sep 14, 2017

Most of the time, when an affix is added to a word, the root word is pronounced the same way. Occasionally, the presence of one sound will influence another, which is why the prefix 'in-' becomes 'il-' in 'illegal', but these changes are fairly predictable and consistent. Other times, the individual sounds of a word will not change, but may shift somewhat due to certain influences. For instance, 'comfort' is usually pronounced /kəmfɚt/ in Standard American English, but despite the spelling, most people with the same accent would pronounce 'comfortable' with the sound represented with R following the sound represented by T, /kəmftɚbəl/. There are a few reasons that this process, known as 'metathesis', occurs, including mishearing the word, but in this case the cause is likely that it is physically easier to say the word as /kəmftɚbəl/, which reduces the number of syllables, and also requires less movement by the tongue. Other metathesized words include 'ask' as /æks/, which has occurred for at least a thousand years in different dialects, and 'pretty' as /pɚdi/ present in Southern American English, with the first vowel shifting towards the front. If you know any yourselves, write a comment.

1009: Chinese Languages Sep 13, 2017

The study of modern language, when done properly, follows the same procedures as the study scientific subjects. Nevertheless, as has been discussed here before, certain conventions are somewhat political rather than purely scientific. 'Chinese', for example, is an incredibly broad term that can often be misleading. Though usually it refers to Mandarin when people use the term casually, depending on the situation, there are other varieties of Chinese that are quite different to it, in the same way that the Romance languages are in many ways similar, but are still distinct. Cantonese, for instance, has six tones while Mandarin has four, and both of those have their own dialects that differ even more. Generally, it is accepted that there are seven varieties of Chinese, but because most people do not call them languages, it can be difficult to describe them, along with their own separate dialects. All varieties of Chinese use not only the same writing system, but while words in Spanish and Italian, (or any two other related languages) will often be written differently in their native languages whether they sound the same or not, even when two words in Mandarin and Cantonese mean the same thing but are pronounced differently, they will be written with the same character, making the varieties appear more similar on the surface. Also, it is politically beneficial for some to consider all of the varieties to be the same language to reinforce a sense of unity, but that issue is beyond the scope of this blog.

1008: Inconsistent Diacritics Sep 12, 2017

Even when the denotation of sound is standardized universally, as with the International Phonetic Association (IPA), all of the orthographical conventions are fundamentally arbitrary. While certainly more regular than English's spelling rules, there is, for example, no phonological reason that nasalized vowels in IPA are written with a tilde, such as with /õ/ as in the French 'bon' while the nasalized versions of the consonants /b/ and /d/ are written as /m/ and /n/ respectively. Therefore, it should be no surprise that anything used in the standard writing of one language would not  necessarily denote the same thing in another. In German orthography for instance, an umlaut indicates a different pronunciation of a vowel than without it, however in French orthography the umlaut, or 'accent tréma', is used to indicate that two vowels written next to each other are to be pronounced independently, like in 'naïve'. There are not any diacritical marks used in English orthography, but occasionally some practices are borrows from other languages; most often this appears in words adopted from other languages, like 'doppelgänger' from German or 'naïveté' from French. In fairly rare cases however, an umlaut will be placed over a vowel in order to accomplish the same effect as in French, such as in the variant spelling of 'reëmphasize'.

1007: Augmentatives Sep 11, 2017

There are a number of English words that have endings like '-et' which historically were diminutive suffixes from other languages, but English does not use these sorts of suffixes anymore, and instead just use adjectives for the most part. Modern English also does not really use augmentative suffixes, which, opposite to diminutives, indicate an increased size of something, even though other languages like Italian have plenty. Instead, English has a few augmentative prefixes, such as 'over-' as in 'overlord', 'mega-' as in 'megachurch', or 'arch-' as in 'archenemy' which can carry the sense of 'physically large' but also just intensify whatever they are bound to. These prefixes, also including 'super-' and 'grand-', are fairly common in certain words, like those mentioned before, but they can be added fairly freely to new ones; if you know any contemporary examples, write a comment. Indeed, so long as someone is able to think the noun by itself, one can add one of these prefixes to invent a new term. There are also a few new augmentative affixes; the prefix 'über-' was adopted from German in the 1990's, and some have even said that the suffix '-zilla' from 'Godzilla', now found in words like 'bridezilla', demonstrates monstrousness and is an augmentative affix.

1006: Indication of Gender (g.w. 7) Sep 10, 2017

Only nouns have grammatical gender, insofar as adjectives, articles, and pronouns are either modified or selected in order to agree with the nouns they modify. Not all genders have to be distinct from each other in every word however; in German, masculine and neuter forms for possessive pronouns are often identical, and there are only two Dutch articles: one for neuter, 'het', and a common form for masculine and feminine words, 'de'. So long as there is a fairly consistent manner in which words are distinguished in such as way, however, grammatical gender can be said to exist. If people stopped using different forms for adjectives, articles, and pronouns to modify nouns with which they agree, there would be no gender, because, though the gender is determined by the noun, it is indicated by those other aforementioned lexical classes. It is partly for this reason that certain languages will include articles where there would not be one in English, which has no grammatical gender. For instance, there is no article used for unspecified referents, meaning that "cats are smart" and "the cats are smart" convey two different messages, the latter of which would only refer to cats that had been previously identified. The same sentence in Spanish however, "los gatos son inteligentes", uses an article to show the gender, but does not refer to preciously specified, in this case, cats.

This is the last day of Word Facts' Gender Week, and though there may still be posts concerning grammatical gender in the future, if you have any remaining questions, please write a comment or send a message.