OK, so how's this for April Fools. We'd need about 5 or 6 people to be in on it. We make up a non-existent but plausible sounding English word. Then everyone who's in on it asks different questions at different times about how it should be used, or whether they're using it correctly. We could all answer each other's questions too, quote all sorts of dictionaries supporting our usages.
The only condition would have to be that Reg Dwight is not one of the ones who knows about it.
Right. The Central Canterbury School of Hectourial Journalism, where your friend was a professor, was completely wiped out in the earthquake; as was all trace of its ever having existed.
Umm, could you ask what the abstract noun form of "hectourial" is, like whether to say hectourialness or hectouriality. Then I could point out that outside of the S.I., it's spelt "hectorial". Then I'll launch a tirade on the esoteric distinction between hectorialness and hectoriality, which you can contradict.
Or better still, I'll say that "hectorial" is the only correct spelling, so that you can tell me about your journalist friend who perished in the earthquake.
I would fail dismally at doing that. I'm useless at photoshop. A corpus might be hard to fake, because whatever we call it, somebody would google it and discover that it doesn't exist.
I also have to leave now. I'll most likely be back in about 90 minutes. If I find a question from Marjory when I return, I shall answer it appropriately.
My second cousin from abroad says people in New Zealand sometimes use the word sushi to refer to women. She was not sure which part of the country. Perhaps it was near the border with Australia? If this word is used, where? And why sushi? I haven't been to NZ since the seventies.
Thank you,
Marj...
I've heard it said that most utterances we encounter on a day-to-day basis are novel. My intuition is that the source of this productivity mostly comes from which words we slot into the grammatical categories, not from hearing syntactic sequences we've never heard before (novel trees). Is this ...
@Gigili No, it is even better with your blatantly lying about voting in the comment, extra funny.
By the way, someone posted a (rather obvious) joke question on Cooking, and the others were like, "uhmm this question is bad". And when they found out, "oooh, I don't think joke questions are allowed except on Meta".
We don't have a conscience—such thoughts never even occurred to us.
It has been great fun. But I have to go to bed now.
I've heard it said that most utterances we encounter on a day-to-day basis are novel. My intuition is that the source of this productivity mostly comes from which words we slot into the grammatical categories, not from hearing syntactic sequences we've never heard before (novel trees). Is this ...
