User:Soap

Short links

• English words by silent letter
• English words with unspelled phonemes
• words with repeated phonemes
• User:Lollipop is my alternate account, from which I often read, but rarely edit.
• User:Soap/etymsearch
• User:Soap/essays

Scratchpads

• User:Soap/vector.css
• User:Soap/Sandbox and User:Soap/scratchpad
• User:Soap/etymsearch for honest speculation about etymologies

cats

23:00, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Category:Autism Category:Mental_health Category:Health

none are appearing properly as of 23:00, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

quote-comic

The page User:Soap/quote-comic might work better if it were at Template:User:Soap/quote-comic following the pattern of some other sandbox templates.

Other information

I picked up the habit of using ... (ellipses) during a time when a smartphone was my main device, and i found the dash and parenthesis keys more difficult to type. I will try to break this habit as I worry it leads me to look like Im always rambling.

My alternate account is Lollipop. I use the Lollipop account to browse in bed on my tablet, phone, and occasionally on a touchscreen laptop, but rarely to edit.

Im currently trying to buttonize the UI as much as possible, though I admit it's somewhat counterintuitive when I go to edit because the buttons arent there in the code. I will do my best to make this work but if I have to scale it back I will save the CSS somewhere so I can restore it if I think of a new way to go forward.

I dont think too many other people will be interested in the code but see /vector.css if you're curious. There are actually many bugs and drawbacks (that is; things that can be fixed and things that can't be fixed), and so I'm almost sure nobody would want to use the code the way I have it now, but people might like to use bits and pieces of it. The most important drawback is the wasted space I see in discussions when people leave a blank line between paragraphs, because for me that means it outdents all the way to the leftmost margin and then indents all the way back in again. This could be fixed if I didn't use so much padding, but the padding is helpful with mainspace entries.

Unorganized short- and long-term projects in English

a hidden category: Category:Requests for definitions in English entries

temporary scratchpad

12:22, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

i wrote this when i was not feeling well, and put all these together. i will get to them eventually. Sorry I've cut back lately and this might linger for a while.

• antitrade Polish Wikipedia says it means literally above, but other sources imply it means higher latitude making it a sonym of westerlies
• soft play https://www.instagram.com/p/CnzSBhNIN0U/ and from the same artist, despite the different signature (i assume she changed her name?)
• hypopitys (move to full name) and pityopus
• find at least one use of self-stimulation in the sense of masturbation. see edit history before Nov 2 2023 for cites
• child prodigy why THUB? if declared sum of parts it c ould revert to a THUB later, but as it is, the sum-of-parts idea only works because we have a hint of child in one of the five definitions of prodigy.
• Category:English_orthographic_borrowings
• ckn is chicken. is chkn also used?
• tarb obedient (not a brat). Probably doesnt exist. My mother may have made it up, or maybe someone in her family made it up, but it's clearly not in widespread use
• defence not much activity on Tea Room thread, might expire with no action. THerefore I will get to this
• life stage possibly from German Lebensstufen, though this is a painting from 1835, not the psychology sense. Even so this might have been the same term used by Charlotte Bühler in 1933
• red sky at night
• nudy rudy ~ nudey rudey ~ nudie rudie. definitely citable

• I'm not going to climb the tree all nudy rudy! I'd probably get a scratch somewhere [...]
  (I dont remember the last word)

• microbe, aerobic, etc use a morpheme that is really just /b/, derived from βίος (bíos, “life”).
• zuke third cite at
• the Jp word for someone who wears shorts in cold weather. is on tea room, but now quite old
• postural ... can it mean "behind the tail"? or "after urination"? i found only one possible hit for the latter and even that is probably meant in the sense "lying down">
• iatrocide ... only example of -cide where the named party is the perpetrator and not the victim?

animal friendly proverbs

This is inspired by, but not restricted to, PETA's coinages. see more than one way to feed a cat and others

• feed two dogs with one bone, a similar spin on a familiar phrase, just like feed two birds with one scone

• but "kill two dogs with one bone" is more attestible in print. the feed version seems to be modern as we've become softer
• there is also an unrelated two dogs with one bone meaning "two people who can never agree" because they have something both parties want but neither can share. this is why i linked it that way

autism

autistics and cousins possibly used in 1993, by a researcher whose name is Cousins. But the terminology may not have been in the origina l paper

shy

15:42, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

bringing this back

call-shy, pee shy, camera shy, gun shy,. what else is there? this suggetss quite a few more

ametropia

00:03, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

Stabilize etymologies on ametropia and like pages. 4 etyms for the same word on one page now. See hypotropia and -tropia (“turning”) ... these form words for eye conditions that rhyme with the -opia words but do not actually use the suffix -opia. It's possible this is a sort of medical pun (since -tropy exists), but it is nevertheless etymologically sound.

in theory there is also -scopia but we seem to be satisfied ending words with -scope.

cyanopia and glaucopia might exist, and this is a separate meaning from the existing cyanopsia. thus, an -opia/-opsia minimal pair arguably exists, where -opsia refers to a medical condition and -opia to a physical type. But -opia can still be used for the medical meaning too.

there is no *scoptic to parallel optic, apparently because the corresponding ancient Greek verb forms did not exist. instead, the word is skeptic.

yet ANOTHER eye condition that sounds like it contains -opia but doesnt is ectropion and its opposite, entropion.

there is also -opsis, as in Lastreopsis, the shield fern.

pyrope

elementals

19:07, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Rollo Ahmed uses elemental and elementary in the same book. Are they the same thing or not?

spit

18:32, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

I could just spit / I could spit, a mild expression perhaps originally meant literally

metallic soap

02:51, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

w:metallic soap has much ifnormation and could be used for other wikt pages as well

as girls go

there is no convenient title for a redirect to go#beingeneral (this link doesnt work for some reason). "as something goes" is the best i can come up with but it's singular.

nohbdy

and find the original Gk

off

09:16, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

nothing about off-white etc listed at off that i can see. arguably off- could cover it but the defn currently isnt very helpful. ("away from white" would not mean light gray to most people)_

anything else

• 2000, Gregory James, Colporuḷ: A History of Tamil Dictionaries‎, page 12:

  The philologastry of these authors generally demonstrates unmotivated phonological changes to 'explain' that Tamil is the root of all languages.

• 1996, Space Cases‎:

  Rosie: I keep warning her not to over do her sonic practicing. She'll blow a vocal chord or something.
  Harlan Band: yeah, well that's one of the dangers when you're hooked on sonics.

• Dilbert Apr 17 1989 date oneself (a pun, containing the idiomatic and the literal sense together)

• spiteware only used on reddit & twttr

• for todge

hyperoptic listed as a misconstruction of hyperopic, when it might actually be a valid alternative form. There is no predictable pattern determining which words end in -opia ~ -opic and which end in -opsia ~ optic, and hyperopsia might be citable as well. (I actually thought the definition was going to be a misconstruction of fiber optic when I first clicked.)

-sman, really -s- + man. Seems used in formal terms for some occupations, but we have the -s- listed as genitive, when I suspect it's plural. This could perhaps be solved by just saying it's -s, not -s-.

big and little

 little boy  little girl  small boy  small girl

 little children  little kids  small children  small kids

surely the comparatives at little#Adjective can be handled better than this. Imagine:

 least boy

 littler heard

and so on.

 big boy  big kid  big child

 large boy  large kid  large child (unless taken literally)

Be the larger person.

Sicyoeae pron & etym if possible. likely Σικυών

Unorganized short- and long-term projects in other languages

very short term projects and other quick notices

• Fuzhou. address the question of whether an entry can have two Alternative forms sections. Remember {{alti}}

Apparently this is a known issue and there is no consensus

kennings

See Category:Old Norse names for Odin and note that one-word kennings might be better classified as heiti.

• These words have kenning somewhere mentioned on the page. However I did not do an exhaustive search as it would have been four times as many pages to click through:

  ofljóst daroþ súgr Friðþjófr svartalfar brjótr hrafn ~ramn hjaldr Beowulf dark elf ból

etymology qiestions

see User:Soap/etymsearch.

Old English

pæcan possibly a misreading of wægan. p ~ ƿ confusion happened also with the word "pail" (here). /p/ is uncommon in word-initial position in native OE words, and it looks like a native word due to its derivation and possible i-mutation.

Sigelhearwa a native name (not even a calque) for Ethiopia. If Ethiopia was already Christian, it would be odd to use this name, so perhaps it only appears in the Old Testament and could perhaps be better translated as Kush or some other name.

Spanish

• chorrear
• Category:Requests_for_translations_of_Spanish_quotations some are beyond my skill level so i will go slowly
• is Plasencia just Placentia all over again? The Wikipedia article stealthily avoids providing an etymology.

Other languages

Swahili /topi/

Funnily enough there is a Swahili /topi/ that means a type of hat. I want to add both of these entries but will hold off until i can understand the noun classes. Also noting that Swahili is a WDL.

Pöppel

A game piece ("doll"). Ready to create, but I dont know the declension and it isnt yet listed in de.wikt. I would need to find it in Duden or some other dictionary.

Sundanese

I made a large number of edits to Sundanese but didnt finish the project. They may be linked from a page such as Special:DeadendPages. I will finish this, but I dont consider it a priority since I'm mostly just adding wikilinks, and my original intent was to thin down the DeadendPages category so that the remaining pages, which might be there for diverse reasons, would stand out more.

tadpole

come back to this. remember mormoloc and Larve

Japanese 白板 add to /p/ list if ever restored

Talitha

• talitha <--- a real word?

peaches, pears, papaya, pineapples

try to find etymology of fi pipo and piippa. is the first one a proper name? is the second one sound symbolism? both are related to hats.

Yes, names of fruits often begin with p in English, with c/k right up beside it. This seems to hold true in Romanian too. Note the complete absence of /t/, the commonest voiceless stop in European languages (and probably worldwide too). The theory linking sweet tastes with the front of the tongue has been cast into doubt if not entirely debunked, but since babies learn to talk from the front of the mouth (lips) to the back, and develop tastes by starting with sweet foods and working towards savory foods and then complex tastes, the subconscious association may be real.

This would not explain the overrepresentation of /k/, so I think sound symbolism also plays a role. The well-known bouba/kiki effect might actually have been better described as bouba-titi since /k/ is a sound used often for large round objects (e.g. German Kugel) and thus fits well for fruits as well. The kiki word is meant to sound like a sharp object, but the only sharp parts of our anatomy are our fingernails and our teeth. The teeth are used in many languages to pronounce the /t/ sound, though English prefers to place the tip of the tongue slightly further back. The further back position actually sounds like a sharper sound to me, but it is still the same area of the mouth. So it may be that /p/ and /k/ are two of a kind whereas a fruit with /t/ would sound subconsciously something spiky and unpleasant to eat.

apple and apricot also begin with /p/ in English according to the "first consonant" system of counting, used in poetry, although i think this is intended to apply to situations in which the first syllable is unstressed. e.g. a phrase like a poignant apology alliterates because the listener hears the same stressed /p/ sound twice, but it doesnt really work, in my opinion, when the /p/ is post-tonic.

Malagasy

akoholahy is the word that came to us translated as "gall"

om zeep

20:08, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

see 肥皂

emojis and emoticons

The 😮 emoji is at least 200 years old, likely much older, perhaps 500.

fun things

idioms

Mastering English means knowing the difference between cream in one's coffee and cream in one's jeans.

chemistry puns

can you Zn of any more?

What a Si you were, hiding Eu under your C-net! You thought you Pb the Cu astray, but then you put your Ne the F Kr in silence to meet your Bi partners. I hope nobody Cs. Oops! Your just Pt both with your car! What an Fe-y! It was Xe television too. The doctors couldn't He or Cm and they'll never Lv. At least they didnt S too much. Now they Ar. Who will Ba?

limericks

maybe a Nash-style limerick or two for the ones that wont fit into the story.....

whatever wont fit elsewhere

A chemist turned dentist put a sign on the wall, "Can you please Pl?"

favorite words

scrambled senses

See /scrambled. My first addition to this page will probably be my best, so I may lose interest in this soon

interpretive etymologies

• Since soak is originally the causative of suck, does that mean soap is the causative of sup? If so, does that make soap a delicious meal?

Korean

Although it is well known that Korean is written in a featural syllabary, there are some pure ideographic words. For example, the word for soap is 석감, remembering the facial expressions of two people who believed the section above.

Malagasy

Try saying the Malagasy word for "brutal" as angrily as you can.

a wish called wəndə

While you've been sitting around, I've been busy reconstructing proto-Nostratic.

Abinomn wi is surely also a cognate, because although it is spoken in southeast Asia, I keep mistaking it for an Algonquian language.

See water/translations for more.

Two more languages arrive at the bar

• Upper Sorbian: Wait, why is everyone looking at me?
• Turkmen: I think we're at the wrong party.

wee

It's good to have words with meanings as flexible as these, but let's hope we don't get them confused.

唱歌 (chànggē)

1. to sing (songs)
2. (Canada) to partake in a citizenship ceremony
3. (Wu, humorous) to urinate

尿

1. urine (Classifier: 泡 m; 篤／笃 c)
2. to urinate; to pee
3. (dialectal Mandarin, Jin) to pay attention to someone

بش

1. to be cheerful, to look happy, to rejoice

   بَشِشْتُ بِهِ

   bašištu bihi

   I was cheerful in countenance with him.

   بَشَّتْ لَهُ فِي ٱلْمَسْأَلَةِ

   baššat lahu fī l-masʔalati

   She was courteous to him in asking.

2. (allegedly) to urinate

others

• 𡳞

interpretive etymologies II

See explanation here.

placenta

The word placenta derives from Latin placere (“to please”), because it's how a baby first feels its mother's love.The cake sense is secondary, because children also love cake. Placebo is a diminutive form, because pills are very small but often have a similar shape.

On the other hand, the town of Placentia was so called because of the many placental mammals that enjoy living there, such as seals.

French fries

Traditionally, southern French cuisine was heavily based on seafood, often boiled in olive or vegetable oil. Particularly prized were small bait fish from Sardinia, packaged and preserved in Cannes each year. But during a long naval war, they lost control of the Mediterranean and their supply of fish. Eager to continue eating their favorite meals, the French were forced to replace the fish with potatoes. The new meal proved surprisingly popular and spread well beyond its homeland. Since small fish are called fry in English, the new dish came to be called French fries. Soon the practice of cooking food in oil came to be called frying as well. This practice also gave rise to a new idiom in English: small potatoes as the plural of small fry.

rat-a-tat-tat

Grammatical pacificists often balk at misuse of decimate, saying that if the word were intended to describe killing or violence, it would be spelled decimatate. To decimate something merely means to make it very small, like a decimal point, just as centimate means to make it even smaller, like a centimal point .  

Likewise, the word combative does not refer to fighting, but to carefully combing one's hair. If you feel the need to talk about violence the word to use is combatative. The confusion of these two similar concepts may be due to the fact that combs have sharp points that can injure a person; the same dual meaning was present in early Germanic languages, where the word harjaz "comb" could also mean army.

fir trees

Fir trees are so named for their dense cloak of needles that protects the trees from the cold winter winds like a thick fur coat. As evidenced by the German cognate Föhre, this word once applied to the entire genus Pinus, and a conifer was a fir tree that had a distinctly cone-like shape.

The reason why fir was displaced in English by pine is unclear. It may be a warning to be cautious around the beautiful imported Norway spruce trees, whose sharp needles can hurt people attempting to hang ornaments, as suggested by the Dutch cognate pijnboom (“pain tree”).

Tobacco

The tobacco plant seemingly gets its name from the closely related tabasco pepper, although scientists have as of yet been unable to reconstruct the original term in the proto-Solanacean parent language.

adormideras

Much mystery surrounds the ancient Greek word μήκων and its many definitions. Beekes suggests a pre-Greek origin. We can now confidently state, however, that the word and its multiplicity of seemingly unrelated meanings come from contacts between early Greek sailors and the inhabitants of the Mekong River, known for its highly sought-after flowers, ornate architecture, and sea life.

candyland

Sri Lanka's earliest rulers were so fond of alcohol that they named their kingdom ஈழம் (/⁠Eelam⁠/, “palm wine”), much to the chagrin of the more temperate nations to their north. But they were also the earliest known consumers of candy. With the rise of trade, the temptation spread around the world. Soon, Western colonists created the word confectionery so that their children would think it was something obscene and lose interest. But one day, the serendipitous children broke the code and ate 500 pounds of candy from an enormous plate balanced on a high plateau. Once the secret was out, the rulers bowed to the demands that that their country take a more family-friendly name by renaming it the kingdom of Kandy.

closet

The early Middle English paradigm of short-vowel diminutives is mostly obscured today, but a few words remain, such as closet, so called because it is where we keep our clothes.

cranimals

The cran in cranberry was traditionally explained as a fossilized term for a barrel of herrings; after commercial fishing switched to metal containers, cranberries were transported in the old cran barrels. But in fact, most scholars now believe that the berry got its name from the crane bird, another name for the great blue heron, which in turn got its name from its diet consisting of small red herrings.

The Proto-Indo-European word for eagle is reconstructed as *h₃érō; this is an /n/-stem, because the eagle, a fellow bird of play, was often seen in close company with herons as they both enjoyed the same habitats.

Igel is the German word for hedgehog; this is a loanword from English eagle, because hedgehogs, powerful apex predators who prey on snakes, are also seen in close company with eagles.

The Proto-Indo-European word for hedgehog is reconstructed as *h₁eǵʰis; this is a loanword from English, as the speakers were unfamiliar with the animal until contacted by modern researchers.

palumbus

Christopher Columbus was so successful in establishing settlements in the New World that these settlements came to be referred to as colonies after his Spanish name, Cristobal Colón. He also reformed the military, adding the rank of colonel to better facilitate communication with those ranked above and below. There may also be a city in Germany named after him, but most scholars believe the city's name derives from their love of perfume.

thymus

Hungarian's word for thyme is kakukkfű, named after the cuckoo bird, because cuckoo clocks tell time.

c'est la viande

The origin of the word begin is obscure, especially due to the lack of exact cognates outside English. The fundamental question is about whether guinea pigs are so called because they be-GIN experiments, or is the verb a reference to the feeling of becoming a pig?

In early modern England, workers were often paid in guineas as well. Though few Englishmen had ever contemplated eating such an animal, much less subsisting on them, France was at this time winning its war against England, and taking all of the larger animals such as pigs for themselves, leaving only the tiniest and cutest animals for the English to eat. As a popular expression at the time stated, where's the beef? To which the French occupiers responded, c'est la viande.

A later alliance with Italy allowed England to repel the French occupiers as they expanded outward across the sea. By this time, guinea breeding had gotten to the point that Europe was overrun by the animals, and the sailors were searching the globe looking for safe habitats to relocate them. At the peak of Italian colonization, every land in sight was named something like Equatorial Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, and yet there seemed to always be a New Guinea on the map each week.

mountain

The pyramids were so called because they were shaped like mountains. Zachary the candymaker brought them to market.

Orkney

The Orkney Islands were so named because of the native population of seals, whose cry of "Ørk! Ørk! Ørk!" alerted the islanders to invaders. The killer whales, another type of seal, lived further out to sea. The word pork likely arose when the Viking settlers founded a new colony in the Pigtish countryside where the food supply was more stable.

other

A playing card company based in Japan was surprised when they hit it big in the video game market in the early 1980s with a game starring an Italian plumber. As a gesture of appreciation, they changed their name to Italian, n(o) intendo".

Cottage cheese is so called because we use it to hold wooden houses together.

Many birds have no sense of smell. Those that do don't let us know, as they remember the unhappy experience of the flycatcher Upupa epops, known for embarrassing birdwatchers with its distinctive cry hoopoop? hoopoop?

Another bird with a story to tell is the petrel, named after its long-distance flight ability (compare pter- as in pteranodon), so known for its great endurance that we used its name for petrol, a motor fuel containing alcohol, hence the -ol suffix, which is derived from Swedish öl "ale". German Öl "oil" is a direct cognate of this word, as the Germans started frying potatoes in oil in order to conserve their beer supply.

The speakers of the Pali language migrated in all directions after their language broke up, but most descendants didn't retain the name. One group left India altogether and founded a new nation to the north and east of their ancestral homeland. Their language thus came to be called NE Pali.

The word punch is a loan from Nepali पाँच (pā̃c, “five”), because when people get angry, they punch other people's faces with all five fingers. The drink fruit punch is so named because its high sugar content leads people to get very punchy.

casus belly

Having defeated the Spanish Armada, the Royal Navy won the war on scurvy as well by capturing a ready supply of naval oranges to portion to the sailors with each day's supper.

The makers of anti-diarrheal pill Imodium originally labeled their product I'm Opium! so people would know what its active ingredient was, but before being brought to market one designer suggested that the name might draw in the wrong type of customers.

Grammatical pacificists banned the ogham script because its words look too much like assault rifles.

Human blood is that which is brought out by the blades of sharp leaved plants.

Gold was discovered in the mountains of the Basque Country. It is being extracted from Itzal Mine.

Swampscott

Poortown and Richtown

Richtown is rich in poor people, but poor in rich people. Poortown is rich in rich people and poor in poor people. Poortown's poor are richer than Richtown's poor but poorer than Richtown's rich. Some say Poortown's richer poor are poorer than the poorest Richtown rich, but Poortown's mayor, Ed Poor, claims Richtown's richest poor are poorer than the richest Poortown poor.

Poortown and Richtown pave their walks with pitch. Richtown mayor Ed Rich knows that the richest Richtown rich are richer in pitch than the richest Poortown rich, but wonders which town's poor are richer in pitch: the richer poor in pitch-poor-poor-poor Poortown or the poorer poor in pitch-rich-rich-rich Richtown?

Poortown truck drivers are donating toy trucks to Richtown school children for Christmas. These annual toy truck truck drives are so famous that Poortown Toy Co has produced a die cast model of the most popular toy truck truck. It's so popular that the list of toy trucks to be distributed on the toy truck trucks will include this toy toy truck truck and Poortown truck drivers have decided to deliver them on a specially requisitioned toy toy truck truck truck.

had had had had had

There is no use/mention distinction involved here, so I consider this sentence much superior to the better-known teacher's classroom example. After all, if use/mention is allowed, why not add a third student who used "had had had"?

The child that the couple had had had had had no breakfast.

The sequence had₁ had₂ had₃ had₄ had₅ breaks down as:

1. The "past perfect" marker
2. To make something happen
3. To conceive a baby, particularly through surrogacy
4. Same as 1)
5. To have, obtain, consume

I will try to explain the five meanings better if I can because I find grammar terms confusing. The most important one, however, is 3), a full verb and not just an auxiliary.

I've traced this to a rec.puzzles entry from 1993, but seemingly with an error, which indicates to me that it might be older than this, and that the 1993 rec.puzzles poster miscopied it from where they'd seen it.

In theory one could produce a sentence with six consecutive hads as well, such as "the child that the couple had had had had had had a child of their own", but since this simply repeats the had₁ had₂ had₃ twice, I prefer the 5-had version.

got

 I've got to get to get gotten

Other repeated words

• your urine analysises

two twos

A pair of English ballet dancers taught an African leader to play woodwind instruments ... from 1:58am to 1:58pm, in fact. That is,

Two tutu'ed Tudor tooters tutored Tutu — two to two to two to two too.

spines

A tribute to the collection at this site:

Tired after a long walk in the desert, I laid down against a cactus to rest, but the spines kept poking my spine.

In French, there are at least three words corresponding to English spine: echino-, échine, and épine. All three are unrelated to each other.

Buster's busts' busts bu(r)st.

Esau's seesaw

I won't do it here (not diff-by-diff, I mean), but I want to unite the famous Esau's woodsaw and seesaw tongue twisters into a single story, perhaps by first telling about Esau, then about the seesaw, and then a third paragraph where the stories come together.

important knowledge

Note that laik means play and is distantly cognate to both like and lich, as well as the suffix -ly. Like-Like is an enemy from the Legend of Zelda. /laix/ is an acceptable pronunciation of lich in Scots English.

Would a Like-Like-like lich like to laik with a lich-like Like-Like, or would a lich-like lich like to laik with a Like-Like-like Like-Like? Not likelily.

The leech leached the lich's lich with a leech from Lechmere.

Like-Likes like to lick the leeches on my leech's lich.

thesaurus

This hilariously bad "thesaurus dictionary" is the worst attempt at automated language processing I've seen since the day I saw cuatro prominent scientists passed off as Spanish on a now-defunct astronomy website. Try searching the entries for soap, tampon, lizard, and carrot.

I suspect this may be one of those sites where the software is set up, advertising revenue is secured, and then the site enters the maintenance stage as the programmers are no longer necessary. Which means it's probably not going to get better anytime soon. In fact, while I had assumed at first blush that this site was new since I'd never seen it until just a few weeks ago, I just found a blog post from 2017 that uses one of its dinosaur images, so the site has been up and running for at least five years, and likely more.

Portmanteaus

Some of these words have probably been coined independently by many different people.

• symblematic: a cross between symptomatic, emblematic, and symbolistic. I created this word independently of anyone else who has used it. As of July 15 2010 it got 139 hits on Google, and likely more if variant spellings are added. (But really this word is better used in speech, where you can speak quickly and people will not even realize it's not a word.) Used by Donald Trump in 2012, but I had already typed this up two years earlier. The spelling symblomatic also competes with the -e-.
• techknowledgeable (also spelled technologible). overheard. The seam is smooth enough that I consider this a fairly good pun.
• errange to erase or wipe out some items in a set, and reorder the remainder. From a middle school teacher
• confuzzled is probably a portmanteau of confused and puzzled. It reminds me, though, that we might still have a barely productive left-over vowel shortening rule to form diminutives ("YouTubby", not *YouTubey, and so on). In theory this could be over 2,500 years old if it results from Kluge's Law.
• unsleepable and slumbersome were both in use in the 1800s, and both have transparent derivations, but I think of them as portmanteaus because they each have a far more common word they resemble. If not, they're at least decent puns.
• femstruate ... according to Megan Yarnall, words like this have started to bleed through our conversation.

There is also rã:ʔ, a word that sounds about halfway between right and wrong. From a high school teacher.

The word examplanation appears in print books going back at least to 1819, the era of movable type, and it is clearly not a scan error. If we read the rules robotically, examplanation would easily pass CFI. However I suspect that most of the uses are typos, even the 1819 one, if we assume people made the same type of motor memory errors with movable type as we do today with keyboards.

Twitter, Reddit, and Usenet

11:57, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

Since this keeps coming up.

Original CFI vote

• This is the vote in which the two-week discussion clause was added to the CFI criteria. This happened before the votes on Twitter and the other sites, meaning that those votes used the two-week CFI discussions as a background.

• This is the vote in which we nominated websites to be allowed into what I will call for lack of a better term the two-week voting pool.

• This is the Usenet vote, a wholly separate discussion. It failed, and serves as a sign that demoting Usenet to the level of Twitter (as I had privately wanted) would also fail .... still, some oppose rationales were about process, not substance. This vote may become relevant if the Twitter discussion continues down a certain path.

There was also a separate vote on whether to allow sites like 4chan, and they were soundly rejected. This could be relevant only because it puts them in a different category than Twitter. I want to get back to this, because I thought I remembered seeing yet another discussion where there were many more votes than this ... even 4chan was only rejected by a vote of 3 to 2 here, which is not what I remembered.

Twitterpated

Twitter, the only site on the list that seems to be contentious, received 60% support for being allowed into the two-week voting pool, meaning it was closed as no consensus. Reading it narrowly, that means it was rejected, and that Twitter cannot be used in any way to meet the criteria for attestation. Under this view, the only sites that merit two-week votes are established journals like Vice and HuffPo that don't feature user-written content. Therefore it is an utter waste of time to even create pages such as women ☕, as they will forever remain at zero acceptable citations even if thousands of tweets are found.

Status quo argument

Yet, people clearly have different ways of interpreting the vote. Some people interpret the 60% support as a pass, meaning that Twitter is allowed, putting it into a category above sites like 4chan which were strongly opposed. It's possible that many of these people interpret the 60% as a pass because it maintains the status quo of allowing Twitter, and therefore is really a 40% vote to disallow Twitter. Under this standard, 4chan and some other sites still clearly are disallowed, as they were rejected by a huge margin. Clearly many of us take this view, as we have been adding Twitter-only words continuously for the five months since that vote, and we have been holding the two-week discussions regularly when they are brought to RFD/V.

But on these discussions some people maintain that the discussions are unwarranted, saying that because Twitter was never accepted as a valid online source that it cannot be let into the two-week voting pool. One possible counterargument to the status quo view is that if Twitter was considered a valid source all along, so would any other site be, and we could be theoretically adding words used only on tiny circle-of-friends blogs and the like and saying that those blogs have not yet been rejected with a CFI vote. However I suspect any such words would be voted down at the CFI discussions, and that if those sources came up to a vote, they would also be rejected by a much greater ratio than was Twitter.

Other disputes

Now, five months later, we are still arguing about how to interpret the result of the vote on Twitter. Some people are saying that the September Beer Parlour vote was the two-week CFI vote, and therefore the votes on individual words are out-of-process. We had been having CFI votes for individual words before the Beer Parlour vote, however.

However we interpret the wording, it does not resolve the question over whether the Beer Parlour vote should be interpreted as 60% to allow or 40% to disallow; if we decide that the September discussion was the only discussion we need, then it either means that 0% of Twitter-cited words are allowed or that 100% are.

My own view on Twitter

Although I was opposed to allowing Twitter (and Usenet), I withheld my vote, as I typically don't vote on site-wide discussions like this. When I saw that we were allowing Twitter, I accepted the result and moved on.

Now, having seen the results of the new policy for five months, I would much rather we continue to allow Twitter than to have endless arguments about how to interpret the September vote each time a new word comes up for review. The system we are using now ... allowing Twitter .... is working well, and we should keep at it until someone can demonstrate a problem that isn't reducible to a difference of opinion.

As for Usenet

Twitter is probably more popular today than Usenet ever was, because during Usenet's peak only a small portion of the population had Internet access. Usenet is even less representative today. I've accepted Usenet as a source of citations, but would strongly prefer that it be treated like Twitter, meaning that words whose only cites were from Usenet and Twitter could be challenged specifically on that basis.

Usenet could be exploited to get extremely rare words to pass CFI. For example, Baspel, a word I made up, passes CFI through its three cites on Usenet because three other people have also (independently) made the same pun as me and with the same meaning ("bad news" as opposed to the Gospel which is "good news").

It's worth noting, though, that after an initially positive reception, we've held off from doing any of these new vote-based RFV's for the past few months, and it's even possible that there wasn't a single example in all of 2023. This issue is likely to sunset itself, as readership of Usenet has declined and so has addition of words from Usenet. In fact, there is now no easily accessible gateway, so addition of words may stop entirely (though old posts are still accessible).

Renaming Twitter to X

09:45, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

It hasnt come up yet, but I expect soon we will rename all our templates to say X instead of Twitter, or start a discussion about doing so. I hope there is a discussion, because I think there are good reasons to keep them as Twitter, but I don't hold so strong an opinion on it that I'll complain if we make the change. —Soap— 09:45, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Ideas for templates

I would like to see a {{quote-comic}} and a {{snowclone}} template. These are two completely unrelated ideas and would serve different purposes. It's just that I got the idea for the second after thinking about my idea for the first.

Snowclone template

The snowclone template would be used on just two pages and would most likely consist of just a single line of code. The only reason I want to see a template is that it would make editing Appendix:English snowclones and its companion page easier and reduce the need for redundant typing. As it stands now, all of the entries must contain the same text twice in order to produce usable links.

the code of {{1}} is something like {{l|{{{lang|en}}}|{{{1|{{safesubst:PAGENAME}}}}}|{{safesubst:ucfirst:{{{1|{{safesubst:PAGENAME}}}}}}}}} but there are so many brackets that i'd have trouble making even a slight modification.

calvin & hobbes jun 22 1988 has the "if you've seen one star, you've seen them all"

quote-comic template

Whereas the comic template, as I imagine it, would be some sort of fusion of {{quote-av}} and {{quote-book}}, so that it would cover webcomics, print comics, and comics that are both without the need to keep switching back and forth or give precedence to the print form of a comic that is today primarily accessed online. One benefit of having a template specifically for comics is that it would allow us to dispense with the annoying repeated parentheses, such as (For Better or For Worse) (comic) which as of yet can only otherwise be avoided by leaving out the genre, potentially meaning that readers will not realize that we're quoting a comic strip. Another benefit would be the addition of a role= parameter, as in {{quote-av}}, which quote-book currently lacks.

Another problem with parentheses occurs when quoting a comic strip in a newspaper, as below:

1. • 1991 September 19, Tim Sniffen, “Tangelo Pie”, in The Massachusetts Daily Collegian‎ (comic), University of Massachusetts Amherst, page 13:

     Excuse me, but is this huge application necessary? Listing job experience — what experience is crucial for being a stock boy?

This makes it looks as if the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, rather than Tangelo Pie, is the comic strip. Since this particular strip was once also published in a paperback format, I went with {{quote-book}}, but I dont have that book with me anymore and can't provide a page number.

I am still interested in this, but for the meantime I will be using {{quote-book}}. If we ever create a separate template for comics, I will make sure that the parameters are compatible so that all I will need to do is change the template name.

Other thoughts

usex vs quote

Naively, one would think that quotes (citations) would show immediately upon viewing an entry, and use examples (usexes) would require the reader to press a button to expand them, but in fact it is the other way around. Why is this? I can imagine a few reasons:

1. Quotes take up more space on the screen, and most readers are just looking for the quickest way to get from one definition to the next, so it is better to hide the quotations except from those who specifically press the button to uncoil them.
2. Any editor can create new use examples, but only published authors can create new quotes, so it helps the spirit of the project to show users' work right in front of them when they hit Save, instead of intimating that what they wrote is of inferior quality to what was there before.

An unspoken consensus suggests that quotes are more valuable than use examples, and I agree, though there are a few occasions in which I will add a use-example where a quote could have done. One case includes technical terminology and jargon, where people using the word are communicating only with others who know what it means, and therefore use it in opaque situations that would be unhelpful to a reader seeking more information. Not all of these are related to technology: it is easy to find people using the term plant-based in recipes, advertisements, and so on, but much more difficult to find someone simultaneously using it and explaining precisely what it means (it has two distinct meanings in fact). Another example where i prefer to type out a use-example is ungrammatical words, such as sleeped, where I chose to paraphrase two users' posts rather than link directly to them.

Google Books search throws up spurious results

This morning I searched Google Books for the phrase did not choose to comply with her wishes, which appears in a book quote on our entry for blow up. Among the very few results I got were .... OTHER book quotes that also appear on our page for blow up, even though they have nothing to do with the book I quoted from, and even though my query string didn't even contain the phrase blow up. This is yet another demonstration of how Google Books search is unreliable, and direct irrefutable confirmation that they are inflating search results with books that absolutely cannot by any stretch of the imagination be helpful to the person searching for a specific quote.

exicornt

yes, they even return four hits for exicornt, a word that was invented on Wikipedia in late 2005 and quickly revealed as a hoax. And two of those four book cites are from before 1930. (No need to bother looking ... I assure you none of Google's four hits actually contains the word.) On a happy note I would like to point out that the person who originally added the exicornt hoax has been let back in to Wikipedia and has since edited primarily about baseball.

time travel

Amazingly typeset self-help book published in 1900 tells us about laptops and cars.

Notes