An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."
A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."
According to my niece, "Yeah, no" is popular now w/ zennials. Also the laughing crying emoji is OUT, to be replaced with the hipper skull emoji to show amusement. As in, this is so funny it killed me.
"Yeah, no" was definitely a thing when I was in high school, and that was 10 years ago at this point. Maybe it's one of those all modern youth culture flows from the US West Coast things.
For example if someone asks me if I want to go somewhere with them at a specific time, and I would like to go with them but I already plan to do something else at that time, then I would say “nja” and while I say that think out an alternative suggestion for when we might go.
Another example is if I talk with someone and they say something that I agree with but then say something I disagree with. Then I would say “nja”. In this case it would be similar to English where you might say “yes and no”. And then state what I agree with and what I don’t agree with and why.
I would say /care, I don't care, either way, both fine with me, or "its nuanced" or "its complicated". The latter two invite curiosity and discussion, whereas the former one and its, ehh.., relatives (for lack of a better word) are more firm in the carelessness aspect therefore being more passive from my part. You can also say no and nod yes, as Torvalds famously did in response to a question concerning NSA.
I like the "yeah nah" expression! (It's best when accompanied with a head nod and shake when it's said.)
It's saying "I hear what you are saying, but I don't agree" with typical Aussie friendly honesty, with the implication that the proposition was unreasonable (often laughable).
Example, "Willing to swap late model Honda Civic for Ferrari or Lamborghini, must be road worthy and registered, cash my way if needed." Yeah, nah.
- There were no two ways about it -> there were two ways about it.
- Inadvertently -> advertently.
- Misnomer -> nomer.
- Unrequited -> requited.
In general, these words and phrases formed by back-formation are not recognized as standard English. A native English speaker will see “gruntled”, have to pause for a moment, and consider that it must mean the opposite of “disgruntled”. Native English speakers will not use the world “gruntled” in conversation or writing unless they are doing it for comedic effect.
These aren't (at least for the most part) back-formations but resurrections of obsolete words, though not necessarily in English. This may not be the caee for multi-word idiomatic phrases (e.g., "make no bones about").
With one exception (requited) I disagree. These are back-formations. Back-formation describes the process, if the results (coincidentally) match some plausible alternative etymology then that’s not evidence that the alternative etymology is correct! If you turn to the OED as a reference, you’ll see that it has an entry for gruntled—and it is listed as a back-formation from disgruntled; I believe it was coined by PG Wodehouse in the 1930s. The prefix dis- in gruntled is an intensifier anyway, so by constructing “gruntled” as an antonym of “disgruntled” you are not getting the original meaning back (the same dis- appears in discombobulate).
Back-formation is just a process. If a language has a word that sounds like “prefix-X”, then back-formation is the process of creating the word “X” from it. Dis- is often a Latinate prefix meaning “apart”, “removal”, or “negation”, but in the case of dis-gruntled and dis-combobulate means “completely”, so the process of adding dis- and then removing dis- has changed the meaning of “gruntled”. It is therefore a new word (if it were the same word, it would have the same meaning).
Another problem is that the imported word may have changed in meaning. “Nonchalant” may have Latinate origin if you dig deep enough, but we really took it from the French nonchaloir to disregard and French indeed has the (uncommon) chaloir to regard. However, the English word “nonchalant” does not have the same meaning as the French word “chalant”—in English it is a feeling or attitude—so when you rip the non- prefix off you are not in any sense getting something that approximates the French “chaloir” that “nonchalant” was created from in the first place.
A final problem is that the affix may not exist in the first place. “Choate” is simply nonsense, “inchoate” comes from the Latin “incohare” which means to begin and there’s simply no affix to remove.
If you have a mathematical mind, think of it as non-commutative. You can add a affix, and you can remove an affix, and you can borrow the word into another language, but these are not commutative operations and the order in which you do things changes them.
The verb “requite” and the adjective “requited” are quite normal English words, and “unrequited” is derived from them in the normal way.
“Unrequited” may be the form most commonly encountered (“mutual” is most common in many places “requited” would naturally fit), but the other forms are not neologisms created by backformation.
Most of the phrases are used in a way where it makes sense what’s being said, but most native speakers only use the phrases slightly modified to mean the opposite of how they’re being used in the writing.
Ha! Exactly my thought! My uneducated guess is that because we are (or at least I am) lacking a lot of vocabulary compared to native speakers, we have to do every time we read something written in a rather lyrical way or that has unusually complex words.
Regarding the 1600's English, for me this is definitely easier to understand than Shakespeare.
Chalant is the present participle of the (disused) verb "chaloir", which means "to matter to someone", "to be important (to someone)".
It's only used anymore in the words "nonchalant" (someone to which things don't matter much) and the expression "peu me chaut" (it matters little to me).
But although "nonchalant" has a clear meaning, the meaning of "chalant" wouldn't be as obvious, since while it's easy to not care about things generally, "generally caring about things" is just the normal state of a person. It's the same reason you don't often hear about a stoppable force or a wieldy tool.
Chaland is something unrelated, it's a slow delivery barge from which derive two meanings, one for a shop being well-stocked (bien achalandé, because it's well served by the barge) and the other for visiting things at a leisurely pace (because the barge is slow and makes many stops).
Nonplussed is a particularly weird case as it means surprised but many people (particularly in North America) think it means not surprised, and so they might think plussed means surprised when through this backformation it ought to mean non-surprised.
Unfortunately, it only makes sense to use with this type of crowd. I can't imagine it'd be that useful for spoilers in other groups that don't have easy access to a ROT13 encoder.
EDIT: BTW, is there another ROT13 encoder in a typical linux installation besides vim's g? command or emacs's rot13* commands?
If they're joking. I'm still on the fence on that.
The thing with text is that you can't really hear the sarcastic tone of voice, and people are so varied, it's believable that one isn't aware, as at least one user has mentioned here[1]. It's always best to just append an /s or a :P or something.
There's plenty of online dencoders (i just abbreviated de+encoding as its the same when shifting by 13 either to the left or right with an alphabet of 26 characters). Not everyone recognizes rot-xx though.
⏵ rot13
Command 'rot13' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo apt install bsdgames # version 2.17-28build1, or
sudo apt install hxtools # version 20200126-1build1
More common with HTML is to set the text to the same color as the background which allows you to see it when you highlight. (Which is probably easier in general.)
'rot13' only works with the alphabet. 'rot18' can do the same thing with numbers too, so rot13 + rot5 = rot18.
Pointless trying to obfuscate info if you can still see the numbers part 'en clair' to give the game away. (bank PINs, phone numbers, etc) Need to obfuscate the digits too.
I don't know whether it's a hug or a slap. It's enormously hard to read but great fun! Do yourself a favor and read this article if you looked immediately at the comments.
I can’t read it because I have the New Yorker app installed, and they use universal links to launch the app whenever you click a link to their domain, and this article isn’t on their app.
My favourite example is the word "deceptively". "The pool was deceptively shallow" could mean the pool was shallower than it looks, or it could mean the pool was not as shallow as it looks, depending on who you ask.
When we have certain friends around and have had a few drinks and some food, someone will ask if everyone is now "gruntled" as in we were previously disgruntled but that has now been resolved.
Shouldn't it logically be "make heads and tails of"?
There are a few superfluous expressions, that make me think I'm missing something (but it's hard enough to read as it is, the reader needs something familiar to hang on to). e.g.
So I decided not to rush it.
But then, all at once,
I was, after all
The more I fret about keeping up with the latest and greatest tech, the more I need to come back to stuff like this. Words are fun too, and creativity isn't limited to building startups.
-Someone who majored in neither comp sci nor literature.
For people unfamiliar with it, Shouts & Murmurs are, from the html code, '<meta name="description" content="Weekly humor and satire about politics and daily life, from The New Yorker's writers and humorists.">'
Very cool! I have never actually seen many of these words in their root forms-- so the author has managed to present something fresh. Also makes me think that the English language is overly abundant in negativity sigh.
Yes its fabulous. I looked up many of these "new" words and was surprised and delighted to find out they're in fact valid words, but never used in speech or writing.
My english is not good enough to translate this. Even with dictionary I have no chance. What is meaning of this - for example?
"She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array."
I understand every word, but don't get meaning at all.
Two other unusual and clever language constructions are xkcd's Up Goer Five a description of a Saturn 5 rocket using only words contained in the 1000 words of basic English, see [1], and
Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright, a novel of 50,000 words without using the letter e, see [2].
Good grief, maybe it's time to change to a different native language! Or if you can't for some reason, you could try if using a less strong word to express your displeasure will actually make you feel less of it and make happier - more gruntled, so to speak.
I'm not sure either, but I don't object -- and I think it's actually related to topics that folks here care about, like cognition, language, and interpretation.
Personally, I find it fascinating that this is spectacularly harder to read than I think anyone would reasonably expect it to be.
I know it's satire, but the writing style of every New Yorker magazine makes me toss the magazine away immediately. It's a shame because there are good topics in the magazine, yet the unnecessarily bloated writing style makes it painful to read.
(Edited for substance)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unpaired_word