Making up catchphrases:

• Without semantics, life is meaningless.
• Without logic, life is unreasonable.

Dummy content you can type with your left hand

irondavy:

So you can keep clicking with the right hand.

Names

• Abed
• Bart
• Dave
• Tag
• Xerxes
• Descartes

Nouns

• Fart
• Swagger
• Tartar
• Czar
• Dwarf

Adjectives

• Deaf
• Starved
• Free
• Erect
• Tart

Verbs

• Exacerbate
• Fret
• Stargaze
• Stab
• Ebb

Phrases

• Caged rats get free water!
• Stewardesses dread reggae barf
• Sad serfs serve sad cabbage
• Vests are cravats! we assert
• Cave scarabs scare savages
• Fat ragers read great faxes

Thanks to Tag, Casey, and Joe for help with this.

• Caesar`s secret war extracts great taxes
• Reef seawater secretes average seaweed
• Carers feed cage-free deer grass
• War drafts scare Steve
• Everett`s secret cards were 3 aces

This is going to ruin my day.

-boy, -girl, -man, -woman

Here are some good word facts.  According to sowpods:

1. There are 2 prefixes that can attach to -boy, -girl, -man, and -woman and form valid words: bat, news
2. There is 1 more that can attach to all but -girl: post
3. 2 for all but -boy: work, sales
4. And 5 for all but -woman: shop, cow, bus, school, choir
5. 5 work with just -boy  and -girl: home, play, paper, copy, atta
6. 16 for -man and -boy: fly, gown, plow, bell, house, pot, dead, plough, high, sand, lift, link, stable, foot, herd, car
7. No prefixes attach to -boy, and -woman but not -man
8. A whopping 81 more strings can be prefixed to both -man and -woman, but neither of the others: patrol, committee, crafts, bats, lay, church, ambulance, yachts, states, gentle, gilds, service, anti, spokes, guilds, pitch, earth, chair, towns, ad, horse, toy, police, congress, working, space, frontiers, footplate, byre, pen, sports, jury, fire, bush, camera, door, marks, washer, fisher, sea, freed, noble, assembly, iron, business, bonds, club, rail, mad, tally, laundry, alder, free, aircraft, every, oars, draughts, kins, press, stunt, clans, super, plants, beads, fore, prize, council, country, trades, air, un, aircrafts, hench, clergy, alms, newspaper, tribes, bushel anchor, cochair, bond
9. There are 22 that work only with -boy: tar, clapper, penny, street, macca, macco, call, low, tom, black, beach, po, bully, haut, boss, lady, day, dough, billy, small, tall, page
10. And none that just go in front of -girl
11. 7 are -woman only: wise, tire, needle, char, wash, bower, scrub
12. And lastly, there are 496 prefixes that attach to -man, but not the other three.

If anyone feels like filling these into a four set venn diagram for me, that’d be super.

"We have to face the fact that maybe we won’t be able to stop every potential attack"

So, sometimes my ‘academic research’ involves searching online for good sentences.  Playing around on the Corpus for Contemporary American English, I came across this gem.  it features five modal terms, which is a ton, especially given how densely packed they are.

You might wonder what I mean by ‘modal’.  The traditional class is a small set of auxiliary verbs: might, must, can, may, and should are the clearest examples.  These words can be used to make statements about possibility, but also obligation and a slew of related notions involving desires and goals, dispositions and abilities.

Modality became the term for anything expressing what these words express, so other verbs (have to, ought to, need to), adverbs (possibly, certainly, permissibly), and adjectives (probable, unlikely, possible) make up most of the rest of the family in English.

I was searching for these types of adjectives in sentences when they are modifying nouns and this was the first hit for “every potential”.  Although the modal status of a few of these is sometimes disputed, I count five:

• have to
• maybe
• won’t
• be able to
• potential

So the “fact” we have to face isn’t so much a fact as the possibility of a possibility in the inherently uncertain future.  I really enjoyed this sentence and needed to share it.

The word I’m currently finding interesting

Improbably is the word I’m currently finding interesting.  One would think that improbably would just be a straight antonym of probably—the way unlikely just means not likely—but they behave pretty differently.  Consider the following sentences:

1. The Pirates will probably lose tomorrow.
2. The Pirates will improbably lose tomorrow.

I take (1) to basically mean: of all the possible ways that tomorrow could go, most of those ways involve the Pirates losing.  But (2) on the other hand doesn’t mean that the Pirates lose in only a few of the ways tomorrow could go, but that they lose in all possible tomorrows, and furthermore, their losing will defy odds.

(2) is actually a pretty goofy sentence because, by uttering it, one is essentially predicting the unpredictable.

Improbable is even trickier, but that might just be because probable is trickier than probably.

Selfish shellfish sell fish shellfish.

As you probably know, there are 164 words in SOWPODS that end in -FISH.  These seem to fit into three categories: 1) Types of fish: CAT-, JEW-, SABLE-; 2) Ways to fish: OVER-, UNDER-; 3) adjectives that don’t have anything to do with fish: STANDOF-, WEREWOL-, UNSEL-.

So I figured I’d combine the ‘hurt people hurt people’ fun with the ‘fish fish fish’ fun to give you more sentences:

• Baitfish bait fish.
• Buffalofish buffalo fish.
• Dogfish dog fish.
• Crossfish cross fish.
• Milkfish milk fish.
• Moonfish moon fish.
• Needlefish needle fish.
• Parrotfish parrot fish.
• Scarfish scar fish.
• Stingfish sting fish. (This one might be true.)
• Wreckfish wreck fish.

According to wikipedia, northern pike feed on perch, and perch feed on bleak.  These facts will be important.  And for pike to feed on perch, it must also be true that pike catch perch, and to catch a fish is to fish a fish, clearly.  So it would be factually accurate to say that:

1. Pike fish perch.
2. Perch fish bleak.
3. Pike are fish.
4. Perch are fish that pike fish. (by 1)
5. Bleak are fish that perch fish. (by 2)
6. Perch are fish pike fish. (by 4, just dropping the “that”)
7. Bleak are fish perch fish. (by 5, just dropping the “that”)
8. Bleak are fish fish pike fish fish. (by 4 and 5)
9. Fish pike fish fish fish fish pike fish fish. (by 2, 7, and 8)
10. Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish. (by 3 and 9)

You got that right.  The sentence “Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish.” means roughly the same thing as “perch feed on bleak”.  If you consider freshwater shrimp to be fish, things get way way crazier.

[The tree was made using phpSyntaxTree.  The e’s are phonologically null traces in the relative clauses—they are semantically linked to the fish that heads the NP where the RC attaches.]

Buffalo people buffalo people

I saw Greenberg a little while ago, and the “Hurt people hurt people” line really stuck with me.  Not the sentiment, but the language.  It’s a pretty gorgeous construction.  There are very few verbs where the bare form is the same as the past participle, and even when that happens, you still need a transitive verb that can take the same type of subject and object (“Put people put people” doesn’t make any sense, for instance).

I searched a list of irregular verbs and came up with the following:

• Cut people cut people.
• Hit people hit people.
• Fit people fit people.
• Broadcast people broadcast people.

Not nearly as good.  Of course, if you don’t care about a generic reading, we can just change the tense to the past and get all sorts of stuff.  Consider a situation in which disoriented men and women began saying gibberish, which then disorients the others around them.  It seems appropriate to describe that situation as:

• Confused people confused people.

And since the past participle and past tense almost always agree, examples like this will show up all over the place.

Much more fun: is when you use homophonous homonyms, or nouns with a related verb sense.  Here are a three with animals:

• Residents of a city in upstate New York are bullies: Buffalo people buffalo people.
• Canine pet owners are persistent: Dog people dog people.
• Ursine-human hybrids have a tendency to carry regular humans: Bear-people bear people.

And best of all, I have constructed a buffalo sentence!  Consider a situation in which extroverts are perpetually living inside other human beings.  Then we’d definitely want to say:

• People people people people.

Scrabble facts, pt. 1

There 272,013 words in my SOWPODS list, a list for international Scrabble tournaments (that is also used for the Facebook program where I do my boggling).  All, but 4,262 are fifteen letters or less—the maximum length to fit on a Scrabble board—but not all of the rest can conceivably be played in a game of Scrabble.  18 of them, for instance cannot be formed because, even with the blank tiles, there won’t be enough of a certain letter.  Here they are:

• bezzazz
• bezzazzes
• classlessnesses
• knickknack
• knickknacks
• pazzazz
• pazzazzes
• pizzazz
• pizzazzes
• pizzazzy
• possessednesses
• razzamatazz
• razzamatazzes
• razzmatazz
• razzmatazzes
• senselessnesses
• stresslessness
• successlessness

View high resolution

Dispatches from my education:

1. FrameNet (where the above part of a chart comes from) is pretty fun to play around with and probably not very useful.
2. I read a paper today in which the authors said the “learning curve” for a task was “steep”.  What they meant was that people learned the task quickly.  I’m not sure I’ve made reference to steep learning curves before, but if I have, I’ve done so incorrectly.  Now I know words and phrases can have more than one meaning (I probably wouldn’t be in school if that weren’t true), but I think it’s fair to say that using “steep learning curve” to mean “difficult to learn” is—if not outright wrong—definitely really stupid once you think about it.  Of course the x-axis on a learning curve is time.  What the hell else could it be?
3. I share an office with 11 other grad students.  There is a bell-like apparatus attached to the door.  It’s a hollow metal cylinder suspended from a string that fits into a metal loop and rings when someone comes in or out.  Or I should say that there was a bell-like apparatus attached to the door.  A lot of people come in and out of a twelve person office and I don’t really give a fuck about their presence (plus I can fucking hear them coming in anyways, even without a bell; it’s not like anyone is trying to sneak up on us).  So I took the bell down on Monday when nobody else was in the room.  I hope I’m not wading into some years old debate on the bell-like apparatus.  I mean, the bell-like apparatus couldn’t have always been there.  Someone once decided that that door needed to make a truckload of noise when people use it, and I just can’t envision a scenario in which the bell-like apparatus is helpful.  I decided against hiding it, so If someone puts it back up, I might need to ask to change offices to avoid confrontation.