Language fleeting thoughts

[gmalivuk]

Yeah I don't get the logic of the list, since it also leaves out combinations like "give up"

[gd1]

Yeah I don't get the logic of the list, since it also leaves out combinations like "give up"

Was just a fleeting thought for fun. One or more of them doesn't make sensu bean.

[PM 2Ring]

"pick down" is gibberish to me, but you could add "pick out" and "pick off".

IIRC, English picked up this verb + preposition construction from the Vikings.

Here's some support for that assertion

Old English generally did not possess phrasal verbs as they are found in Present-Day English. They did exist, although they were rare. Much more common in Old English was the inseparable-prefix verb, a form in which the particle was attached to the beginning of the verb. 
[...]
The formation of prefixed verbs in Old English was no longer productive in Middle English, and the loss of productivity was already evident in Old English, in which certain authors added a post-verbal particle to prefixed verbs, possibly because the prefix was losing meaning (Denison, “Origins’, 47). S
[...]
Middle English was also subject to the powerful forces of French and Anglo-Norman, as well to some influence from Old Norse. Several authors on the subject claim that Old Norse, which already had a fairly robust incidence of phrasal verbs, must have incited the production of English phrasal verbs with post-verbal particles, although the degree to which Old Norse is responsible for this is unclear (Smith 140, Fischer 386). The rapid borrowing of French verbs into Middle English likely slowed the development of phrasal verbs (Baugh and Cable 340, Fischer 386) because of competition in semantic fields, as French brought in Romance verbs that could fill the semantic fields of the Old English prefixed verbs. 

[Eebster the Great]

How many can we make with the verb "run"? Let's shoot for 20. Here's 8 to start:
run up
run down
run in
run out
run on
run off
run around
runaway

They are all have meanings that are not immediately obvious from the definitions of the individual words. Some might need hyphens to get that particular sense, but I'm too lazy to check which.

[PM 2Ring]

"run through", as in "I'll run through the list", but also that thing with a sword.

Does "run by" fit the pattern?

[Angua]

run over

[Liri]

Run past
Run along(side)
Run against
Run for
Run beside

[Eebster the Great]

Are those phrases that have meanings distinct from the individual words? Like, a runoff is definitely different from "run" + "off," but how does "run beside" mean anything different from "run" + "beside"?

[gmalivuk]

Yeah if we're going to count regular verb+preposition and verb+adverb pairs, then basically any verb can be used in a long list like this.

[Sableagle]

I've mentioned elephant gun three times on this forum, but I've never--in text form--considered the many possibilities to what the noun 'elephant gun' could be.

Elephant gun (n.)

1. A gun used specifically to fire ammunition at elephants
2. A gun that is in the shape of an elephant
3. A gun that is the size of an elephant
4. A gun that sounds like an elephant
5. A gun that is designed to be used by elephants
6. A gun that uses elephants as ammunition
7. A gun made out of elephant
8. A gun made by an elephant
9. A gun made by a person called Elephant
10. A gun named after a person called Elephant
11. A gun named after, or inspired by, elephants

I think six would look like a giant cannon. (is that a cannon used to shoot giants? Or a cannon that shoots giants as ammunition? Or a cannon that...)

I would like to add a few that occurred to me, for the sake of discussion:
[*]A gun made in a place called Elephant
[*]A gun named after a place called Elephant
[*]A gun used to attack a place called Elephant
[*]A gun used to defend a place called Elephant
[*]A method of increasing fuel flow to an engine (gun) similar to the way an elephant would be imagined to, or developed by a person named Elephant, or commonly used in a place called Elephant. (Jackrabbit start, Thach weave, Tokyo drift).
Yes, I know the last is three but they are related at the root and the variation in branches has been captured already

[*]A gun that turns the target into at elephant, related to the frog gun of XEvil
[*]A gun powered by an elephant, as in "air gun" being powered by compressed air.

[Eebster the Great]

• A biceps of an elephant

[gd1]

The waker has asleepened. - Luap, the movie Crevice.

Appropopriate = Appropriate and Apropos

[Grop]

It's a bit unorthodox to count years from Bastille Day, but you do you I guess.

It is funny how English speakers refer to the French national day as Bastille Day. The English Wikipedia even says that we celebrate the taking down of that fortress, which happened on a 14th of July. On paper, what we celebrate is the anniversary of that Fête de la Fédération. When you look carefully at what happened on 14/07/1789, it doesn't look very pretty, which may be why the French government doesn't insist too much on celebrating that.

French people normally call the 14th of July their national day (and most of the time they would call it the 14th of July), and would only mention the Bastille if asked what happened on that day (or if they feel like telling you everything they know about history ~ which may be a French thing).

[Eebster the Great]

Reading the article, it sounds like la Fête de la Fédération in 1790 itself was commemorating the storming of the Bastille, which makes 14 juillet a celebration of a celebration of the event, a "Bastille Day Day."

[Grop]

Calling this day Bastille Day is factually true; it is just not how people from my country name it. Also most of us aren't aware of that, but the main thing to be "celebrating" about would be the lynching of soldiers who had no say about French politics (and some of them were from Switzerland).

(This is a thread about language fleeting thoughts, I am obviously not telling you how to call things).

[Eebster the Great]

I got that, I was just commenting on the seeming recursive nature of celebrating a celebration.

[Soupspoon]

(and some of them were from Switzerland).

Those perfidious Swiss, with their cuckoo-clocks and their insane toblerones…

[ThirdParty]

Dear prescriptivists: don't ask who the bell tolls for; its for y'all.

[Sableagle]

Schiphol airport has a place inside it with pavement café umbrellas advertising "panini's" [sic].

I was tempted to ask one of the waitresses's what's she's got's in her pockets's.

[Pfhorrest]

An umbrella made of pavement sounds like a bad engineering choice.

Or is the cafe made of pavement?

(Does it even count as pavement if it's not used for a ground surface? Wouldn't that just be concrete? Assuming a cafe/umbrella is not made of asphalt, though maybe that would make more sense than concrete for the umbrella...)

[SuicideJunkie]

There's a little lawn-stick ad on the route from the office I drive by most days on the way back from picking up lunch.

> Help's with anything

Is what it says near the bottom. Anything... except for language apparently.

Edit/PS: I think a pavement café would be selling pavement-themed food and drink.
Little sugared traffic cones on the side of your waffle shaped like a manhole cover for example.

[Soupspoon]

> Help's with anything

Is what it says near the bottom. Anything... except for language apparently.

I disagree. Let's help'em with anything, like they ask. In particular with language. But only how to be less ambiguous in the face of unimaginative people like you.

[flicky1991]

There's a sign not far from where I live - a properly printed sign, not hand-written - advertising an "independant" used-car dealer. Did their software not give them the red squiggly line?

[Thesh]

I'm picturing an ant in adult diapers.

[Eebster the Great]

There's a sign not far from where I live - a properly printed sign, not hand-written - advertising an "independant" used-car dealer. Did their software not give them the red squiggly line?

They didn't pay the printer extra to spellcheck the signs.

[Grop]

This week I did some tourism in my own country. On two occasions, staff talked to me in English first, then went like "Oh, vous êtes français" as I replied in French. This is quite funny, and I am pretty sure that they would have used French first like five or ten years ago.

[gd1]

Pop Quizatzhaderach

First Round Draft Picts?

Initiation? Or... outnitiation?

How do Russians tell English speakers "No for now, but maybe yes later."?
...
Not quite nyet.

Subspace: The space left in your stomach for port of subs sandwiches.

Concentrashunned
Ichibanned
Edo Tensei, or perhaps Edo Sensei...

Dadvice
Evil's Dadvocate
Nonetheless... less the none

It is what it is. It isn't what it isn't.

If you will.
No I won't.

And what have you.
Naught but the lint in my pockets dear sir!

What ho!
What do you mean... like a rake or bro's before ...?

[Soupspoon]

Faced with the need to count down "Five… four… three… two… one…" many times (for reasons unnecessary to delve into) I found myself in the gaps resurrecting the thoughts that I often have during this task, once I get to the "if you say a word over and over, it starts to lose all meaning" stage of higher-awareness. Despite the lack of narcotic influence commonly claiming to invoke such insights.

The vowels are "Eye Ore Eee Ooo O'". The initial plosives (or functional equivalents) are "F F Th T, W". I always seem to get to the stage (after maybe the first fifty or hundred iterations of feeling that the tongue-twister of F(…v)-F-Th(r…) and the shape of the mouth over Eye-Ore-Eee suggests that Three does not follow Four, but that there's a more correct transitional digit between them that I'm skipping. The mouthmand tongue feel like they're doing far more repreparation betwixt the 4 and 3 than between any of the others (understandable, F(^eye_fvvv)F(^ore)->??->Th(_r^eee)T(^ooo)_W(o'_n), with handy transitions at most points) I the start to wonder what that digit/word/utterance should be, and have to second-guess myself as in every subsequent iteration it feels like I've skipped that key item in the list.

I wonder if I should ask what is missing? Will knowing the word forever send future iterations into a worse sense of self-doubt (like going "A B C D F G H…"), or will it exorcise this personal demon?

[jaap]

"if you say a word over and over, it starts to lose all meaning"

Semantic satiation

The mouthmand tongue feel like they're doing far more repreparation betwixt the 4 and 3 than between any of the others (understandable, F(^eye_fvvv)F(^ore)->??->Th(_r^eee)T(^ooo)_W(o'_n), with handy transitions at most points) I the start to wonder what that digit/word/utterance should be, and have to second-guess myself as in every subsequent iteration it feels like I've skipped that key item in the list.

How about the obvious "and", or rather "an' ". It links nicely with the previous r and following th, doesn't introduce any semantic distractions, and is not likely to mess up your rhythm by taking up the time/space of a proper item on the list.

[Soupspoon]

Trying it out loud (good job I'm alone!), and to the backround noise of a diatracting bit of archived radio, I'm trying "Five, Four'an Three Two One", but it's tending to count as an extra syllable over the original rhythm. Maybe make the 'An replace Three? There are some problems with that (not your fault you don't fully appreciate the context I deliberately didn't reveal), but I'll work on it. See if I can at least get over my mind-numbedness, the satiation you correctly identify.

(Not sure I meant to be so mysterious, just didn't want to complicate the fleeting (if recurring) thought I was conveying.)

[Flumble]

I always seem to get to the stage (after maybe the first fifty or hundred iterations of feeling that the tongue-twister of F(…v)-F-Th(r…) and the shape of the mouth over Eye-Ore-Eee suggests that Three does not follow Four, but that there's a more correct transitional digit between them that I'm skipping.

You're skipping over bleem.

[ThirdParty]

Faced with the need to count down "Five… four… three… two… one…" many times (for reasons unnecessary to delve into)

If you're the person whose job it is to bleep out celebrities when they use curse words on "live" broadcasts, that's fascinating and totally necessary to delve into. (It could be that the word your subconscious thinks is missing between "four" and "three" is "f*ck", if that's the word that usually triggers the countdown in the first place. No, seriously: its vowel is roughly intermediate between the vowels in "four" and "three".)

Maybe make the 'An replace Three?

If you're going to do that, consider using "san" (rhymes with "Khan") instead; it means "three" in languages such as Mandarin and Japanese. "Five four san two one" strings together reasonably comfortably, with each word ending with the mouth in the same position it needs to be for the start of the next word. (At least in my dialect. If you've got a non-rhotic dialect, the transition between "four" and "san" may not be as smooth.)

[Eebster the Great]

I always seem to get to the stage (after maybe the first fifty or hundred iterations of feeling that the tongue-twister of F(…v)-F-Th(r…) and the shape of the mouth over Eye-Ore-Eee suggests that Three does not follow Four, but that there's a more correct transitional digit between them that I'm skipping.

You're skipping over bleem.

I thought bleem went between six and seven, but I can't find the clip to check.

[chridd]

I always seem to get to the stage (after maybe the first fifty or hundred iterations of feeling that the tongue-twister of F(…v)-F-Th(r…) and the shape of the mouth over Eye-Ore-Eee suggests that Three does not follow Four, but that there's a more correct transitional digit between them that I'm skipping.

You're skipping over bleem.

I thought bleem went between six and seven, but I can't find the clip to check.

This is the first result on Google, and it has it between three and four.

[Eebster the Great]

Huh, I was talking about an old SNL Weekend Update.

[jaap]

Huh, I was talking about an old SNL Weekend Update.

That's the number bleen, which is totally different from bleem.

[chridd]

Huh, I was talking about an old SNL Weekend Update.

That's the number bleen, which is totally different from bleem.

so... one two three bleem four five six bleen seven eight nine... (bleeo? bleeng? some unrelated name?) ten

Or is bleen really part of the coverup for bleem, trying to confuse people so they won't know where to look?

(Also, they didn't say bleen was an integer, so that one's entirely plausible, since it's entirely possible that someone could discover some significant irrational number 6 point something. Well, except for the part where someone got a Nobel in mathematics.)

[Eebster the Great]

Huh, I was talking about an old SNL Weekend Update.

That's the number bleen, which is totally different from bleem.

That's it! I could swear this was on a Weekend Update too, or another SNL skit with Carlin, but I might just be mistaken.

[Soupspoon]

(Reminds me that there's also the episode of Elastic Planet, number 3 to be precise, that dealt with the polygon with 4½ equal sides. Not currently available in iPlayer, but maybe it's findable out there. Not that this is a Language Fleeting Thought any more, but just to add to the catalogue of similar things.)

[WriteBrainedJR]

Are those phrases that have meanings distinct from the individual words? Like, a runoff is definitely different from "run" + "off," but how does "run beside" mean anything different from "run" + "beside"?

Really late to reply to this, but "run beside" is the only offender on that list.

"Run past" means to tell somebody something for review. "Can you run that list past me again?"

"Run along," is a nicer way of saying GTFO.

"Run against," as in an election, in which one "runs for" an office.

To add to the list: "run across," which means to find something largely by happenstance. "Run of" is used refer to a standard quantity of a product that one produces, though I suspect that this usage is unfamiliar to most people.