The Coffee House

[sm4him]

Their once was a men who liked to misspel thing's and, grammar badly.

Typing that gave me a headache.

As did it me just reading it, considering the work I have to start doing again soon!



Seriously, though, if y'all really do have any oddball language questions, let me know! I have been wanting to fire up my blog again this year, and I also want to start preparing for the section of Intro to Linguistics that I'll hopefully be teaching this Fall, so the ideas for blog posts as well as the practice for teaching would be really helpful to me!

Okay, Lenny, a friend just posted something on FB that reminded me of one of my favorite language oddities.

Explain to me why you can be discombobulated, but nobody is ever combobulated to start with.
For that matter, I've never heard of anyone being gruntled or gusted either.

Is combobulated a word? Or gruntled? Gusted might be a word, but if so, it would likely have to do with wind, not mood.

I make a point of using "gruntled" whenever I can, just for the looks it gets. I hadn't thought of "gusted", but I will use it from now on!

You and I would get along just fine. I even use "combobulated" now and then, just to make people wonder.
Like they don't wonder about me enough as it is.

 

[tirediron]

Their once was a men who liked to misspel thing's and, grammar badly.

Typing that gave me a headache.

As did it me just reading it, considering the work I have to start doing again soon!



Seriously, though, if y'all really do have any oddball language questions, let me know! I have been wanting to fire up my blog again this year, and I also want to start preparing for the section of Intro to Linguistics that I'll hopefully be teaching this Fall, so the ideas for blog posts as well as the practice for teaching would be really helpful to me!

Okay, Lenny, a friend just posted something on FB that reminded me of one of my favorite language oddities.

Explain to me why you can be discombobulated, but nobody is ever combobulated to start with.
For that matter, I've never heard of anyone being gruntled or gusted either.

Is combobulated a word? Or gruntled? Gusted might be a word, but if so, it would likely have to do with wind, not mood.

Combobulation IS a word. As in: Urban Dictionary: Combobulation. First, you combobulate, then you discombobulate, then you can recombobulate.

The Urban Dictionary is NOT a dictionary! The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't list, ergo... t'isn't a word!

 

[limr33 3]

Combobulation IS a word. As in: Urban Dictionary: Combobulation. First, you combobulate, then you discombobulate, then you can recombobulate.

Hmmm, if it IS a recognized word, it's a newly-formed one, possibly through the process of what is called back-formation. "Combobulated" is not in the 1933 OED. Neither is "discombobulated" for that matter. So both words are less than 100 years old.

Huh, although etymonline.com puts it at 1834: Online Etymology Dictionary A quick search puts both words at mid-century.

Anyway, back-formation. Normally we have words that can take affixes (the general term for prefixes or suffixes) and we create new words that way. Sometimes, we have a word that has an affix and we remove it to create a new word. Someone who is "addicted" becomes an "addict" for example. Sometimes this is done even if a word already exists: 'conversation' becomes 'conversate' even though a perfectly good verb already exists. I hate the word but I have to admit that obnoxious as it is, it's still a product of valid and generative grammatical processes of English.

So what came first, combobulate or discombobulate? Not really sure. I'll do some more digging.

 

[limr33 3]

A friend of mine wanted to know why 'horrendous' could be used to describe the object, but there wasn't any form of the word to describe how someone was feeling, so she coined 'horrended' and I have loved and used that word ever since

 

[minicoop1985]

I'm horrended that you're horrended. Wait, what?

 

[pgriz]

Lessee. Bulls produce bullate (think of condensate), and a bunch of that could be though of a "combo" so combobullate would be a collection of bull by-products, and then someone missed the double EL so it became combobulate. Yeah - I think that's it.

 

[pgriz]

And as for "horrended" - is it a receiver or giver or horror? As in "I was horrended that I lost my wallet" or "I horrended him with my gaunt visage". Leonore - what's the accepted usage if we're going to be promulgating your invention?

 

[pgriz]

Does anyone even remember the original meaning of "google"? As in the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros? Which sounds uncomfortably like a political convention that one strayed into.

 

[sm4him]

Lessee. Bulls produce bullate (think of condensate), and a bunch of that could be though of a "combo" so combobullate would be a collection of bull by-products, and then someone missed the double EL so it became combobulate. Yeah - I think that's it.

I am horrended by that extraordinarily elaborate etymological extrapolation!

 

[tirediron]

Does anyone even remember the original meaning of "google"? As in the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros? Which sounds uncomfortably like a political convention that one strayed into.

Was it only 100 zeros? For some reason, I thought it was a million.

 

[pgriz]

Does anyone even remember the original meaning of "google"? As in the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros? Which sounds uncomfortably like a political convention that one strayed into.

Was it only 100 zeros? For some reason, I thought it was a million.

Nah. But it was the largest named number that you could write out without using too many pages of paper.

 

[limr33 3]

"Horrend" can be used transitively or intransitively.

I horrend easily.
You horrend me with your shenanigans!

 

[pgriz]

Why not use "horrify" instead "horrend"? They seem equivalent to me, unless I'm being dense. There must be a nuance that is flitting above my head like an unreachable butterfly.

 

[limr33 3]

I don't think it was meant to fill a semantic hole. It was a silly conversation amongst tired language teachers and the result was us cackling like loons at the word horrend and it's variant, horrended. I think it started when my friend was musing about how it's 'horrify' and 'horrified' but then 'horrendous' instead of something like 'horrifous'. Or, if -ify is a verbal suffix, shouldn't it be 'horrous'? Was the root horr- or horrif-? If the root is horr- then where did the -endous come from instead of just the -ous? Maybe the root is horrend?

And so on.

 

[bribrius]

hey kids.... while i was contemplating the meaning of life earlier i noticed my wife bought a chocolate cake. while i am wondering why she didn't just bake one i have realized life just became a whole lot better suddenly.