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It seems like a lot of humor has an element of surprise. Sudden meanings, unexpected turns of the plot, language unexpected given the context (impolite language in polite context, technical in a no...
The quoted definition appears to answer your question already. An 300 ml cup of water is full if and only if it contains exactly 300 ml water. There's no mystery there, if you think of a cup the i...
The oldest known usage of "nifty" is in an American poem from 1868. If you read the poem at this link, you'll find that that author found it useful to comment on the meaning of the word inside the...
Asking for translations is a common and normal technique that novice language students use to learn their language of choice. This allows them to connect and transfer some of their existing languag...
Devalue is commonly used to mean diminish value. Seems like the prefix re- is sometimes used with opposite effect to de-, as in reinforce meaning to increase force or refried meaning more fried. ...
Everyone knows what "nifty" is. It's obvious, isn't it? A thing which possesses nift. But what is this mysterious nift? Looking at things that are considered nifty, I cannot quite come up with a g...
Following an earlier comment which indicated that this could be a typo for a "roach colony", @msh210 was able to confirm that this 1980 edition of the book indeed had a "roach colony" where the 198...
Lawrence Sanders, Caper, 1980. 1987 paperback edition, page 61: We saw crumbling walls, decayed ceilings, cracked plumbing fixtures, exposed electrical wiring. We saw one room that appeared to h...
You can express the same meaning as "closed, but not locked with a key" with: "Die Tür ist zugezogen" (if the door was deliberately closed) "Die Tür ist ins Schloss gefallen" (if you did not cl...
I was trying to explain to someone that my door can only be opened with a key, regardless of whether the door is locked or simply closed. I figured schließen would fail to express that unambiguous...
Maybe https://quillbot.com/? I haven't used it much myself, but it might perhaps be handy. It can paraphrase, check grammar etc. Trying it out with your sentence as-is, it proposes to paraphrase i...
I think these sort under the "too broad" category and should be closed. Questions should ideally have some lasting value to future readers, meaning that they must be rather specific. It is fine to...
I can confirm that that usage is also common in Italian, but not only to show exasperation. It's a way to "boost" the emotional connection between the speakers and emphasize a sentence. It's a way ...
As the title says. Background I often find myself in the need of building an English sentence that I almost know how to get right. The scaffolding is there, but there are maybe one or two words ...
Markdown doesn't work, but HTML does. The HTML source for the following is taken from the question ("preferred solution"): This is a sentence with 中文 characters 日本語が分かりません
I realize that we don't have an official stance on translation questions, so I am looking for community feedback. Should translation questions of words/phrases be considered off-topic?
Here's the image of the humourous 'translations', and my wife has helped me 'untranslate' some of them, but we're stuck on some: Bill Gates has released Windows in a Bengali version called JAN...
My own experience has been that: You can definitely learn a lot by only listening/reading, never speaking You will still gain some ability to speak/write even though you never practice it It w...
An eponym is the thing after which something else is named. For example, the linguistical concept of eggcorns is named after the word eggcorn, hence the word eggcorn is the eponym of the concept. ...
The term for this is autological word. An autological word (also called homological word) is a word that expresses a property that it also possesses (e.g., "word" is a word, "noun" is a noun, "E...
Some words are examples of the concept they name. Examples: "Word" is a word. "Noun" is a noun. "Eggcorn" is an eggcorn (a mistaken word that sounds like and has some connection to another wor...
When we launched this community, we did not yet have the ability to set different reputation grants for different categories. We've had this for a while but we failed to follow up before now, sorr...
It seems that people used to say "listen to" and "hear" television, a holdover from radio, and that that gave way to "watch" and "see" over time. Has anyone any information on the timeline of this ...
The term "multiligualism" is generally used to characterize the linguistic capabilities of a single speaker. If the person uses exactly two (or at least two) languages, they are bilinguial even if...
In Icelandic, you are, I suppose, more likely to refer to a single person and their family, than to the family without naming any single person as well. Random example from the web: "Fjölskylda Ei...
