Posts by matthewsnyder
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...
English speakers from certain areas, in particular British, seem to add an extra r sound after vowels. For example: Idea -> idea-r Drawing -> draw-r-ing China -> China-r What is th...
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 original meaning of humor of course refers to the obsolete theory of the four humors and their effect on human temperament. I'm not asking about that. It appears that initially, the meaning sh...
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. ...
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. ...
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...
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...
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...
This is not something unique to Chinese, it is most commonly seen with British speakers: https://languages.codidact.com/posts/288307 The Chinese were historically much more exposed to British, in ...
