Hey, Vsauce. Michael here In 1934 Webster's dictionary gave birth to a new word by mistake. Their chemistry editor Austin N Paterson submitted a simple entry: "D or D abbreviation for density". Nothing wrong with that, but the entry was misread and 'dord' was added to the dictionary. 'Dord' was an accidental word for
thirteen years before the mistake was discovered and its wordship revoked. Let's have fun
with words today, but first, what's the deal with first? Or for that matter, second? If you were in
position three you're in third place. Position 5, fifth. Position 197 one hundred and ninety-seventh. Pretty simple. So why do positions 1 and 2 give us first and second? Shouldn't they be 'oneth' and 'twoth'? Well, maybe. But English loves collateral adjectives. Adjectives derived
from different roots than the nouns they describe. There are plenty of
derived adjectives, don't get me wrong. A bunch of clouds make the day cloudy, friends are friendly, poets are poetic. Things with a lot of
smell to them are smelly but the Moon is not Moonly. The Moon is lunar. Collateral adjectives are everywhere. Mouth stuff is oral. Bees are apian. Some nouns have both. Fathers can be fatherly or paternal . And a setting filled with fog can be foggy or brumous. It's often said that no word rhymes with orange. Is that true? Well, rhyming can be controversial because
it often depends on pronunciation, accent and can be forced. Especially if
you use multiple words, you can force orange to rhyme with
door hinge, if you want. But what we want is a perfect rhyme. A perfect rhyme is what occurs between
two words like tickle and pickle. They are perfect
rhymes because the final stressed vowel sound and all the sounds
afterwards are identical. Identical doesn't rhyme with pickle,
because even though they both end with 'ickle', identical has it stress
in the wrong place. We could rhyme them if we pronounced it
not identical but instead identical. With that in mind, orange does have perfect rhymes. They
just happen to be extremely obscure, like 'Blorenge', a hill in Wales. Silver also has a perfect rhyme: chilver, a female lamb. Think Fact delineated even more words we
often say don't have rhymes but actually do. Point is, orange does have perfect rhymes, and even if it didn't, well, that wouldn't make it special. Sure, monosyllabic words tend to rhyme with other words. It's believed
there are only about 100 single syllable words that have no rhyme. For instance, wolf, sixth, depth and filmed. But considering words of all lengths, it's been calculated that most English words don't rhyme with anything. Don't believe me? Well, leave a comment below. The word
'comment' rhymes with nothing, nor does husband, sandwich, liquid, penguin, chimney, empty, and, of course, 'nothing' rhymes with nothing. Identical rhymes are even more perfect than perfect rhymes but they become so
identical at that point it's a little obvious and not really
appreciated. Identical rhymes occur when the consonant
sound before the final stressed vowel between two words are also identical. Sun and gun are perfect rhymes. But gun and begun are identical rhymes. So are offend and defend, or homonyms like son and sun. You could call the people
who watch over, and monitor, the police 'the police police'. Who watches over them? Well, 'the police police police', of course. You can
string together any number of police's and always create
a sensible, though clunky, title. You can even use the word police by itself to create a
grammatical sentence. It takes eight of them. Police police police police police police police police. Here's what the sentence
means. Police police, which police police police watch over,
police police. Add any multiple of three more police to
this stream and you preserve the grammar. The most
that fit on Twitter is 20. If you say police enough times
it starts to sound like its not even a real word. That is called jamais vu, the reverse of deja vu, when something familiar all of a sudden
feels new and novel. I've covered it before but
let's be clear. If you don't practice obediency to the police you may wind up in J L. Escape, and you're an SKP. Letters, whose names said together some
similar to words, are called Gramograms. You can't hear a pterodactyl urinate because it's
silent 'p'. But every letter in the alphabet is
silent sometimes. And some letters are used more
frequently than other letters in English words. Scrabble provides more
of those letters and people guess them more often when playing hangman. Next time you play hangman you can take advantage of this. People will guess more letters
incorrectly if you choose a short word that has few different letters. John McLuhan ran 15 million computer simulations of
hangman and he found that the most difficult word for
people to guess is jazz. Phantonyms aren't ghostly undead words, they're words
that appear to mean one thing but actually mean something completely different. Enervate sounds like it means to fill with energy but it actually means to drain of energy, to weaken. Noisome appears to mean really noisy but it actually describes something that has an extremely offensive smell. In 2005, the New Oxford American Dictionary
published a new word: esquivalience. They said it meant the wilful avoidance of
one's official responsibilities. But it didn't. They made it up as a copyright trap. If anyone copied
their dictionary the stealer wouldn't be able to explain
how esquivalience wound up in their dictionary without admitting that they had copied it. Map makers often insert fake features for the same purposes. Streets and
towns that only exist to trap copiers that only exist on paper, Paper Streets & Paper Towns. The author of
The Trivia encyclopedia even placed a fake fact in one of his books because he
was certain that the Trivial Pursuit board game was
taking their questions from his book. Sure enough, later the
board game included his fake fact as a real question. Similarly, the esquivalinece trap was used to catch Dictionary.com. But here's the thing: authorities don't
tend to respect copyright traps built out of fake facts. Facts cannot be copyrighted. They belong to, and can be used by, all of us. US federal courts have argued that fake facts presented as real are not
protected, because if they were, no one could share real true information
without fear of sharing something protected by copyright. That said, stylistic decisions like how the facts
are selected or arranged or articulated can be copyrighted. When the automobile
association was caught mimicking the stylistic features of ordnance
surveys, they were forced to pay up twenty million pounds. You cannot own a fact and you cannot own a lie you made up, if
everyone believes it. But you can own how you tell them. Puns are great, and in 'The Pun Also Rises' John Pollock relates a fantastic story.
Puns can be traced all the way back to be epic of Gilgamesh,
where people are warned of an upcoming giant flood. They are
told that the skies will soon rain kibtu and kukku. Words that mean corn and the sound corn makes when
falling on the ground. But in the story, the words are actually
puns on words for misery and suffering. People who got the pun prepared and
saved their own lives, but those who failed to recognise the pun
perished in the flood, which means the very oldest pun on record was literally corny. Is that ironic? No. Irony is one of the most debated figures of speech. The Oatmeal[.com]
famously lamented that if anyone refers to anything as being ironic, the hip thing to do right now is
to call it out as being not ironic. Situational irony is what we
tend to mean when we say something is ironic. The Oatmeal defines it as "when something
happens and a reversal of expectations occurs". Dig.com's recent article on the
subject uses an even stricter definition, saying "situational irony is a direct
result of an action intended to produce the opposite effect". Their example is really good. If the elevators at in elevator repair school are out of order, that's not really situational irony.
Instead, what would be really ironic is that if the
elevators were out of order because the experts at the school had done something to them they believed would make them run forever
and never be out of order. Alanis Morissette wrote a
song called 'Ironic', whose lyrics contain situations but famously no situational irony. People love pointing this out. "A traffic jam when you're already late."
Not situational irony, that's just a bummer or a sad
coincidence. Patrick Cassels cleverly rewrote the song's lyrics to contain
situations that are actually situationally ironic. For example, a traffic jam when you're already late to receive an
award from the municipal planning board for reducing the city's automobile
congestion eighty percent, or a black fly in your
chardonnay poured to celebrate the successful fumigation of your recently purchased vineyard in southern France. Now that's what I call situational irony. But regardless of what Alanis intended, a close reading of the song's lyrics
reveals that irony is occurring, just not the situational
kind it's hip to argue about. Instead, her song is all about dramatic irony. When someone is, often hilariously, unaware of the significance of an event,
while other people are. Take a look at the lyrics for 'Ironic'.
The situations she describes are never explicitly labeled ironic. At the most, they're simply
stories and similes and metaphors for it: life. And, she adds later, life is also ironic. Dramatically ironic. These
things sound like cruddy scenarios, but they actually figure, they actually make sense. Ironic is not a list of examples of
situational irony. Instead, it's a treatise on dramatic irony, the difference between what life knows we need and what we think we need. What's ironic isn't 10,000 spoons when
all you need is at knife. It's the fact that, as Alanis believes, you have all of
those spoons, because unbeknownst to you, but known by life, what you really need right now is only spoons. Or, the last thing you
need right now is a knife. On the subject of overanalysing pop songs, analysis of dog mitochondrial DNA
has revealed that all dogs may be traceable to a localised event. The species is believed to have resulted
from the domestication of wolves about 11,000 to 16,000 years ago, in what is now Southwestern China. So, Baha Men, to answer your question, it was the Mesolithic Southwestern Chinese who let the dogs out. And as always, thanks for watching
Do you think that Pat just really likes to write articles or is he getting cash for that?
My boy made it big!
It's more than new... it's old.
Excuse.
Yo how much do you think crabby patty cassels hassled this urkel twerking shiva to give him this shoutout, my guess is cash
Not everything has to be more than something
He deserves....so much more than this