The Grammar of Politics Thread
In American English we would pronounce it if it's singular but if it's plural the /t/ disappears. Interesting. Perhaps there are some dialects of American English where that's not the case so I'm mostly speaking for myself here.
Interesting dichotomy.
I didn't get this one when I heard it about 25 years ago, but I feel I should get half points because I was looking at the right ending. Probably from playing scrabble at a high-ish amateur level.
I'll tell you now that it is longer than 10 letters.
Is the ending "-ings"?
Chez, thank you for introducing me to a brand new experience - being in agreement with you.
In "often" everything is pronounced. But with "gifts" (in the plural), I think it's going to be pretty slight. Something is going on there but it's definitely not a fully realized /t/.
Chez, thank you for introducing me to a brand new experience - being in agreement with you.
It'll get boring after a while
Strength was what I was looking for and I didn't consider making it a plural noun----but I don't think the "ng" is a single phoneme there like it is in a word like "tangy"-- there is a 'release' with the g when the tongue moves from your velum to between your teeth-- you could pronounce it without the release but no one does.In "scripts", the t there is just silent. "Scrimps"
Do you pronounce "scripts" the same as "scrips"? I don't think I do.
Definitely sounds like it could be some country bumpkin thing. Like rural Tennessee or some ****.
Yeah I'm pretty sure I do. I might try producing some spectrograms later to see what is going on there but I don't have an external microphone with me so it might be difficult.
How many letters?
Longer than obfuscatingly? I don't know if that is really proper English, though there are plenty of uses online.
How many letters?
Longer than obfuscatingly? I don't know if that is really proper English, though there are plenty of uses online.
15 letters. It is an adjective. Think suitable prefixes and endings for maximum padding. Or in other words, find a long enough noun or verb and then pad it out.
How many letters?
Longer than obfuscatingly? I don't know if that is really proper English, though there are plenty of uses online.
But zero hits in the COCA.
Upon googling, there is a really obscure answer with 17 letters which is definitely not the word I'm thinking of. There is also a second pretty obscure answer with 15 letters which is also not the word I'm thinking of. The word I am thinking of is not hugely obscure, certainly not for its length, i.e. it is gettable for the posters ITT.
The Corpus of Contemporary America English hosted by BYU-- it's a 1 billion word sampling of American english that allows you to search for word usage and phraseology. It requires a login to access but no academic affiliation. I use it all the time to settle debates about what is "correct"-- since there isn't really such a thing only what is used and what isn't.
It's how I was determining that "could care less" is used 11x more than "couldn't care less" in American english.
How would a longer length calibrate how obscure a word is?
Obviously longer words tend to be more obscure (i.e. encountered less frequently in speech or writing) than shorter words, so when gauging the relative obscurity of a word it makes sense to weigh it on a scale of words of similar length. "Going" is more common than "circumlocutory", but that doesn't tell us much about the obscurity of the latter, relatively speaking.
