Unrelated but I have the exact same clock pictured in the article … Weird.Does it go tock-tick?
I suppose it depends on what part of the clocks action you first wake up during.
No fucking way, it’s exactly the same!
Trying to explain this to non native English speakers at my work is hilarious. It’s a rule that I don’t even know the parameters of. It just is!
I now want to read a small story that actively violates these kind of rules.
I heard that child Tolkien told his mother he’d “written a story about a green, great dragon” and when his mum told him it had to be a “great, green dragon” he was so put off that he didn’t write again for years.
So maybe track down that story?
stupid-big-ol-quadratic-yellow-bikinibottom-sponge-fuckin ass
Bad boy, fat lip, cat toy, sad song, ad lib, bat wing, say so, far right, bar fight, fort night, lock pick
What about cat nip?
My mom, who learned english later in life always says “nip cat”, maybe unconsciously trying to follow the rule?
It’s because “catnip” is one word.
Anything can be one word if you remove the spaces 🤷♂️
But it started as one word, it wasn’t made into one word later afaik. The words also aren’t interchangeable. The thing being talked about is fundamentally nip, not a cat. In a saying like tick tock, the tick part and tock part are interchangeable. In “big bad” they’re both referring to the wolf so again they’re interchangeable. In this case the “nip” part is the same as the wolf part in “big bad wolf”.
If I were to say wolf nip, you’d think of a version of catnip for wolves. If I were to say nip wolf, you’d think of of a wolf that bites people.
Technically it started as two words… cat + abbreviation of the latin name (nepeta).
I don’t know how i feel about this pedantic argument being my very first contribution to Lemmy, but here we are.
I think you misunderstand what I mean. It comes from 2 separate words being put together, but as far as I’m aware it’s always been a compound word, as in it’s always been called catnip, not cat nip.
Australia disagrees.
That’s interesting! I’ve heard aussies refer to that campaign/guideline a lot and I’ve always heard it as “slip slap slop”, which follows the rule but doesn’t make sense as the order of activities. I don’t know whether they reverted to the vowel order when talking casually, or if they said it right and I subconsciously ‘corrected’ it in my memory.
I fucking love linguistics oh my god. This is amazing
You should check out this book: Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme―And Other Oddities of the English Language
It was absolutely fascinating. Who knew there’re very good reasons why English is so messed up?
English is hard, but can be figured out through tough thorough thought though.
What a load of flam-flim.
I’m from Germany, so no native English speaker. Why does it still sound wrong in my ears? Is it the way we have to open the mouth to make those sounds, and it feels unnatural in a different order?
English is basically bastardized German, so that’s probably it
This is about the most useless thing I will learn all week. Interesting, but utterly useless.
Not if you’re an EFL (English as foreign language) teacher and you needed a way to help your students understand adjective placement better: )
