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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.
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