Sharing some of my intriguing English language finds, obscure linguistic topics, geeky grammar 'rules', wonderful British accents, controversial phonetic theories, and myriad other topics about /ˈbrɪt.ɪʃ ˈɪŋ.ɡlɪʃ / that have left me mesmerised for a lifetime.

The odd one out: ad lib

Ad-lib means to do something spontaneously, to do something without prior planning or practice. The word should be hyphenated as in ad-lib when used as an adjective, verb or noun, and not hyphenated as in ad lib when used as an adverb.

The comedians had to speak ad lib when suddenly pulled on stage, and instantaneously, their ad-lib jokes were received with uproarious laughter from the audience. Once they had ad-libbed a few final words to thank their fans who had enjoyed their ad-libs they went backstage in great relief.

Litotes

Litotes is a figure of speech and a form of understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite. It is a way of saying something by using double negatives.

The double negative ("ain't" and "half") is used to emphasize the intensity of the heat, implying that it is extremely or unbearably hot.

'Embiggen' is a perfectly cromulent word

The words 'embiggen' and 'cromulent' were introduced in 'Lisa the Iconoclast', an episode of the Fox animated television series The Simpsons that first aired on 18 February 1996. Coinage of the word 'cromulent' has been attributed to the television writer David X. Cohen, while 'embiggen' was coined by writer Dan Greaney.

Educationally sound

Words that contain all five vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and the diphthong "y", are not common in English language.

I unintentionally came across this phenomenon which unequivocally is marked as a geeky topic. Their practical value is only subordinately important. By putting the spotlight on these rarities, I fear inducing uncomplimentary comments of non-grammarians, but that's the story of my life.

Punctuation

UK - University of Oxford Style Guide:

Use single quotation marks for direct speech or a quote, and double quotation marks for direct speech or a quote within that.

Place any punctuation which does not belong to the quote outside the quotation marks (except closing punctuation if the end of the quote is also the end of the sentence).

US - Associated Press Style Guide:

Use double quotes (“) for initial quotations, then single quotes (‘) for quotations within the initial quotation.

Punctuation goes within the quotation marks when they apply to the quoted material. They go outside when they apply to the whole sentence.

Indeed

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; If what is said is not what is meant, then what ought to be done remains undone.

—CONFUCIUS

Hapax legomenon

A hapax legomenon (ἅπαξ λεγόμενον; ‘said only once’, is a word or an expression that occurs only once within a context: either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text. The word quizzaciously was cited by Vsauce host Michael Stevens in 2015 as an example of a hapax legomenon, with Google only returning one search result for the word at the time despite being included in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The rank-frequency plot for words occurring in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick shows that 'the' occurs most frequently. Around 44% of the novel consists of words that occur only once and are hapax legomena (indicated in red).

Not a Scrabble word

With three letters ‘y’, ‘syzygy’ is a word you don’t hear every day.

It means as much as entities -abstract or real - that have become interconnected, despite their differences.

In astronomy, it describes three celestial bodies lined up in a row.

In biology, the term describes the pairing of homologous chromosomes that occur during meiotic cell division.

In maths, syzygy is an object defined in terms of a polynomial ring of n variables over a field k.

In poetry, a syzygy is the combination of two metrical feet into a single unit.

In philosophy, the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov used the word to signify ‘unity-friendship-community’. In Gnosticism, syzygy is a divine pair of eons, complementary to one another. And in psychology, the term refers to a union between opposing forces or elements, used by C G Jung.

But what makes this word exciting for me, is the fact that the pronunciation of all ‘y’s are different.The first is pronounced as a near-close near-front unrounded vowel, the second as a mid-central vowel (schwa), and the third as a close-front unrounded vowel.

Age is but a number: Appellatives of age groups

Just a glimpse of light shone through the curtained window this morning when I peeked at my room while stretching my legs as I woke up after a short but deep sleep. I had worked throughout the night, hunchbacked in front of my window to the world, while sitting in complete darkness. A short tap on the keyboard lit up the screen and the room just enough to sustain my nyctophelic realm. ‘Tomorrow I will start doing things differently’, I heard myself saying. Habitually I opened a new tab looking for the latest news feed, and while skimming though chunks of text, there it was: octogenarian. A real word, written by a real person, in an actual article published by a well-respected newsletter. Copy and paste into the search field of Cambridge Dictonary: a person who is between 80 and 89 years old. Seriously? I asked ChatGPT to come up with the equivalent word for age groups of people in their 10s until their 100s, and surely it did. Denarians, vicenarians, tricenarians, quadragenarians, quinquagenarians, sexagenarians, septuagenarians, octogenarians, nonagenarians, centenarians, semi-supercentenarians, and supercentenarians. The whole gamut of age cohorts indicated by their proper appellative unfolded right in front of me. Words, that I thought of as fabricated, appeared to exist in dictionaries. I looked at the right-bottom corner of my screen. It was 06:52. A whole day lay ahead to contemplate about the mesmerizing world of lexicography.

Forget brontobyte - Meet the new SI prefixes

Let's refresh our memory a bit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values, typically 0 and 1. One byte is a combination of eight bits.

Our appetite for more bytes grows exponentially. To support the needs to express quantities of digital information using orders of magnitude in excess of 1024, and to prevent unofficial prefix names, such as brontobyte and hellabyte of being de facto adopted by the general public, new SI prefixes have been named by resolution of the General Conference on Weights and Measures (27th meeting) on 15-18 November 2022.

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