Stan Carey

"Hiking boots" has the same problem -- the boots aren't themselves hiking, they're boots for use in hiking. That's another noun-noun compound. "Mixed-breed puppy" is, to me, not such a clear case ("breed" is clearly originally a noun, but maybe this use is common enough to have converted). But you don't need to use spurious examples -- in another comment, you provided a very genuine one: "red" and "wooden" are both clearly adjectives, and their ordering cannot vary. This is a well-known example of a somewhat-but-not-entirely mysterious phenomenon in linguistics. Here's a nice recent writeup of what I think is a related phenomenon: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/cutthroat-compounds-in-engl… . This one consists of the observation that words like "kickass" and "pickpocket" are suppressed (not illegal, but suppressed) in English because they conflict with our tendency toward right-headedness (that is, in any English compound, the "essence" of the compound should be found at the right end). Instead, we incline more to compounds like "bank robber" or "nose-thumbing" ("engage in a bit of nose-thumbing"). Someone else in this thread already mentioned that they see adjective ordering as a question of which adjectives are more essential to the whole. My problem with your comments here is that you're making arguments based on obviously spurious tests unrelated to the claims you then try to follow (um, lead) with. It's analogous to saying "We need to stop…

https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2015/12/09/raising-the-question-of-beg… "There was once a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish, it was so fragile. And I fear that it will not survive the winter."

Thinking about language usage as "wrong" or "right" might not be the most helpful way to think about it: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/descriptivism-vs-prescripti… (p.s. not saying there's no wrong or right when it comes to ideas themselves)

Merriam-Webster has the verb "to buffalo" as going back to 1891, with no notion of it being specific to any particular locale. The OED says it's "North American slang," while Google's dictionary calls it "informal". I've certainly heard it in conversation on the east and west coasts of the U.S. (albeit very occasionally). [Added:] For all sorts of American examples over the decades, see https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2018/04/23/buffaloed-by-the-verb-buffa…

"literally" was used the way teenagers use them now in old literature too: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/literally-centuries-of-non-… But yeah people using this term still grinds my gears.

You opened a can of worms for me. As a non-native (but very comfortable) English speaker I wasn't quite sure about the pronunciation of "eschew" because I can't remember to have ever used it, or when I last heard it. https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/how-do-you-pronounce-eschew… Turns out there is a multitude of pronunciations to choose from.

> Too, the database state is inspected to check for any side effects. This is such a weird sentence. "Too,"? Replace with "Also," https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/too-its-a-strange-usage/

Yes I was kind of wondering if this is a new thing, like because[0,1,2] or if it's canonical English. I was looking for an analysis like [0] on this, but I couldn't find any. 0: http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/72252671648/why-the-new-because-is… 1: http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/because-as-a-prepos… 2: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/because-has-become-a-prepos…

From the HN "Boustrophedon" discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15539373 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15547162 DonHopkins on Oct 25, 2017 | prev | next [–] Scott Kim has a wonderful talent at designing "ambigrams". Check out his classic book "Inversions" and his gallery of more recent work! http://www.scottkim.com.previewc40.carrierzone.com/inversions/ An inversion is a word or name written so it reads in more than one way. For instance, the word Inversions above is my name upside down. Douglas Hofstadter coined ambigram as the generic word for inversions. I drew my first inversion in 1975 in an art class, wrote a book called Inversions in 1981, and am now doing animated inversions. A Scott Kim Ambigram for "George Hart": https://www.georgehart.com/scott-kim.html John Maeda's Blog: Scott Kim’s Ambigrams https://maeda.pm/2017/12/17/scott-kims-ambigrams/ The Inversions of Scott Kim: https://www.anopticalillusion.com/2012/04/the-inversions-of-scott-kim/ Channel: An Optical Illusion » scott kim: https://optical397.rssing.com/chan-26600952/index-latest.php Scott Kim’s symmetrical alphabet: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/10/18/scott-kims-symmetrical-alph… Typography Two Ways: Calligraphy With a Twist https://www.wired.com/2009/05/pl-arts-6/

Oligarchy means government by the few: https://www.etymonline.com/word/oligarchy (although today we tend to use it as a synonym for plutocracy, which is government by the rich). So the opposite of oligarchy would be democracy. Aristocracy means government by the best: https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=aristocracy, so kakistocracy would be its strict opposite. In fact, it was probably coined for that reason, since the people who invented it would have known that "aristos" means "best" in Greek. (Edit: the Wikipedia page says that.) "Best" in aristocracy doesn't mean what we nowadays mean by that word, which is "most qualified". That would be meritocracy. That's strictly a modern notion, in fact a postwar one, and it has not aged well: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&q… Actually it was a satirical creation to begin with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy, and the British academic who invented the word would have been aware that he was sticking a Latin and a Greek root together, making the satire funnier, since in classical terms only an ignoramus would do that. See https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/the-monstrous-indecency-of-… or, if you prefer, https://www.google.com/search?q=%22polyamory+is+wrong%22&source=ln… The…