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 miss read

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

your in third place. Position 5, fifth

position 197

197 pretty simple

so why do positions 1&2 give us first and second

shouldn't they be oneth and twoth?

well maybe. But English loves

collateral adjectives. Adjectives derived from different groups 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. Bee's 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 stressed in the wrong place

we could rhyme them if we pronounced it not identical

but instead identical. With that in mind

orange does have perfect rhyme's they just happened to be extremely obscure

like blorenge a hill in Wale's

silver also has a perfect rhyme chilver a female lamb

think fact delineated even more words we often say don't have rhymes but

actually do. Point is orange does have

perfect rhymes and even if it didn't well

that wouldn't make it special. Sure monosyllabic words

tend to rhyme with other words it's believed there are only about 100 single syllable

words that have no rhyme

for instance wolf, sixth, depth and filmed

but considering words of all lengths

it's been calculated that most english words

don't rhyme with anything don't believe me

well leave a comment below the word comment

rhymes with nothing, nor does husband, sandwich

liquid, penguin, chimney, empty

and of course nothing rhymes with nothing

identical rhymes are even more perfect

than perfect rhymes but they become so identical at that point

it's a little obvious and not really appreciated

identical rhymes occur when the consonant sound before the final stressed vowel

between two words are also identical

sun and gun are perfect rhymes but gun

and begun are identical rhymes so are

offend and defend or homonyms like

son and sun you could call the people who watch over and monitor the police

the police police who watches over them well

the police police police of course you can string together

any number of police's and always create a sensible

though clunky title you can even use

the word police by itself to create a grammatical sentance it takes

eight of them police police police police police police police

police police here's what the sentence means police police

which police police police watch over police police

add any multiple of three more police to this stream

and you preserve the grammar the most that fit on Twitter

is 20 if you say police enough times it starts to sound like its not even a

real word

that is called jamais vu the reverse of deja vu

when something familiar all of a sudden feels new

and novel I've covered it before but let's be clear

if you don't practice obediency to the police

you may wind up in J L escape and you're an SKP

letters whose names said together some similar to words

are called Gramograms. You can't hear

a pterodactyl urinate because it's silent p

but every letter in the alphabet is silent sometimes

and some letters are used more frequently than other letters

in english words Scrabble provides more of those letters and people guess them more

often when playing hangman. Next time you play hangman you can take advantage of this

people will guess more letters incorrectly if you choose a short word

that has few different letters. John McLuhan

ran 15 million computer simulations of hangman

and he found that the most difficult word for people to guess

is jazz

phantonyms aren't ghostly undead words they're words that appear to mean one thing but

actually mean something completely different

enervate sounds like it means to fill with energy but it actually means to

drain of energy to weaken

Noisome appears to mean really noisy but it actually describes something that has an

extremely offensive smell

In 2005 the New Oxford American Dictionary published a new word

esquivalience

the said it meant the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities

but it didn't they made it up

as a copyright trap if anyone copied their dictionary

the stealer wouldn't be able to explain how esquivalience wound up in their dictionary

without admitting that they had copied it. Map makers often insert fake

features for the same purposes Street and towns that only exist

to trap copiers that only exist on paper

paper Street & Paper Towns the author of The Trivia encyclopedia even placed a fake fact

in one of his books because he was certain

that the Trivial Pursuit board game was taking their questions

from his book sure enough later the board game included his fake fact

as a real question. Similarly the esquivalinece trap was used to catch

Dictionary.com

but here's the thing: authorities don't tend to respect copyright traps

built out of fake facts

facts cannot be copyrighted they belong to and can be used by

all of us. US federal courts have argued that

fake facts presented as real are not protected because if they were

no one could share real true information without fear

of sharing something protected by copyright: that said

stylistic decisions like how the facts are selected or arranged or articulated

can be copyrighted when the automobile association was caught mimicking

the stylistic features of ordnance survey's they were forced to pay up

twenty million pounds

you cannot own a fact

and you cannot own a lie you made up if everyone believes it

but you can own how you tell them

puns are great, and in 'The Pun Also Rises'

John Pollock relates a fantastic story. Puns can be traced

all the way back to be epic of Gilgamesh where people are warned

of an upcoming giant flood they are told that the skies will soon rain

kibtu and kukku words that mean

corn and the sound corn makes when falling on the ground

but in the story the words are actually puns

on words for misery and suffering

people who got the pun prepared and saved their own lives

but those who fail to recognize the pun perished in the flood

which means the very oldest pun on record

was literally corny. Is that ironic?

no. Irony is one of the most

debated figures of speech the oatmeal famously lamented that if anyone refers

to anything as being

ironic the hip thing to do right now is to call it out as being not ironic

situational irony is what we tend to mean when we say something is ironic

the oatmeal defines it as when something happens in a reversal of expectations occurs

dig.com's recent article on the subject uses an even stricter definition

saying situational irony is a direct result of an

action intended to produce the opposite effect

their example is really good if the elevators

at in elevator repair school are out of order

that's not really situational irony. Instead

what would be really ironic is that if the elevators were our border because the

experts at the school had done something to them

they believed would make them run forever and never be

out of order. Alanis Morissette wrote a song called

ironic whose lyrics contain situations but

famously no situational ironing

people love pointing this out.

A traffic jam when you're already late. Not situational irony

that's just a bummer or a sad coincidence. Patrick Sastles cleverly

rewrote the song's lyrics to contain situations that are actually

situationally ironic for example a traffic jam

when you're already late to receive an award from the municipal planning board

for reducing the city's automobile congestion

eighty percent, or a black fly in your chardonnay

poured to celebrate the successful fumigation of your recently purchased vineyard in southern France

now that's what I call situational irony

but regardless of what Alanis intended

a close reading of the song's lyrics reveals that irony

is occurring just not the situational kind it's hip to argue about

instead her song is all about dramatic irony

when someone is often hilariously

unaware of the significance of an event while other people are

take a look at the lyrics for ironic the situations she describes our never

explicitly labeled

ironic at the most they're simply stories and similes and metaphors for it

life

and she adds later life is also

ironic dramatically ironic these things sound like crudy scenarios but they

actually figure they actually make sense

ironic is not a list of examples of situational irony

instead it's a treatise on dramatic irony

the difference between what life knows we need

and what we need think we need

what's ironic isn't 10,000 spoons when all you need is at knife it's the fact that

as Alanis believes you have all of those spoons

because unbeknownst to you but known by life what you really need right now

is only spoons or the last thing you need right now is a knife

on the subject of overanalyzing pop songs

analysis of dog mitochondrial DNA has revealed that

all dogs may be traceable to a localized event

the species is believed to have resulted from the domestication of

wolves about 11,000 to 16,000 years ago

in what is now southwestern China

so baha men to answer your question it was the Mesolithic southwestern Chinese

who let the dogs out

and as always thanks for watching