Word or Words of the Day and Discussion

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that enjoys cooking.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
Not just Penrose, but M C Escher. Our son has a copy of the print of Escher's never ending staircase. Amazed me every time I'd walk in his room and see it on the wall.
 
Not just Penrose, but M C Escher. Our son has a copy of the print of Escher's never ending staircase. Amazed me every time I'd walk in his room and see it on the wall.

Years ago one of our local papers used to carry "Believe It Or Not" by Ripley. Every so often that staircase would show up. There is also another one that is a spiral. Is it spiraling inward or outward? :angel:
 
I am going to be using this one:

thagomizer:
(anatomy) An arrangement of spikes found on the tails of various
stegosaurs.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thagomizer>
But you left out the best part:
Etymology

Coined by Gary Larson in 1982. His comic strip shows a caveman giving a lecture illustrating this part of a dinosaur, with the caption "Now this end is called the thagomizer... after the late Thag Simmons". See -ize, -er.

The term "thagomizer" has been in use for quite a while, as a joke, but it is now the official term.
 
morpheme:
(linguistics) The smallest linguistic unit within a word that can carry
a meaning, such as "un-", "break", and "-able" in the word
"unbreakable".
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/morpheme>
Actually, a morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit that carries meaning. The example is made up of three morphs and each morph represents one morpheme. There are free morphemes, bound morphemes, derivational morphemes, inflectional morphemes, and even cranberry morphemes. One can't study morphology without having had the difference between a morph and a morpheme pounded into one's head. A morph is a formal unit with a physical shape. A morpheme is an abstract unit of meaning. Now doesn't that distinction make perfect sense?
 
Actually, a morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit that carries meaning. The example is made up of three morphs and each morph represents one morpheme. There are free morphemes, bound morphemes, derivational morphemes, inflectional morphemes, and even cranberry morphemes. One can't study morphology without having had the difference between a morph and a morpheme pounded into one's head. A morph is a formal unit with a physical shape. A morpheme is an abstract unit of meaning. Now doesn't that distinction make perfect sense?
Examples?
 
Actually, a morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit that carries meaning. The example is made up of three morphs and each morph represents one morpheme. There are free morphemes, bound morphemes, derivational morphemes, inflectional morphemes, and even cranberry morphemes. One can't study morphology without having had the difference between a morph and a morpheme pounded into one's head. A morph is a formal unit with a physical shape. A morpheme is an abstract unit of meaning. Now doesn't that distinction make perfect sense?
TL--an example of an inflectional morpheme would be the ending added. When you add -ed to a word to form the past tense, that is an inflectional morph to indicate physically the past tense and the morpheme is that it conveys the action happened in the past (abstract). However, you can also have -t as the morph to indicate past tense and the abstract unit of meaning is that the action happened in the past. How one adds inflection in Swedish is a better example, but it is after 2 a.m. and I've had a couple of glasses of wine and can't think of any examples in Swedish except the word for house but can't remember all the suffixes added and don't wish to embarrass myself on a public forum! A cranberry morpheme is more fun. There are two morphs cran and berry. Cran as a morpheme is a very abstract unit of meaning because it really doesn't carry a meaning, but combined with the two syllable morph berry we understand it. Other cranberry morphemes would be similar words that when broken down don't make sense and are not used in other instances (unlike -un, -like, -ed and the like).
 
Back
Top Bottom