Ryusenshi wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 2:05 pmWord of the day for me: a stan, meaning an obsessive fan of something (particularly a music genre or artist). Related: to stan, to obsessively follow something. It comes from the song "Stan" by Eminem. Considering how the song ends, this is pretty terrifying.
Also used as a verb. "We stan a queen" is a consecrated phrase in youthspeak.
The first time I saw the term "Bernie stans" in 2016, I was baffled, since "the 'stans" is a nickname for the countries of Central Asia. I thought they were talking about areas of the country where Sanders supporters were heavily concentrated.
Not really an innovative usage, more a stylistic inconsistency:
I just bought something from an online store. At one point, the store showed me the page where I had to choose a payment option. Different payment options were accompanied by short explanations of how they worked. And in some of those explanations, I, the customer, was addressed as "Sie" (German formal address), while in others, I was addressed as "Du" (German informal address). Apparently, some of the explanatory notes had been written by marketing copy writers who were more old-school and formal, while others had been written by marketing copy writers who were trying harder to be hip and all that.
"Protesters reportedly equipped with hammers and crowbars, donned in helmets and gas masks..."
The usage of "donned in" is novel to me. Like "wear" or "sport", "don" is an exclusively transitive verb that should need no preposition to take an object. I also came across examples of "donned with", which were similarly recent. (So far, nothing earlier than 2013.)
My daughter has a clear, hard, unflapped alveolar [d] for intervocalic /ð/, a feature I have heard from no one else here, in words like other and mother.
Linguoboy wrote: ↑Wed Jul 22, 2020 11:58 am
"Protesters reportedly equipped with hammers and crowbars, donned in helmets and gas masks..."
The usage of "donned in" is novel to me. Like "wear" or "sport", "don" is an exclusively transitive verb that should need no preposition to take an object. I also came across examples of "donned with", which were similarly recent. (So far, nothing earlier than 2013.)
"Donning" rather than "donned in" would be far more normal to me.
I think "to don" can be used any way you want, because nobody is familiar with it. It's like whom. Just sprinkle it wherever to show that you're smart. Next we'll see sentences like "He bedecked a sparkly cape."
Travis: does your daughter go to a school with lots of L2 English speakers? I've found that de-fricatized (is word?) /D/ is a feature of ESL English that very readily spreads to L1 speakers. There are studies of Asian Americans demonstrating that this change persists even among generations that grow up speaking only English fluently.
Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sat Jul 25, 2020 2:28 am
Travis: does your daughter go to a school with lots of L2 English speakers? I've found that de-fricatized (is word?) /D/ is a feature of ESL English that very readily spreads to L1 speakers. There are studies of Asian Americans demonstrating that this change persists even among generations that grow up speaking only English fluently.
Alyssa's school isn't one with many L2 English speakers to my knowledge. Also, the dialect here readily defricates initial /ð/, but as a dental or dentalveolar stop, nasal, or sibilant, depending on what it is adjacent to. What is atypical is to defricate it in other positions, or as an alveolar stop.
Yesterday a coworker gave a presentation via Zoom and I'd never heard so clearly how heavily he aspirates certain stops. Word-initial /k/ before back vowels consistently sounded like [kˣ], and his initial /h/ even tended toward [x]. /t/ and /p/ were fairly heavily aspirated, too, but not to the point of affrication. (He's from Michigan originally and visits often.)
Today a friend kept referring to the magazine she was reading as a "book". I was genuinely confused whether it was a periodical or a monograph.
Linguoboy wrote: ↑Thu Aug 20, 2020 5:07 pm
Today a friend kept referring to the magazine she was reading as a "book". I was genuinely confused whether it was a periodical or a monograph.
You may have already figured this out, but this is fashion terminology. It's long been standard to refer to fashion magazines as "books."
Linguoboy wrote: ↑Thu Aug 20, 2020 5:07 pm
Today a friend kept referring to the magazine she was reading as a "book". I was genuinely confused whether it was a periodical or a monograph.
You may have already figured this out, but this is fashion terminology. It's long been standard to refer to fashion magazines as "books."
Granted, my only familiarity with this term comes from The Devil Wears Prada, but I thought it referred specifically to the loosely-bound mock-up of an upcoming issue, not the printed final product.
I have been paying attention more closely to how other people speak, and it appears that a lot of people palatalize and affricate their /t/s before stressed /u ɜr/, much moreso than I had thought before. If anything my own speech is weird because I do not nearly as noticeabily palatalize and affricate in these cases (whereas I do strongly palatalize and affricate /t/ before unstressed /ər/).
Linguoboy wrote: ↑Sun Aug 30, 2020 2:24 pmI don't know if the speaker was native or not, but I just saw someone use "paint" to mean "draw with chalk". (I can only use "paint" with liquids.)
If the speaker was native, I wonder if Microsoft Paint has anything to do with it, allowing an association with drawing without paint at all. Some languages of course don't make the distinction, like Mandarin with 畫 huà. It's not unusual for me to hear Chinese speakers here confusing 'draw' and 'paint'...
Travis B. wrote: ↑Fri Aug 21, 2020 11:32 am
I have been paying attention more closely to how other people speak, and it appears that a lot of people palatalize and affricate their /t/s before stressed /u ɜr/, much moreso than I had thought before. If anything my own speech is weird because I do not nearly as noticeabily palatalize and affricate in these cases (whereas I do strongly palatalize and affricate /t/ before unstressed /ər/).
When you say "affricate", do you mean an actual sibilant affricate of the [tʃ] type?
My impression of my own speech is that /t/ often has a noisy enough release, especially before high vowels, that it could be thought of as non-sibilant affrication, but except before /r/ (in which case I prefer the analysis for my own speech that it has actually become /tʃ/) and /j/ (which would include many words where you just have /tu/) there's no assibilation.
Yesterday a coworker gave a presentation via Zoom and I'd never heard so clearly how heavily he aspirates certain stops. Word-initial /k/ before back vowels consistently sounded like [kˣ], and his initial /h/ even tended toward [x]. /t/ and /p/ were fairly heavily aspirated, too, but not to the point of affrication. (He's from Michigan originally and visits often.)
I've caught myself using a velar or uvular fricative aspiration on /p/ (sic) before the LOT vowel, particularly when saying possibly emphatically, and I've occasionally noticed others doing this as well.
Travis B. wrote: ↑Fri Aug 21, 2020 11:32 am
I have been paying attention more closely to how other people speak, and it appears that a lot of people palatalize and affricate their /t/s before stressed /u ɜr/, much moreso than I had thought before. If anything my own speech is weird because I do not nearly as noticeabily palatalize and affricate in these cases (whereas I do strongly palatalize and affricate /t/ before unstressed /ər/).
When you say "affricate", do you mean an actual sibilant affricate of the [tʃ] type?
My impression of my own speech is that /t/ often has a noisy enough release, especially before high vowels, that it could be thought of as non-sibilant affrication, but except before /r/ (in which case I prefer the analysis for my own speech that it has actually become /tʃ/) and /j/ (which would include many words where you just have /tu/) there's no assibilation.
The affrication seems to be that of a lightly-affricated [tɕʰ] or (when unstressed) [tɕ], as opposed to strongly-affricated like [tʃʰ] or (when unstressed) [tʃʰ] from /tʃ/. It definitely is not [tθ], as it has a clear palatal element to it.
Interestingly enough, /t/ is typically affricated far more strongly before unstressed /ər/, even though I have heard people who have very marked affrication and palatalization of even stressed iniitial /t/ before /w/ (e.g. in a particular lawyer commercial from about fifteen years ago where the person kept on saying "[tɕʰ]wenty [tɕʰ]wenty [tɕʰ]wenty").
Ser wrote: ↑Thu Jul 16, 2020 1:42 am
"Doomscrolling." Just came across this term. The oldest entry in Urban Dictionary, from March this year (2020), defines it as "Obsessively reading social media posts about how utterly fucked we are. Although I like a more depressing definition entered in June: "Doomscrolling is scrolling through Twitter in 2020 becoming sadder the further through you scroll. There is no end."
It is one of those activitity nouns in -ing, like "mountain hiking", which can enter the "be + [word]-ing" construction, even though you don't normally say *I mountain-hiked (or *I doomscrolled). Common collocations include "to be doomscrolling" and "to stop/quit doomscrolling".
I doomscrolled all day (true story).
This is way more natural to me than 'I mountain-hiked...'. I wonder why.
I would think that in practice, any time you talk about a specific instance of mountain hiking, it should be clear from context that there were mountains involved. For example, "I hiked up Mount Everest", since "*I mountain-hiked up Mount Everest" would be redundant.
On the other hand, maybe I'm wrong about this, since *I used to mountain-hike sounds weird.
My flatmate uses the verb doink to mean "operate an electronic device", e.g. "while I'm doinking on the Internet" or "he was doinking on his phone". He rejected the use of *"doinking about" without an adjunct.
This is novel to me, since I regard doink as either (a) onomatopoeia for a light smack or (b) a euphemisim for fuck, both usages recognised by Wiktionary. The second usage could be a taboo deformation of dick or it could be an alteration of boink.
