I really liked minutes to midnight. A lot more introspective and mature.
I really liked minutes to midnight. A lot more introspective and mature.
Apparently eleventy-bajillion dollars wasn’t enough.
I just cancelled my gas station rewards program because they moved everything to a mandatory app. I will not use your app.
(on mobile, so sorry for any formatting weirdness)
English teachers will only give you an arbitrary, subjective answer about whether it’s a word - you want a linguist if you want an objective answer.
Since we’re dealing with two different “words” (roots) here, factory and overclocked, the first thing to look for is compound stress. Many compound words in English get initial stress: compare “blackbird” and “a black bird”.
This isn’t foolproof, however. For some speakers there are compounds that don’t get compound stress - some speakers say “paper towel” as expected, while others say “paper towel”, but it’s still a compound either way.
So how can we actually tell that paper towel is one word? See if the first member of the potential compound (the non-head) can be modified in any way.
For example, we know doghouse is a compound because in “a big doghouse” big can only refer to the house, and cannot refer to “the house of a big dog”. Similarly, blackboard must be one word because it can take what appear to be contradictory modifiers: " a green blackboard".
So, in the same way, paper towel and toilet paper are one word because “big paper towel” can’t mean “a towel made from big paper” and “pink toilet paper” can’t mean “paper for a pink toilet”. (Toilet paper also gets compound stress.)
Yet another way to test is by semantic drift (meaning shift). As mentioned earlier, blackboards don’t have to be black, so the meaning of the compound doesn’t perfectly correspond to the pieces of the word - instead, the fact that it’s a vertical board you write on in chalk is much more important to the meaning. This is because once the pieces combine to form a new word, that new word can start to shift away from the meaning of the pieces. Again, however this process takes time, so it’s not a perfect test.
So, back to the original question: is “factory-overclocked” one word?
Well, it doesn’t get compound stress, and for me I can still say things like “it’s home-factory-overclocked” to mean that it was overclocked in its home factory, so the first member can take modifiers. And, the whole thing still means what the pieces mean.
So, in my grammar, “factory-overclocked” is two words. But for some of you “home factory overclocked” may not be possible, which would indicate that it’s started to become one word for you. Everyone’s grammar is different, but we can still test for these categories.
If you instead mean by your question, “can factory and overclocked be combined with a hyphen?”, however, I can’t help you, because language-specific writing conventions are subjective and arbitrary, and not something that linguists usually care very much about.
Same. Sauce ruins good fries.
I always just go to America’s Best. $80 for an eye exam and two pairs of glasses is hard to beat.
Thanks for taking the time to write such an informed and in-depth comment!
Elephants apparently find humans cute, but I doubt that cats would.
Still not buying a Samsung.
Instead he should be paying higher taxes so the city/state can ~have more money to build a bigger and stronger social safety net~ funnel more money to the organized crime syndicates well known to operate at all levels of Gotham’s government.
If you took away the majority of the bacon this would be a really good breakfast 👍🏽
Excellent post in general, but it should be noted that the meaning of “wine-dark sea” is still very much disputed.
Sekiro has the best combat of any game I’ve ever played, so I’d be satisfied with just having something like it in other FS games.
…entirely in Sony’s hands.
Qualcomm really does want to become Intel.
Just bought $50 of merch off their website – this is the sort of journalism we should all be supporting.
I just use hyphens for everything.
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