linguistics

5 Words That Sound The Same In Almost Every Language.

Words really don’t have any logic to them. You can’t just work out the meaning of words based on the sounds that make them up. That’s because words are arbitrary.  So if you don’t speak Chinese, you can’t possibly figure out the words for, say, “breakfast” or “fridge”. Different people agree to give different combinations of sounds different meanings. […]

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50 Awfully Good Oxymorons.

An oxymoron is a figure of speech in which two or more words side by side contradict each other. Their use in speech often leads to humor, irony, and sarcasm.  We’ve asked our followers at The Language Nerds to share their favorite oxymorons and the result has been nothing short of hilarious. We’ve compiled them here for

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What is a Wug?

A wug is an imaginary cartoon creature created and first used by psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason to test people’s ability to use the English plural morpheme*. The test usually involves two cartoon panels—one depicting one wug with the caption “This is a wug,” and the other depicting two wugs with the caption “Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are

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