Friday, 4 February 2011

Trocheeotomy? Trocheeectomy.

The latest xkcd:

If you Huffman-coded all the 'random' things everyone on the internet has said over the years, you'd wind up with, like, 30 or 40 bytes *tops*.
Click for larger image

Trocheeotomy? Or should it be trochee-ectomy? (~trocheeectomy)

[Some additional things:

Here's an interesting chart of trochee bigrams from the xkcd blag:

[again, click for larger image]

And Mark Liberman on Language Log offers some discussion here. (I imagine xkcd is thinking of Snow Crash rather than The Big U. By the bye, the linguistic-y part of Snow Crash I've always felt to be the weakest part of the book.) ]

The alt-text:
If you Huffman-coded all the 'random' things everyone on the internet has said over the years, you'd wind up with, like, 30 or 40 bytes *tops*.
Posted by be_slayed at 07:40
Labels: , , , ,

3 comments:

  1. John Cowan4 February 2011 at 10:48

    Obviously -ectomy. It is proposed to remove the offending words, not to put holes in them. (This commentary is already free of them.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Matt4 February 2011 at 11:11

    Scrapple: Best and greatest of all possible trochees?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous27 October 2013 at 15:03

    My son is scheduled for a tracheostomy this evening his third one. He went into ICU 12 days ago for what was diagnosed as a misplaced feeding tube and another aspiration pneumonia. They tried to extubate him on the weekend when he went into respiratory distress, and this evening, the surgeon will insert a tracheostomy. Although this won't prevent future aspiration pneumonias, the medical staff involved in his care will be able to keep him on the respirator and, we (his parents) will have to relearn how to care for the tracheostomy. To get more info please visit http://researchpaperswritingservice.com/.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)