Tucked securely away in my sloggy getting-a-cold brain: The prefix "mini" is a newly available building block in English, from the 1960s when someone figured that from the word "minimum" and "miniature" it must mean small (what does it mean? must look it up). They coined the word "miniskirt." Now we blithely affix mini- to whatever we please; this process is called reanalysis. The catachrestic moment of misunderstanding, mis-reverse-engineering the word minimum, created this cool useful piece of language. At least that's how I see it!
"Catachrestic" has been my favorite new fun word for over a year now, along with "haplography" which I have now encountered in a new form in this fabulous book (haplology, which is when the language evolves to drop a syllable from a word that has nearly identical syllables). I've probably said this before but which would you rather, hear me drivel on about how my throat is scratchy, or go into excited pedant mode over the one paragraph from the Historical Linguistics book that I might remember?
If you are especially lucky you will catch me 2 years from now whipping out this useless factoid about miniskirts at a party and grinning smugly as if I am particularly fascinating and know a lot about linguistics, and you can make fun of how I don't remember anything else from that one really good book by what's his name.
I wish I could remember all the terms... if I had read this book before I was 15, I would have effortlessly memorized them all and would still know them now. It took no effort then and the space in my brain was hungry (starving) and infinite.
If I get into Berserkely I'm going to have to really work to learn icelandic or latin... or something... But this sort of book fires me up to want to work. Imagine the fun I could have translating some knotty little poem from old norse... I could find some flyting which is the improvisational duels... and write the paper I'd like to write about the Fl0rentino duel-poem and flyting and doing the dozens.
p.s. My throat is all scratchy. fuck!!!
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