Looks like I moved to proton drive just in time!

The TSA allows food though?

(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.

“Women are the best you’ll ever be able to get a little bit of.”

Lol, I spelled it “ov” on my spelling test.

If there were no surface tension there would almost definitely be no wicking action either. If it didn’t evaporate super quickly, water without surface tension would probably be a giant pain in the ass to clean up.

Same. Sauce ruins good fries.

Thanks for taking the time to write such an informed and in-depth comment!

Well we know where that got Saruman, Pippin, and Denethor.

It is difficult to pull a moral out of this story

Uh no it’s fucking not. Big corpos do whatever the fuck they want and see no real consequences. That’s it. That’s the moral.

I have one of those and it’s cost me who knows how much time and effort. The only times I ever really use are 15 seconds (for melting butter), 50 seconds (for water for baking bread; 1 minute is too hot), and 1:45 for coffee (again, 2 minutes is too hot). I can count the number of times I’ve actually used the “push 1 for 1 minute” feature on one hand, and instead I have to press an additional “timer” button for absolutely no reason Every. Single. Time. I want to microwave something.

That looks much more like ‘so’ ソ than ‘n’ ン

Almost half of all English words are borrowed from French, dating from when England was colonized and culturally subjugated by the Norman French starting in 1066.

When we played it you also had to go down on one knee, and the person unfreezing you had to sit on your knee while they flushed your arm.

Unless you’re talking about Scots, the closest languages to English are separated by at minimum more than a thousand years, which is plenty of time for those constraints to change significantly.

I’d even expect different dialects of English to behave differently when adapting loanwords, because they already show plenty of phonotactic differentiation.

I have a private theory about that, actually (that is, not backed up by research yet to my knowledge).

I think this is due to accidental gaps, that some languages allow for clusters that just don’t happen to appear in those languages by an accident of history (e.g. they allowed them at one point but they were eliminated by a phonotactic filter that no longer exists in the language, etc.), so when they borrow a word with that string now, they can pronounce it no problem.

If you think about phonotactic constraints as being the result of constant rankings (as in models like Optimality Theory), this should even be predicted as a form of Emergence of the Unmarked (though stop clusters are pretty marked, so this would be more like “local” or “coincidental” unmarkedness).

I also think that studying borrowing adaptations like this would give us a more accurate picture of the overall constraint ranking of a given language than just restricting ourselves to native words.

What actually happened is that these roots were borrowed from Ancient Greek by paleontologists to form the word “pterodactyl”, not modern Greek.

In Ancient Greek, they would have pronounced both the “p” and the “t”, but “pt” isn’t a possible beginning of a word for English speakers, and so borrowed words that start with “pt-” (and “mn-” and a few others) have the first sound deleted as a repair mechanism to allow English speakers to pronounce them.

In modern Greek, “pt” consonant clusters that used to be pronounced as-is have undergone dissimilation - both “p” and “t” are stop consonants, so the “p” has instead become an “f” (which is a fricative, not a stop), to make the cluster easier to pronounce.

Just bought $50 of merch off their website – this is the sort of journalism we should all be supporting.

That’s about a pound of cheese every two days. Pretty sure I could hit that number without any trouble at all.

And 5 was a significant downgrade from 4.