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biostructure
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08 Jan 2011, 3:12 am

Another one of those "does anyone else do this?" posts:

I just realized today how I have always liked to play with words, and apply patterns to them. As an adult I do it far, far less than I did as a kid, because I have just gotten less silly, and I tend to keep it to myself when I do. Like for instance today I was thinking of "being green" (in the ecological sense), and thought to myself that the quality of being eco-friendly could be called "grenliness", following the pattern that the quality of being clean is called "cleanliness" with the first part being pronounced like "clenn". Now I know that language doesn't really work that way, but I find interest in just playing with word patterns like that.

When I was a kid, I used to do that even much more, carrying words through chains of making anagrams, homophones, rhymes, etc., to come up with different and cryptic "equivalent" ways of saying things. Though I'm aware that perfectly normal people can do this too, for instance in the making of rhyming slang, where arbitrary phrases are used as "templates" to "translate" one word into a code for that word.



ediself
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08 Jan 2011, 3:56 am

I always did that kind of things...i look for the origin of words in the languages i know , but it just comes to me suddently after years of using a word, for instance yesterday, i was watching something that was called "lullaby", for some reason i always thought of a bug when i heard that word, and suddently my mind started playing with the word until it formed "lull-her-by" and i thought hey....that might well be the original way this was used...
i like finding the origin of words. btw i'm going to look it up and check if i was right :)



Verdandi
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08 Jan 2011, 4:48 am

I still do this.

I think to some extent my Buffy fixation actually pushed me to do it more than I would have otherwise.



tangomike
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08 Jan 2011, 5:16 am

I still do this, its a great way to understand the original usages of words or even to figure out the real meanings of them. Sometimes people nowdays usewords without really thinking of what they mean such as "Oh my God!", those words carried much more weight back in the days when it started. now that religion is less important on a national scale those words are tossed around. "You're welcome" as opposed to "you welcome"- people sometimes forget its short for "you are welcome" and "you welcome" simpley doesnt make grammatical sense. , "irregardless" - "regardless" already describes what "irregardless" is trying to, people just add the IR because most times you add IR its a positive, idk, word like "repairable" which would become "irreparable". "regardless" is a negative word because of the "less" and thus two negatives "Ir" and "less" like in math become positive, which is opposite of the meaning ppl seem to give "irregardless"

sorry rant. but yes i still do this all the time especially since I speak a few languages.



Philologos
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08 Jan 2011, 8:35 am

It is, in fact, exactly the way languages do things - just that your creations may not match what has taken off in the world.

I am a pattern person, and a word person - precisely what you describe I have not really done a lot in life outside my head, but it is not at all alien to me.

It is interresting - I do historical linguistics - to see how in some cases the language chooses between two competing patterns, sometimes using both with a difference, sometimes picking one, sometimes blending things.



Moog
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08 Jan 2011, 8:53 am

I still do this! I love it. I love 'grenliness' by the way that's great. One word me and my friend made up recently was 'sensical' which is a cut and shunt of sensible and logical.


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daedal
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08 Jan 2011, 10:16 am

I didn't do this with words, I mostly did it with numbers, which is weird because I've always been bad at Maths. If I came across a group of 3 or 4 numbers, I'd play with them like:
234
2 is half of 4, half of 2 is 1, which is 1 away from three, which is 1 away from 4, which is 1 away from 2+3...etc



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29 Sep 2019, 5:48 pm

Loves this topic .. before game bugaboo was a game there was my mouth liking that c :heart: ombination of sounds


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Trogluddite
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29 Sep 2019, 6:42 pm

Only when I was younger? Oh no, why would I ever stop doing something so enjoyable?!

Actually, if anything, it's a bit of a compulsion. I find it really hard to have a face to face conversation with someone if they have their back to a bookcase, a wall of posters, or a shelf full of cereal boxes. I just can't concentrate until I've savoured all the words on display, even if I know what they'll be and they're not really important. I can read entire chapters of books only to realise that I have no idea what happened in the plot, but still having favourite words, clever metaphors, and grammatical patterns swimming around in my head. If I need the loo, my bum has barely reached the toilet seat before I'm reading "sodium laureth sulphate" for the millionth time in my life off the back of the nearest shampoo bottle.

I'm pretty sure I matched the criteria for hyperlexia when I was a child; learning to read precociously early, and with more emphasis on structure than on meaning than for typical learners. Like autism used to be for so long, it's usually thought of as purely a childhood thing, but I have a strong suspicion that it has effects which last into adulthood.


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AnneOleson
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29 Sep 2019, 8:43 pm

Yes to all above!



Jakki
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29 Sep 2019, 9:47 pm

Riding in the car.. as a little child .. was repeatedly told not to say those things , worst one was , getting on the freeway .. if you cant see over the side of the car door , you see glass and sky and things up in the air..., so , what you are seeing is better described as flying and moving quickly past? So freeways were repeatedly called flyways by me , until i started being struck for saying this.
Some aspies have some issues growing up i think?


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Last edited by Jakki on 29 Sep 2019, 9:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The Grand Inquisitor
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29 Sep 2019, 9:48 pm

At school, when they gave us some letters to work with and told us to find as many words as we could using just those letters, I was always really good at that, like often best in the class. I even beat the super smart kids and was able to find more words than them.



Lely
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30 Sep 2019, 2:46 pm

I didn't play games with words, I counted the letters in words and sentences to see if it had an even number of letters. When the word or sentence had an even number of letters that was good. With an uneven number of letters the word or sentence was bad or imperfect.
Then later I came up with an easy rule that could help me fix a sentence when it had an uneven number of letters, by also spelling out the punctuation marks "Punkt" (period), "Komma" (comma), "Fragezeichen" (question mark) which could when spelled out save an imperfect sentence by making the number of letters in it even. :D
Which is a dumb game but I still do it sometimes :lol: