There Can Be Only One
Thanks to the endlessly entertaining brilliance of Ryan North, I recently learned about hapax legomena, words which occur only once in either the written record of a language, the works of an author, or in a single text (according to Wikipedia). At least at the single text level, they're not that uncommon. A quick perusal of my blog's word count analyzer suggests that the number of words I've used only once is approximately equal to those I've used more than once. That's a lot of hapaxes.
Now imagine that, eons from now, my blog is the only remaining fragment of written English. The meanings of words such as "woozy", "peanuts" and "purse" will be forever lost unless the extraterrestrial/human descendant/superevolved cockroach linguists can sort them out from context. I wish them good luck.
Now imagine that, eons from now, my blog is the only remaining fragment of written English. The meanings of words such as "woozy", "peanuts" and "purse" will be forever lost unless the extraterrestrial/human descendant/superevolved cockroach linguists can sort them out from context. I wish them good luck.