Happy Halloween, all
I think today we are planning to carve the ghost pumpkin Jen bought, and put it outside to keep the evil spirits away. This should be fun. Whee, Halloween. It is sad that we will have no trick-or-treaters, though. At least, I don't think we will.
We dressed up and went to a Halloween party last night, with the dorkiest costume there. Why, you ask? Well, Jen and I together were a minimal pair. Yes, I hear you groaning. (Non-linguists: A minimal pair is two words that differ by one sound, like cat/bat. We use them to show that a language distinguishes whichever two sounds are different.) So we each dressed up to represent one word of a minimal pair.
If you want, you can try to guess which words we were:
I wore a regular white t-shirt and jeans and covered my clothes and most of my exposed skin with ant-shaped stickers. I was representing formication (from L. formica, 'ant'), which is when you imagine that ants are crawling all over you.
Jen wore a short velvety low-cut dress with one strap hanging off the shoulder, high heels, hose with runs in it, lots of makeup, red nailpolish, and smeared bright red lipstick. She was representing, and I'm sure you can see where this is going right now, fornication, which I trust I do not need to define. (I offered to give her a hickey to go with the rest of the costume; she declined, saying that it would be "too realistic." Hmph.)
Yes, we spent a lot of time explaining the costume. One person got it right off, though. We were all "We're a minimal pair!" and she was like "formication?" I was impressed.
I'd never dressed up since, like, elementary school. That was kind of fun. Except that no one else really dressed up geekily, which was sad. We collected a lot of Romance words for 'ant' when we were giving hints about my costume by citing the Latin word for ant, and now I'm really curious about [f] > [h] > 0 in Spanish. I think I should post to linguaphiles and ask.
We dressed up and went to a Halloween party last night, with the dorkiest costume there. Why, you ask? Well, Jen and I together were a minimal pair. Yes, I hear you groaning. (Non-linguists: A minimal pair is two words that differ by one sound, like cat/bat. We use them to show that a language distinguishes whichever two sounds are different.) So we each dressed up to represent one word of a minimal pair.
If you want, you can try to guess which words we were:
I wore a regular white t-shirt and jeans and covered my clothes and most of my exposed skin with ant-shaped stickers. I was representing formication (from L. formica, 'ant'), which is when you imagine that ants are crawling all over you.
Jen wore a short velvety low-cut dress with one strap hanging off the shoulder, high heels, hose with runs in it, lots of makeup, red nailpolish, and smeared bright red lipstick. She was representing, and I'm sure you can see where this is going right now, fornication, which I trust I do not need to define. (I offered to give her a hickey to go with the rest of the costume; she declined, saying that it would be "too realistic." Hmph.)
Yes, we spent a lot of time explaining the costume. One person got it right off, though. We were all "We're a minimal pair!" and she was like "formication?" I was impressed.
I'd never dressed up since, like, elementary school. That was kind of fun. Except that no one else really dressed up geekily, which was sad. We collected a lot of Romance words for 'ant' when we were giving hints about my costume by citing the Latin word for ant, and now I'm really curious about [f] > [h] > 0 in Spanish. I think I should post to linguaphiles and ask.