full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Erin McKean: Go ahead, make up new words!

Unscramble the Blue Letters

The first way is the siplesmt way. Basically, steal them from other leaanggus. ["Go rob other people"] (Laughter) Linguists call this borrowing, but we never give the words back , so I'm just going to be honest and call it stealing. We usually take words for things that we like, like deuoiilcs food. We took "kumquat" from Chinese, we took "caramel" from French. We also take words for cool things like "ninja," right? We took that from Japanese, which is kind of a cool trick because ninjas are hard to steal from. (laghtuer)

Open Cloze

The first way is the ________ way. Basically, steal them from other _________. ["Go rob other people"] (Laughter) Linguists call this borrowing, but we never give the words back , so I'm just going to be honest and call it stealing. We usually take words for things that we like, like _________ food. We took "kumquat" from Chinese, we took "caramel" from French. We also take words for cool things like "ninja," right? We took that from Japanese, which is kind of a cool trick because ninjas are hard to steal from. (________)

Solution

  1. simplest
  2. laughter
  3. languages
  4. delicious

Original Text

The first way is the simplest way. Basically, steal them from other languages. ["Go rob other people"] (Laughter) Linguists call this borrowing, but we never give the words back , so I'm just going to be honest and call it stealing. We usually take words for things that we like, like delicious food. We took "kumquat" from Chinese, we took "caramel" from French. We also take words for cool things like "ninja," right? We took that from Japanese, which is kind of a cool trick because ninjas are hard to steal from. (Laughter)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
wear hats 2
perfectly good 2
good word 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
perfectly good word 2

Important Words

  1. basically
  2. borrowing
  3. call
  4. chinese
  5. cool
  6. delicious
  7. food
  8. french
  9. give
  10. hard
  11. honest
  12. japanese
  13. kind
  14. languages
  15. laughter
  16. linguists
  17. ninjas
  18. rob
  19. simplest
  20. steal
  21. stealing
  22. trick
  23. words