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
- simplest
- laughter
- languages
- 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
- basically
- borrowing
- call
- chinese
- cool
- delicious
- food
- french
- give
- hard
- honest
- japanese
- kind
- languages
- laughter
- linguists
- ninjas
- rob
- simplest
- steal
- stealing
- trick
- words