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Gostak
"Gostak", a meaningless noun, occurs in the phrase "the gostak distims the doshes", which exemplifies how it is possible to derive meaning from the syntax of a sentence even if the referents of the terms are entirely unknown. It is an example of a nonce word. The phrase, coined in 1903 by Andrew Ingraham became popularised through its quotation in 1923 by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in their book '' The Meaning of Meaning'', and has since been referenced in a number of cultural contexts. History Coined in 1903 by Andrew Ingraham, the sentence became more widely known through its quotation in 1923 by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in their book ''The Meaning of Meaning'' (p. 46). Ogden and Richards refer to Ingraham as an "able but little known writer", and quote his following dialogue: Deriving meaning This can be seen in the following dialogue: :Q: What is the gostak? :A: The gostak is what distims the doshes. :Q: What's distimming? :A: Distimming is what the gosta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
XYZZY Award
The XYZZY Awards are the annual awards given to works of interactive fiction, serving a similar role to the Academy Awards for film. The awards were inaugurated in 1997 by Eileen Mullin, the editor of ''XYZZYnews''. Any game released during the year prior to the award ceremony is eligible for nomination to receive an award. The decision process takes place in two stages: members of the interactive fiction community nominate works within specific categories and sufficiently supported nominations become finalists within those categories. Community members then vote among the finalists, and the game receiving a plurality of votes is given the award in an online ceremony. Since 1997, the XYZZY Awards have become one of the most important events within the interactive fiction community. Together with events like the Interactive Fiction Competition and Spring Thing, the XYZZY Awards provide opportunities for the community to encourage and reward the creation and development of new work ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Miles Breuer
Miles John Breuer (January 3, 1889 – October 14, 1945) was an American physician and science fiction writer of Czech origin. Although he had published elsewhere since the early 20th century, he is considered the part of the first generation of writers to appear regularly in the pulp science fiction magazines, publishing his first story, "The Man with the Strange Head", in the January 1927 issue of ''Amazing Stories''. His best known works are "The Gostak and the Doshes" (1930) and two stories written jointly with Jack Williamson, "The Girl from Mars" (1929) and ''The Birth of a New Republic'' (1931). Early life and medical career Miles J. Breuer was born in Chicago, in 1889, to Charles (Karel) and Barbara Breuer, Czech immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The family moved to Nebraska in 1893 while Charles pursued a medical degree at Creighton University in Omaha. Miles grew up in the Czech community of Crete, Nebraska. He graduated from Crete High School in 1906. H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously
''Colorless green ideas sleep furiously'' was composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book '' Syntactic Structures'' as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical. The sentence was originally used in his 1955 thesis '' The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory'' and in his 1956 paper "Three Models for the Description of Language". There is no obvious understandable meaning that can be derived from it, which demonstrates the distinction between syntax and semantics, and the idea that a syntactically well-formed sentence is not guaranteed to also be semantically well-formed. As an example of a category mistake, it was intended to show the inadequacy of certain probabilistic models of grammar, and the need for more structured models. Senseless but grammatical Chomsky wrote in his 1957 book '' Syntactic Structures'': It is fair to assume that neither sentence (1) nor (2) had ever previously occurred in an English discourse. Hence, i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pseudoword
A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning. It is a specific type of nonce word, or even more narrowly a nonsense word, composed of a combination of phonemes which nevertheless conform to the language's phonotactic rules. It is thus a kind of vocable: utterable but meaningless. Such words lacking a meaning in a certain language or absent in any text corpus or dictionary can be the result of (the interpretation of) a truly random signal, but there will often be an underlying deterministic source, as is the case for examples like ''jabberwocky'' and '' galumph'' (both coined in a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll), '' dord'' (a ghost word published due to a mistake), ciphers, and typos. A string of nonsensical words may be described as gibberish. Word salad, in contrast, may contain legible and intelligible words but without semantic or syntactic correlation or coherence. Characteristics ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nonce Word
In linguistics, a nonce word—also called an occasionalism—is any word (lexeme), or any sequence of sounds or letters, created for a single occasion or utterance but not otherwise understood or recognized as a word in a given language.''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language''. Ed. David Crystal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 132. Nonce words have a variety of functions and are most commonly used for humor, poetry, children's literature, linguistic experiments, psychological studies, and medical diagnoses, or they arise by accident. Some nonce words have a meaning at their inception or gradually acquire a fixed meaning inferred from context and use, but if they eventually become an established part of the language (neologisms), they stop being nonce words.Crystal, David. (1997) ''A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics'' (4th Edition). Oxford and Cambridge (Mass., USA): Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Other nonce words may be essentially me ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andrew Ingraham
Andrew Ingraham (1841 - 1905) was an American educator, writer and soldier. Ingraham was born on 19 December, 1841 at New Bedford, Massachusetts, United States. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1862. During the Civil War, he enlisted with the Company I, of the Third Massachusetts regiment, where he served for nine months, before transfer to the signal corps. After the war, he was principal of the Plymouth Academy from 1865 to 1866. Later he taught at the Friends’ school, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, eventually succeeding John Tetlow as headmaster in 1878. He held this position until 1883, when he became headmaster of the Swain free school, also in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He retained this position until the school suspended in 1903, upon which he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is credited with the invention of the Gostak "Gostak", a meaningless noun, occurs in the phrase "the gostak distims the doshes", which exemplifies how it is possible to derive meaning ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Meaning Of Meaning
''The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism'' (1923) is a book by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. It is accompanied by two supplementary essays by Bronisław Malinowski and F. G. Crookshank. The conception of the book arose during a two-hour conversation between Ogden and Richards held on a staircase in a house next to the Cavendish Laboratories at 11 pm on Armistice Day, 1918. Overview The original text was published in 1923 and has been used as a textbook in many fields including linguistics, philosophy, language, cognitive science and most recently semantics and semiotics in general. The book has been in print continuously since 1982. In 2002, the critical edition prepared by W. Terrence Gordon was published as volume 3 of the 5-volume set ''C. K. Ogden & Linguistics'' (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995). The full publication history up to 1990, including serialised publication in ''The Cambridge Magazi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sepulka
Sepulkas (, singular ''sepulka'') (also sepulcas or scrupts in English translation)"Scrupts" at the FAQ page of Lem's official website are fictional objects mentioned in 's novels '' The Star Diaries'' and '' Observation on the Spot''. The nature of these objects, their physical properties, and their use are mysterious. In-universe sepulkas Sepulkas were first mentioned by Lem's interstellar traveller |
Noun
In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an Object (grammar), object or Subject (grammar), subject within a phrase, clause, or sentence.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, dead, or imaginary): ''mushrooms, dogs, Afro-Caribbeans, rosebushes, Mandela, bacteria, Klingons'', etc. * Physical objects: ''hammers, pencils, Earth, guitars, atoms, stones, boots, shadows'', etc. * Places: ''closets, temples, rivers, Antarctica, houses, Uluru, utopia'', etc. * Actions of individuals or groups: ''swimming, exercises, cough, explosions, flight, electrification, embezzlement'', etc. * Physical qualities: ''colors, lengths, porosity, weights, roundness, symmetry, solidity,'' etc. * Mental or bodily states: ''jealousy, sleep, joy, headache, confusion'', etc. In linguistics, nouns constitute a lexical category (part of speech) defined ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Glokaya Kuzdra
''Glokaya kuzdra'' () is a reference to a Russian language phrase constructed from non-existent words in a grammatically proper way, similar to the English language phrases using the pseudoword " gostak". It was suggested by Russian linguist Lev Shcherba. The full phrase is: "" ('). In the phrase, all word stems (-, -, -, -, -, ) are meaningless, but all affixes are real, used in a grammatically correct way and — which is the point — provide enough semantics for the phrase to be a perceived description of some dramatic action with a specified plot but with unknown actors.N. D. Svetozarova"How is “Glokaya Kuzdra” Made" ''Russian Speech, No.6, 2023, 116-128, An English translation (only syntax and no semantics) could be: "The glocky kuzdra shteckly budled the bocker and is kurdyaking the bockerling." Shcherba used it in his lectures in linguistics to emphasize the importance of grammar in acquiring foreign languages. The phrase was popularized by Lev Uspensky in his popula ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
