Here’s my comment from the last time this came up (like a week ago):

“There’s been no meaning shift. The “possessive” and “envious” uses of jealous both date from the 14th century in English, and both senses were present in the ancestors of these words all the way back to Greek.”

It’s always been synonymous with “envious”, as far back as we can trace.

This isn’t the case, because humans can handle significantly larger deviations from “comfortable” on the cold side than the hot side, so again Fahrenheit gets it pretty much right.

This is horrible logic. If anything, it should be: you need to learn Celsius if you are doing science, but most people aren’t scientists and therefore don’t need to learn Celsius, so this isn’t really a problem that comes up for a lot of Fahrenheit users.

According to Wikipedia Rankine is properly used with the degree symbol, but sometimes is not by analogy with Kelvin.

(on mobile, so sorry for any formatting weirdness)

English teachers will only give you an arbitrary, subjective answer about whether it’s a word - you want a linguist if you want an objective answer.

Since we’re dealing with two different “words” (roots) here, factory and overclocked, the first thing to look for is compound stress. Many compound words in English get initial stress: compare “blackbird” and “a black bird”.

This isn’t foolproof, however. For some speakers there are compounds that don’t get compound stress - some speakers say “paper towel” as expected, while others say “paper towel”, but it’s still a compound either way.

So how can we actually tell that paper towel is one word? See if the first member of the potential compound (the non-head) can be modified in any way.

For example, we know doghouse is a compound because in “a big doghouse” big can only refer to the house, and cannot refer to “the house of a big dog”. Similarly, blackboard must be one word because it can take what appear to be contradictory modifiers: " a green blackboard".

So, in the same way, paper towel and toilet paper are one word because “big paper towel” can’t mean “a towel made from big paper” and “pink toilet paper” can’t mean “paper for a pink toilet”. (Toilet paper also gets compound stress.)

Yet another way to test is by semantic drift (meaning shift). As mentioned earlier, blackboards don’t have to be black, so the meaning of the compound doesn’t perfectly correspond to the pieces of the word - instead, the fact that it’s a vertical board you write on in chalk is much more important to the meaning. This is because once the pieces combine to form a new word, that new word can start to shift away from the meaning of the pieces. Again, however this process takes time, so it’s not a perfect test.

So, back to the original question: is “factory-overclocked” one word?

Well, it doesn’t get compound stress, and for me I can still say things like “it’s home-factory-overclocked” to mean that it was overclocked in its home factory, so the first member can take modifiers. And, the whole thing still means what the pieces mean.

So, in my grammar, “factory-overclocked” is two words. But for some of you “home factory overclocked” may not be possible, which would indicate that it’s started to become one word for you. Everyone’s grammar is different, but we can still test for these categories.

If you instead mean by your question, “can factory and overclocked be combined with a hyphen?”, however, I can’t help you, because language-specific writing conventions are subjective and arbitrary, and not something that linguists usually care very much about.

“Women are the best you’ll ever be able to get a little bit of.”

Lol, I spelled it “ov” on my spelling test.

*puerile

This is literally the opposite of what happened. “To damp” was used to mean “to moisten” in the 1670s, a hundred and fifty years before “dampen” started to be used for it also in the early 1800s.

As with many if not most of the pedants in this thread, you’re dying on a hill that’s actually just straight-up wrong.

Natural human languages always have ambiguity. There are plenty of conlangs (constructed languages) specifically designed to avoid ambiguity though if you wanted to use one of those.

If such a version of English were ever made, it would immediately gain ambiguity as soon as people began speaking it fluently (and same for the conlang if a community of speakers began using it fluently as well).

There’s been no meaning shift. The “possessive” and “envious” uses of jealous both date from the 14th century in English, and both senses were present in the ancestors of these words all the way back to Greek.

If there were no surface tension there would almost definitely be no wicking action either. If it didn’t evaporate super quickly, water without surface tension would probably be a giant pain in the ass to clean up.

Same. Sauce ruins good fries.

Thanks for taking the time to write such an informed and in-depth comment!

Well we know where that got Saruman, Pippin, and Denethor.

It is difficult to pull a moral out of this story

Uh no it’s fucking not. Big corpos do whatever the fuck they want and see no real consequences. That’s it. That’s the moral.

Instead he should be paying higher taxes so the city/state can ~have more money to build a bigger and stronger social safety net~ funnel more money to the organized crime syndicates well known to operate at all levels of Gotham’s government.

They hated him because he told them the truth.

I have one of those and it’s cost me who knows how much time and effort. The only times I ever really use are 15 seconds (for melting butter), 50 seconds (for water for baking bread; 1 minute is too hot), and 1:45 for coffee (again, 2 minutes is too hot). I can count the number of times I’ve actually used the “push 1 for 1 minute” feature on one hand, and instead I have to press an additional “timer” button for absolutely no reason Every. Single. Time. I want to microwave something.