Polysemy!

As far as I can tell from my linguistics "textbook" polysemy means when a word has multiple meanings. Woohoo, of course words have different meanings, especially words like "cool" and "gay" and other slang words... because once upon a time they weren't slang.

Here's the cool thing that I learned from reading this section--Verbs have an average of 2.11 meanings and nouns have an average of 1.74 meanings! Weird. Whoever thought of taking the time to figure that out? (Apparently Miller & Fellbaum in 1991 and 92).

P.S. The name of my texbook is Language Change: Progress or Decay by Jean Aitchison. It's actually quite good and it's actually about the size of a novel, almost 300 pages, small, paperback and incredibly readable. Not too dense at all. Not textbook-y. Sometimes the analogies are a bit overdone, but I guess they really do help me to understand what's going on.

College Students Say the Darndest Things

We have a quote board in our apartment, that can get pretty entertaining at times. Here are a couple just for fun:

"Oh don't worry about it hun, you can have lots of secs." (This was in response to me telling my roommate I just needed another sec(ond) before I was ready to go; definitely embarrassing if you read it out loud, and now, every reference to sex on our quote board is spelled "sec")

"You know what I've had enough of? Periods!"
(several second pause)
". . . oohh, not the punctuation."

"Snow is the best thing that comes down from heaven. Well, first Jesus, then snow."