Frazz by Jef Mallett for May 14, 2016
May 13, 2016
May 15, 2016
Transcript:
Frazz: I'm impressed you know purposely from purposefully. Caulfield: Easy. Think of a giant pool toy with a bad value. You could purposely inflate the porpoise partly but you'd have to purposefully inflate the porpoise fully. Frazz: That sounded good but made very little actual sense. Caulfield: That's because it's in English.
German defines the concept in as few words as possible, knocks out the spaces, and scrunches the fragments back together – sometimes a ridiculously long word, but it works. French turns it pover to l’Academie Française, who will study it for a decade or so, and come up with a word which now must be used in legal documents. English looks around for a language that already has such a word, steals it, and claims it is English. The main problem with this system is that the original spelling is kept, making it either difficult to spell or to pronounce, so either or both are mangeled. Other languages use combinations.