Re: "Theory informs practice" - OK?

On Fri, 14 Nov 2008 03:06:36 -0800, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:

>Alex:
><<
>What, are you ignoring diachrony?  Back when the ancestor of "blank"
>would've been a plausible past of the ancestor of "blink", there
>wasn't any
>"blank" adj.; we stole that from French later.
> >>
>
>No, I think that "blunk" is purely a present time joke, and we
>can't erase our knowledge of the word "blank" right now.  Had
>the joke been made *before* "blank" made its way into English,
>*then* "blank" would've been a likely made-up past tense.
Hm, I'm not sure I get the point of this; am I missing an aspect of a joke?

Perhaps orthogonally, the only "blocking" I've heard linguists discuss
before is the kind where things are blocked by simpler semantically
identical things, not phonologically identical ones.

Alex