Re: I'm new!

On Tue, Oct 24, 2000 at 07:11:56PM -0400, Nik Taylor wrote:
> John Cowan wrote:
> > Note the word order in "longue nouvelle", which makes it look like an
> > idiom rather than a simple transparent phrase "long short story" (yes,
> > we do say that in English sometimes no matter how stupid it sounds).
>
> No worse than "cold hot dog", IMO.  "Short story" is a fixed phrase, at
> least in my speech, I say "shórt story", not "shórt stóry", that is,
> pronounced as one word, not two.
[snip]

I noticed that contemporary English seems to be acquiring a set of
idiomatic phrases that have become fixed, almost as if they were a single
word. In fact, I suspect that most English speakers have come to think of
such phrases as a single, indivisible concept, although it is composed of
more than one word.

Also, AFAIK, "hot dog" is sometimes written as "hotdog" -- or at least,
used as such. So phrases like "cold hot dog" or "long short story" isn't
all that strange to me -- a "short story" has become an atomic concept
describing a certain kind of story; the "short" no longer necessarily
describes its length. Hence, a "long short story" is that certain kind of
story that happens to be longer among its kind.

Hmm... sounds like what I intend to do with my conlang... as I've said
before, color symbolism is very strong in my conlang/conculture -- I think
I'll start constructing words with "red", "green", or "blue" prefixed, to
add subtle nuances to meaning, or even creating a totally new, atomic
concept analogous to English idiomatic phrases like "hot dog", "short
story", etc.. (And no, I didn't steal this idea from Draqa, although I was
pleasantly surprised when I discovered that Draqa is also heavy on color
symbolism in a similar way.)


T