As you may know, one of my loves is watching English Premier League Soccer. It occured to me, while watching the Liverpool-Manure disaster over the weekend, that English is the oddest language in the world in terms of the lack of predictable patterns. (*)

Case in point: the nonstandard endings for demonyms. Check out this list:

Liverpool -> Liverpudlian
Manchester -> Mancunian
Oxford -> Oxonian
Leeds -> Leodensian
Newcastle -> Novocastrian
Glasgow -> Glaswegian
Wolverhampton -> Wulfrunians

Do you see an easy pattern there? I sure don’t. You have the “-ian” ending in most of them, but just before that is a rat’s nest of arbitrariness.

(*) I’ve studied Spanish, French, Hebrew, and Russian in depth.

“Lousy”.

Does anybody ever use the word “lousy” anymore?   If you took a random sample of 15-year-old kids, would a majority of them even know what it means?

From http://www.work911.com/communication/differentmeanings.htm:

The connotative meaning of something has to do with what the word suggests to the individual, based on that person’s experiences and emotional reactions and judgements associates with the word or what it refers to.

I all of a sudden have a huge interest in finding out more about connotative meaning.

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Tags: ConnotativeMeaning, Semantics