a-ginger-in-black:

rockmarina:

lizawithazed:

s-peak-in-tongue-s:

cardboardfacewoman:

rooksandravens:

derinthemadscientist:

thepioden:

animatedamerican:

nentuaby:

animatedamerican:

asexualbrittaperry:

ggiornojo:

asexualbrittaperry:

you can make nearly any object into a good insult if you put ‘you absolute’ in front of it

example: you absolute coat hanger

as well u can just add ‘ed’ to any object and it’s sounds like you were really drunk

example: i was absolutely coat hangered last night

#i was gazeboed mate #i was absolutely baubled

Meanwhile, “utter” works for the first (e.g., “you utter floorboard”) but somehow “utterly” doesn’t seem to work as well for the second (“I was utterly floorboarded”).

Utterly doesn’t work for drunk because it’s the affix for turning random objects into terms for *shocked*, obviously.

… huh.  I thought that might just be the similarity to “floored”, and yet “I was utterly coat hangered” does seem to convey something similar.

I have to tell you, I am utterly sandwiched at this discovery.

Completely makes the phrase mean “super tired”.

“God, it’s been a long week, I am completely coat-hangered.”

Something is

Something is wrong with our language

Is it a glitch or a feature?

Feature

this neat feature is called collocative substitution, and it occurs when certain words are strongly linked to certain context and/or phrases. when you read/hear a pair of words that usually wouldn’t go together, your brain fills in the context with what would normally be inferred, given the originally phrased pairing. thus, finding out that there’s a term for this phenomenon may indeed leave you utterly sandwiched. lesser known or less strongly linked phrases and pairings may not be able to translate substituted words to appropriately fit the inferred context, so you were not utterly floorboarded at the club last night, but rather you were absolutely floorboarded, and as this explanation continues to drag on, you may by the end of it find yourself completely coathangered from read it all.

I, like all linguists I have met or even heard of, have a deep intricate love-hate relationship with the English Language because of complete and total coathangering like this

Hey I was just studying this last week! It’s also a thing in Spanish 😂

English is so great!  And so terrible!