Gnarly Foot - 11 March 2013

<p>It's the Up Goer Five Challenge! Try to describe something complex using only the thousand most common words in English. It's a useful mental exercise that's harder than you might think. Also, if you want to make a room dark, you might turn off the lights. But you might also cut them off or shut them. You probably know the experience of hearing or seeing a word so long that it ceases to make sense. But did you know linguists have a term for that? Plus, cumshaw artists, the history of Hoosier and beep, and the debate over whether numbers are nouns or adjectives.<br /><br />FULL DETAILS<br /><br />Who uses the phone book these days, right? The people of Norfolk Island off the coast of Australia do! And not only are their names printed, but so are their nicknames. If you're looking to call Carrots, Lettuce Leaf, Moose, Diesel, or Hose, they're all in there.<br /><br />What makes a word a word? If something's not in the dictionary, you might not be able to use it in Scrabble. But dictionaries aren't the last word on whether a word is legitimate. If you use a word that someone else understands, then it's a word. So when Johnny from East Hampton, New York, called to ask if his made-up term micronutia, meaning "something even smaller than minutia," was a real word, he was happy with our answer.<br /><br />We've all had the experience of saying a word over and over again until it starts to sound like nonsense. Linguists call this semantic satiation, although you might also think of it as Gnarly Foot phenomenon. Stare at your foot long enough, and you'll start to wonder how such a bizarre-looking thing could ever be attached to your body. Something similar happens with language.<br /><br />A bleeble is that little sound or word they throw into a radio broadcast, like the call letters, that serves as a brief signature.<br /><br /> Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game using three-word phrases linked by the word and. For example, what idiom could be described literally as a country carnival found in the center of town? H