Outsider’s Perspective

“Nintendo is going to sell eleventy billion of them.”

Adjectives, Euphemisms, Outsider's Perspective

I saw this in an Ars Technica article published today about the Nintendo DSi.

I like the creativity of “eleventy billion”.

I searched for “eleventy” (with the quotation marks) on Google, and I got about 304,000 matches.

According to Wikipedia, the word “eleventy” was coined by linguist and author J. R. R. Tolkien and refers to the number 110.

I can imagine that some non-native speakers of English must be puzzled when they see this word, but it also makes sense when one compares it to the rhyming word “seventy”.

messiest, messier, messy, less messy, least messy

Adjectives, Outsider's Perspective

I heard someone say “messier” the other day, and it made me wonder about the various versions of the adjective “messy”.

We can say that X is “messy”.

We can compare X to something else and say that X is “messier” than the other.

We can compare X to everything else and say that X is “messiest”.

However, there are no modifiers of the adjective “messy” when going in the other direction.

Instead, we have:

  • X is “less messy” than something else.
  • X is the “least messy” of them all.

I find it interesting that modifiers of adjectives in English do not have this bidirectional symmetry.

I suspect that this asymmetry must give some native speakers of other languages difficulty when they are learning English.

“One” as a Pronoun

Outsider's Perspective, Pronouns

I was thinking about this over the last few days, so I had to review a dictionary for the definitions of the word “one”.

A definition of “one” as a pronoun is an indefinite person of a kind understood by the context.

British English says that the pronoun “one” can replace the singular pronoun “I”, but American English extends this to replacing the singular pronoun “you” as well as the singular pronouns “he”, “she”, or “it”.

For example:

  1. “Mum was acting strangely, and one should have noticed it.” can mean “Mum was acting strangely, and I should have noticed it.”
  2. “It was as delicious as one would expect.” can mean “It was as delicious as you would expect.”
  3. “After the husband and wife had driven the Ferrari, each said that it was as fast as one could desire.” can mean “After the husband and wife had driven the Ferrari, each said that it was as fast as he or she could desire.”

There you have it — a pronoun that can be a first-person pronoun, a second-person pronoun, or a third-person pronoun. No wonder English can be so difficult to learn as a second language!