this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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[–] cholesterol 36 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

The word 'monosyllabic' isn't monosyllabic.

The word 'alphabetic' isn't alphabetic.

The word 'palindrome' isn't a palindrome.

[–] Dasus 21 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Those are all heterological words, just like "phonetic".

Autological (or homological) would be words like "pentasyllabic", "unhyphenated" and "writable.".

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Does the word heterological describe itself?

[–] Dasus 13 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Uffff, right in my autism.

Luckily the internet helps with that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grelling%E2%80%93Nelson_paradox

The paradox can be eliminated, without changing the meaning of "heterological" where it was previously well-defined, by modifying the definition of "heterological" slightly to hold all nonautological words except "heterological". But "nonautological" is subject to the same paradox, for which this evasion is not applicable because the rules of English uniquely determine its meaning from that of "autological". A similar slight modification to the definition of "autological" (such as declaring it false of "nonautological" and its synonyms) might seem to correct that, but the paradox still remains for synonyms of "autological" and "heterological" such as "self-descriptive" and "non–self-descriptive", whose meanings also would need adjusting, and the consequences of those adjustments would then need to be pursued, and so on. Freeing English of the Grelling–Nelson paradox entails considerably more modification to the language than mere refinements of the definitions of "autological" and "heterological", which need not even be in the language for the paradox to arise. The scope of these obstacles for English is comparable to that of Russell's paradox for mathematics founded on sets.

Tldr "does the set of all sets contain itself?"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

Haha, I'm sorry. It was definitely a set-up.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

This just makes me mad lol

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

My favorite is 'Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia', which is the word for the condition of being phobic of long words. Feels like the doctor who named that one was a bit of a dick XD

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Same, always fascinated me when I first learnt it

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

The fear of long words is Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.