We’ll just continue to do it anyway.

Looks like I moved to proton drive just in time!

One of my biggest problems with the movies is that they made Elrond (and all of the other elves) so angry and stodgy, and completely ignored all of the joyful aspects of his character from the books. The elves, especially the Noldor, are a people defined by the way their joy for life is inextricably mixed with sorrow as they fight the long defeat, which is part of what makes them so compelling.

Apparently eleventy-bajillion dollars wasn’t enough.

(on mobile, so sorry for any formatting weirdness)

English teachers will only give you an arbitrary, subjective answer about whether it’s a word - you want a linguist if you want an objective answer.

Since we’re dealing with two different “words” (roots) here, factory and overclocked, the first thing to look for is compound stress. Many compound words in English get initial stress: compare “blackbird” and “a black bird”.

This isn’t foolproof, however. For some speakers there are compounds that don’t get compound stress - some speakers say “paper towel” as expected, while others say “paper towel”, but it’s still a compound either way.

So how can we actually tell that paper towel is one word? See if the first member of the potential compound (the non-head) can be modified in any way.

For example, we know doghouse is a compound because in “a big doghouse” big can only refer to the house, and cannot refer to “the house of a big dog”. Similarly, blackboard must be one word because it can take what appear to be contradictory modifiers: " a green blackboard".

So, in the same way, paper towel and toilet paper are one word because “big paper towel” can’t mean “a towel made from big paper” and “pink toilet paper” can’t mean “paper for a pink toilet”. (Toilet paper also gets compound stress.)

Yet another way to test is by semantic drift (meaning shift). As mentioned earlier, blackboards don’t have to be black, so the meaning of the compound doesn’t perfectly correspond to the pieces of the word - instead, the fact that it’s a vertical board you write on in chalk is much more important to the meaning. This is because once the pieces combine to form a new word, that new word can start to shift away from the meaning of the pieces. Again, however this process takes time, so it’s not a perfect test.

So, back to the original question: is “factory-overclocked” one word?

Well, it doesn’t get compound stress, and for me I can still say things like “it’s home-factory-overclocked” to mean that it was overclocked in its home factory, so the first member can take modifiers. And, the whole thing still means what the pieces mean.

So, in my grammar, “factory-overclocked” is two words. But for some of you “home factory overclocked” may not be possible, which would indicate that it’s started to become one word for you. Everyone’s grammar is different, but we can still test for these categories.

If you instead mean by your question, “can factory and overclocked be combined with a hyphen?”, however, I can’t help you, because language-specific writing conventions are subjective and arbitrary, and not something that linguists usually care very much about.

Linguists are still divided on this topic, called the “Critical Period” hypothesis - the question of whether there is a “Critical Period” during childhood when children naturally acquire language better than adults.

The data in favor cited in pop articles often comes from “feral children” like Genie, but as Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world mentioned, how much of this inability is due to natural brain development and how much is due to years of unimaginable trauma is hard to know.

Other research has cited brain plasticity differences and brain matter changes that occur during puberty that seems like it may be linked to language acquisition.

Again, however, the counterpoint of “It takes ten-ish years of pure immersion for children to learn a language, and how many adults actually do that” is pretty frequent.

I’m still undecided about what I think - maybe something in the middle, like “humans do lose some neuroplasticity during puberty that may inhibit language acquisition a bit, but adults acquiring native-like fluency is still possible with enough immersion”.

A girl I was thinking about dating made lembas by making some slight modifications to shortbread cookies.

As for how it turned out, I married her.

“Women are the best you’ll ever be able to get a little bit of.”

If there were no surface tension there would almost definitely be no wicking action either. If it didn’t evaporate super quickly, water without surface tension would probably be a giant pain in the ass to clean up.

Gotta love some good, old-fashioned eucatastrophe.

Same. Sauce ruins good fries.

Well we know where that got Saruman, Pippin, and Denethor.

Elephants apparently find humans cute, but I doubt that cats would.

Still not buying a Samsung.

That looks much more like ‘so’ ソ than ‘n’ ン

Excellent post in general, but it should be noted that the meaning of “wine-dark sea” is still very much disputed.

Sekiro has the best combat of any game I’ve ever played, so I’d be satisfied with just having something like it in other FS games.

…entirely in Sony’s hands.

Qualcomm really does want to become Intel.

Just bought $50 of merch off their website – this is the sort of journalism we should all be supporting.