My sister was asked by her English teacher (who had also been my English teacher) back in the Nineties, "What is a word?".
Although the exercise had been completed in class that day, I sent along my definition (this has been revised slightly over the years): A word is the concatenation of phonetic vocalizations which is only rendered comprehensible after application of the pronunciation and syntactic norms of the language of intended usage. The teacher's response was, "That's typical of him!"
That definition's probably wrong, but you never know...
Comments by astragali
Astragali commented on the word word
My sister was asked by her English teacher (who had also been my English teacher) back in the Nineties, "What is a word?".
Although the exercise had been completed in class that day, I sent along my definition (this has been revised slightly over the years): A word is the concatenation of phonetic vocalizations which is only rendered comprehensible after application of the pronunciation and syntactic norms of the language of intended usage. The teacher's response was, "That's typical of him!"
That definition's probably wrong, but you never know...
June 20, 2010