The Innovative Usage Thread

[bulbaquil]

I just call the bills a "one," "five," "ten," "twenty," "fifty," or "hundred".

[Shm Jay]

You forgot "two". By the way "single" makes it sound like a slice of processed cheese food.

[roninbodhisattva]

I just call the bills a "one," "five," "ten," "twenty," "fifty," or "hundred".

There's always just referring to them by the old guy on the bill: "Washingtons", "Jefferson", "Hamilton", etc.

[bulbaquil]

You forgot "two".

$2 bills are rare enough that I feel necessary to specify "two-dollar bill."

By the way "single" makes it sound like a slice of processed cheese food.

Brand new, directly from Kraft®'s new CEO Ben Bernanke: Legal Tender Singles™!

[Matt]

One of my professors gave us a simple assignment yesterday and remarked "this shouldn't be a brainer." Presumably she meant "this should be a no-brainer." English is her third language, though.

[Radius Solis]

"No brainer" is one of those wonderful examples of our sometimes applying morphology to phrases instead of words - there is no such thing as a "brainer" that we then negate with "no", rather the -er is being applied to the whole phrase "no brain". IIRC this sort of thing is relatively uncommon cross-linguistically, which may be why your English-L3 teacher doesn't quite have a handle on it.

[Yng]

Someone today used 'parannoy' (or 'paranoi', if you like): to mean 'make some one paranoid'.

[faiuwle]

Today I saw "Unices" as the plural form of Unix [system] in a scholarly journal. I know it's not particularly innovative in casual conversation, but I didn't think it was that standard.

Relatedly, and possibly more innovatively, my father will sometimes use "Unik" to refer to a single user of a Unix system, possibly because of the -nik suffix, and undoubtedly at least partly because he thinks that it is funny that it is homophonous with "eunuch".

[Bristel]

Talking to my sister on the phone, and she is using "type deal" at the end of her sentences instead of "and stuff" or "and that".

[Jipí]

Today I saw "Unices" as the plural form of Unix [system] in a scholarly journal.

I was going to say "Why, you find it all over the internet as a tongue-in-cheek joke", but a scholarly journal takes it to a whole nother level Cue retroflices.

[Bedelato]

I keep wanting to think "substitute X for Y" means "use Y in place of X" instead of "use X in place of Y".

Early printers, lacking a specific glyph for eng, sometimes approximated it by rotating a capital G, or by substituting a Greek eta (η) for it.

I would be tempted to write "substituting it for a Greek eta".

[TomHChappell]

Someone today used 'parannoy' (or 'paranoi', if you like): to mean 'make some one paranoid'.

That is a good one! I approve. Let's get it added to the OED.

[Jipí]

Can THC use italics and underline separate from another? We'll be back right after the break … Stay tuned!

[TomHChappell]

Can THC use italics and underline separate from another? We'll be back right after the break … Stay tuned!

Well, I can use most kinds of emphasis or stress independently of one another; but, where's the fun in that?

[Radius Solis]

then why not use it all?

[bulbaquil]

then why not use it all?

BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE
^u_n^r_e^a_lⁱ_s^t_i^c

[Nortaneous]

Probably not innovative as much as conservative enough that it's almost never heard anymore, but there's not a better thread for this so whatever.

From one of my professors:
"trial" [tʃrɔːɫ]
"hired" [hæːrd] (even more interesting because I'd bet he has the mary-marry-merry merger, although I'm not sure)
"require" [rɪkwɐːr]
"compile"(?) [km̩pɔːɫ] (didn't write down the word for this one and I can't remember it)

I'm not sure if the [ɔː] here is entirely merged with historical /ɔ/. It sounds less rounded than I'd expect an /ɔ/ to be, so it might not be.

[faiuwle]

Isn't that standard(-ish) /aI/ -> /a:/ in southern AmE, maybe with some other [5]-related thing turning [A] into [Q] or [O]? I don't know about the "hired" one, though, as you'd expect that to almost rhyme with "hard" in that case.

[Nortaneous]

I don't think I've ever heard it before, and I'm used to conservative Southern Midland. Also, that doesn't explain the [æ]; I have [haːrd] there (not merged with "hard", which has a higher, shorter, and more backed vowel, something along the lines of [hʌˑrd]), and that's what I'd expect to hear from any sort of monophthongization.

[dunomapuka]

Jon (/dʒɑn/; pronounced like "John"): a word for an unspecific object, akin to "thing"

This is supposed to be "jawn" /dʒɔn/ and it comes from Philly. So either it has spread to a cot-caught merging area, or SHE merges cot-caught and thus is hearing it as "Jon." Where is this high school?

[Jetboy]

I don't know if it's exactly innovative, but I think that one of the guys in my Greek class has [x] for /h/. I only noticed because he carried it over into his Greek for the spiritus asper.

[finlay]

You mean, he's not Greek, and you're trying to speak Ancient Greek?

Just because I would expect to hear [x] instead of [h] from a modern Greek person trying to speak English.

[Nortaneous]

I know I've heard [x] for /h/ from non-native English speakers before, so that's not surprising.

[Jetboy]

Gah, sorry, badly worded. No, I'm pretty sure he's an English L1 (though it's possible that he isn't, now that I think about it), and the class is Ancient Greek, which I'm quite sure he isn't a native speaker of.

[Trailsend]

Swiped from the Eddythread, something that's probably shown up elsewhere but I thought it delicious anyway:

still be an abundance of Starbuces

Pronounced ["stAr\.bju.%si:z], obviously.