[gumby]

Speaking of "fuck" I read a paper in the 80s (unfortunstally I've lost it -- it was back when papers were, well, printed on paper) that analyzed why you can say "fan-fucking-tastic: but not "fantas-fucking-tick".

I wish I could find it again -- I'd surely understand it better now.

[Slickarango]

Expletives are the only infixes in english!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive_infixation

[contingencies]

Three days ago I was scanning Unicode (looking for useful characters for a roguelike, as one does), came across the metrical triseme (⏗), tetraseme (⏘) and pentraseme (⏙) in the Miscellaneous Symbols section, and added them to wikipedia. As far as I could ascertain, these are used to indicate scansion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scansion#Other_symbols - which is apparently primarily a term used to describe rhythm and meter in a poetic context. However, the Expletive infixation page uses the alternate term prosody in perhaps more of a formal linguistic sense. PS: prosody & scansion. Certainly on the cryptic crossword one of these decades...

[laaph]

Can I ask what library you use for your roguelikes? Last time I was working with ncurses, I found it doesn't support unicode, and wncurses isn't well support on the Mac.

[contingencies]

I use a few libraries. The roguelike one I use is rotLove[0] for LÖVE[1] for Lua[2], which is a port of rot.js[3], which is itself a libtcod[4] port. However, fonts are handled by LÖVE. I have a bug filed with them right now where Chinese text crashes though, so I wouldn't call it ultra stable. Then again, it's just a fun project to learn Lua, so I'm not in a hurry.

[0] https://github.com/paulofmandown/rotLove [1] http://love2d.org/ [2] http://lua.org [3] http://ondras.github.io/rot.js/ [4] https://bitbucket.org/libtcod/libtcod

[nercht12]

Makes me wonder what would happen if English had a deprecation system like programming. "Prosody @deprecated - to be removed in 2017."

[Tarean]

Didn't this happen for spellings in various ortography reforms? I think german had the largest one in recent years and iirc there was a deprecation period for old spellings.

An English spelling reform would be a blessing but almost certainly isn't going to happen. And even if something would work it probably would lead to more fun akin to color-colour.

[WalterBright]

Shibit!

[afterburner]

Is it because 'tick' is a word? Or because it's nicer to have 1-2-2 syllables rather than 2-2-1? Or because 'tic' is the least stressed syllable in the word 'fantastic'? And the middle syllable is the most stressed, so preceding it with 'fucking' feels nicer?

[kissickas]

I would abso-fucking-lutely agree with your stressed syllable theory.

[StavrosK]

I find it very likely that it has more to do with the word "fantastic" than the word "fucking". "Fanta-fucking-stic" sounds very awkward.

[sjnair96]

Intuitively, I'd expect it to be because it's much easier to transition from the position of the tongue during the 'n' sound of fantastic to the 'f' sound of fucking than the transition from the 's' in fantastic to the 'f' in fucking. It sort of rolls of the tongue easier.