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13 Oct 2007 12:40 pm
Fucking and the English Language
If you missed Steven Pinker's essay in the New Republic, you shouldn't have. Vaughan at Mind Hacks offers this aside:
Once, whilst drinking with a psycholinguist (say that
after a few pints) I was taught a useful way of quickly working out the
stressed syllable in any English word - something which is apparently
called the 'fuck test'.
Simply insert the word 'fucking' into the word, as if you were using
the swear word for emphasis, and the syllable that follows the
'fucking' is the stressed syllable.
For example, absolutely -> abso-fucking-lutely. The stressed syllable is the third: i.e. absolutely. It works for every multi-syllable word I've found so far.
Which just goes to show that psycholinguists are some of the coolest melonfarmers in the whole of cognitive science.
Absofuckinglutely, man.
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