• cholesterol@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    The word ‘monosyllabic’ isn’t monosyllabic.

    The word ‘alphabetic’ isn’t alphabetic.

    The word ‘palindrome’ isn’t a palindrome.

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Those are all heterological words, just like “phonetic”.

      Autological (or homological) would be words like “pentasyllabic”, “unhyphenated” and “writable.”.

      • sik0fewl
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        8 months ago

        Does the word heterological describe itself?

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Uffff, right in my autism.

          Luckily the internet helps with that.

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grelling–Nelson_paradox

          The paradox can be eliminated, without changing the meaning of “heterological” where it was previously well-defined, by modifying the definition of “heterological” slightly to hold all nonautological words except “heterological”. But “nonautological” is subject to the same paradox, for which this evasion is not applicable because the rules of English uniquely determine its meaning from that of “autological”. A similar slight modification to the definition of “autological” (such as declaring it false of “nonautological” and its synonyms) might seem to correct that, but the paradox still remains for synonyms of “autological” and “heterological” such as “self-descriptive” and “non–self-descriptive”, whose meanings also would need adjusting, and the consequences of those adjustments would then need to be pursued, and so on. Freeing English of the Grelling–Nelson paradox entails considerably more modification to the language than mere refinements of the definitions of “autological” and “heterological”, which need not even be in the language for the paradox to arise. The scope of these obstacles for English is comparable to that of Russell’s paradox for mathematics founded on sets.

          Tldr “does the set of all sets contain itself?”

      • Ech@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        My favorite is ‘Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia’, which is the word for the condition of being phobic of long words. Feels like the doctor who named that one was a bit of a dick XD