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The ordinary-sized words are for everyone, but the big ones are especially for children.



Wednesday 1 May 2019

Nuts and Bolts: Menzareth's Law.

Menzareth's Law (or Menzareth-Altmann's Law) is named after Paul Menzareth, and sometimes also Gabriel Altmann, and it says that the longer a sentence is, in terms of the number of clauses it contains, then the shorter the actual clauses will be. 

It also says that the longer a word is, in terms either of the number of syllables or of morphs (morphs are things which form a distinct part of a word's meaning, like the -ion in the word construction, for example), the shorter will be those syllables (and therefore the whole word) in terms of the time taken to say them.

It's a nice neat theory.

But, obviously, not actually true a lot of the time.

Ah well, never mind.

Word To Use Today: ones with lots of syllables, perhaps. Like sleeplessness, or caterpillar, or supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.




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