Re:English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2...
by tim333 on Sunday March 28, 2021 @05:29AM
(#26609021)
You only get defenestrate in quite pretentious literary essays. I'm English and only came across it recently. I think the availability of Google has made that sort of stuff more common writers can use obscure words and rather than have 90% of their readers not understand, now they can google it. English has a vast stock of words like that that some writer probably made up a centuries ago - there's a lot of old literature out there.
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Re:English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2...
by smitty1e on Sunday March 28, 2021 @06:13AM
(#26609185)
English's jumbo vocabulary makes it great for doggerel, because so many ideas can be phrased with multiple rhymes and syllable counts.
Re:English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2...
by ghaff on Sunday March 28, 2021 @09:38AM
(#26610292)
And punny and other wordplay headlines. For example, I could absolutely see, if there were a politician named Fenwick who was fired, a headline writer doming up with: Fenwick defenestrated.
Re:English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2...
by brigandish on Sunday March 28, 2021 @08:53PM
(#26616542)
It's not an uncommon word, even in speech. I did a quick check and the Times, Telegraph and Guardian all have plenty of examples of its use, too, across different sections of the paper. Even the Daily Mirror had 4 entries.
The Sun, however, came up blank.