I didn’t get very good sleep last night. Why? Because I didn’t have my blog post ready for this morning. So I went to sleep thinking of what I could write about, woke up thinking of what I will write about and drove to work thinking of what I could write about.
In the past month, I’ve slowly developed a blogging-biorhythm. For the content of my WordPress, I usually have a couple posts in queue that I slowly write, edit and re-edit. But for most days, I typically write up my post the night before and have it ready to publish when I wake up the next morning. So when that didn’t happen yesterday, it threw my sleep off.
And then on my drive to work this morning, I thought, “Well, I’ll just write about having nothing to write about.” Brilliant.
Feed my mind.
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Word Fun
As I was typing this, my totally non-geeky mind couldn’t help but think “rhythm” is a great word to use when there are no vowels on your Scrabble rack, and “queue” is a lifesaver if you’re stuck with a bunch of vowels.
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More Word Fun
“Converse” or “conversate”? Which one do you use? What’s the difference?
10 Comments
September 25, 2007 at 1:43 pm
I don’t think I’ve ever spoken or written the word “conversate.” I think I’ve always used “converse.” Oh well… let’s call the whole thing off. =) ~P
September 25, 2007 at 3:47 pm
i’m the champ.
September 25, 2007 at 5:45 pm
no wonder. i was wondering how you type all these posts so early in the morning.
converse vs. conversate. hahaha do we have to make this a public debate…?
September 25, 2007 at 10:38 pm
i’ve never used conversate. what the heck is conversate?
the bound morpheme ‘-ate’ is actually a meaningless morpheme. it doesn’t really have a separate meaning. it doesn’t attach to free morphemes to create a new word.
alleviate (v.) – but “alleve” is not a word
mitigate (v.) – no “to mitig”
initiate (v.) – no “to initi”
relegate (v.) – no “to rele”
but ‘-ate’ is found in verbs a lot. and interestingly, all the verbs seem to be transitive! There seem to be no ‘-ate’ verbs that are intransitive.
we can reason “conversate” to mean “to make conversation,” i.e. “to converse” and that’s what it seems to mean (instinctually).
but it sounds weird doesn’t it? it sounds weird because! -ate only attaches to transitive verbs, but if “conversate” were really a word, it would be an INtransitive verb!
so yes. “converse” is a real word. “conversate” isn’t in the dictionary, but rationally it’s supposed to mean “to converse”
who says linguistics is useless??
September 25, 2007 at 10:38 pm
sigh. tia’s the only one who’ll appreciate my comment. oh well.
September 26, 2007 at 12:06 am
Aaron,
If by champ, you mean biggest loser, then yes.
Jennifer,
Wow. As I was reading your comment, I thought you totally copied and pasted from google somewhere, but I realized that you actually typed all that out. Amazing. Anyways, just to clarify, I’m a fan of “converse”, but dictionary.com has “conversate” as an entry and so I wanted to know what the general perception of the word was.
September 26, 2007 at 1:23 am
And Steven, you forgot to say that Jennifer is a nerd. =) ~P
October 6, 2007 at 6:47 pm
[...] wrote a comment on steven’s blog about the difference between converse and conversate, and it made me miss studying linguistics so [...]
December 15, 2007 at 10:07 pm
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
January 7, 2008 at 6:48 pm
very interesting.
i’m adding in RSS Reader