Cultural Grammaticalization--Sam Shovel SpecGram Vol CXLIX, No 2 Contents

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Chomsky
(n.), an evil daemon said to be native to Massachusetts. By extension, any wicked or misguided creature, as in "That student is a real Chomsky, isn't she?" (quotation from Sullivan, My Life as a Linguist, 1971).

Etym.: the seemingly Slavic suffix may be misleading. Burgess (1958) pointed out the propensity of then-current slang to "Russify" English words through the Slavic suffixes. Thus, in this case, the root may be English chomp and the meaning, 'one who devours' (cf. Chrichton's [1973] eaters of the dead = 'archtypal evil'.)

nection
(n.), sort of like a couple of nodes slapped together. Only they're pointing in different directions, see? So you don't even need a line between them. They're kind of like neurons.

Etym.: plainly related to Latin nex (stem nec-) 'death', although the nature of the derivation is unclear. Mackey's (1987) suggestion relating it to English next is clearly preposterous.

node
(n.), sometimes it's half of a nection. Either half, doesn't matter. They're both nodes, after all.

Etym.: Lamb himself (1989) has suggested that the word is derived from the analogically formed English past tense verb knowed, since nodes have to have figured out how much activation was coming in in order to determine output. Reich (1975) proposed, on similar semantic grounds, a connection with English note, with dialectal voicing of the final consonant. Most likely, however, is that the word is simply the o-grade of net (q.v.), with expressive consonant lenition.

phonon
(n.), fictitious element (really only part of a network) used in doing componential analysis.

Etym.: from English phony, referring to the ficticious nature of the construct. From there extended to phoneme, morphophoneme, phonology, etc. (q.v. omn.). Second element (-on) unclear, possibly related to one, i.e. phonon = 'phony one'.

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Cultural Grammaticalization--Sam Shovel
SpecGram Vol CXLIX, No 2 Contents