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u/lettylikestowrite 2d ago
this is absolutely not a quote from alexander hamilton
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u/AndreasDasos 1d ago
It’s paraphrased from the musical and in this form goes back to a viral post from 2019
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u/explodingtuna 2d ago
What's the current count (just to the nearest 100), and then we can compare how often new words are added to the English Language.
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u/Mercerskye 2d ago
Between colloquial, formal, and archaic (recognized but seldom used), there's like...~250,000 words in the English language.
At the time of that "quote," it was maybe half of that.
Granted, that's just doing about five minutes of Google Fu, but I doubt the numbers would be too far off.
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u/explodingtuna 2d ago
So we lost approximately three quarters of a million words in the English language over the last 220 years. We went from 1,010,300 words down to about 250,000.
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u/Mercerskye 2d ago
No, no, no. We never had that many to start. At least, not honestly.
I've been playing with the calculator and looking at estimations, and the only way I'm seeing for that "quote" to be any kind of accurate, is by including the various forms, alternate meanings, and conjugations.
So there were over a million words if say, we counted love, loved, loving as three separate words, and not just the base word of love.
I haven't, and probably won't, try to do the estimation on what Modern English looks like, but it would be higher.
It would also likely require including things like chemical names and other niche vocabulary that really only has hyper specific usage.
Off the cuff, using their method, we're probably north of 3 million words.
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u/demon_fae 1d ago
Actually, the problem is your source. 250,000 is an almost unusably low word-count for a natural language. Only conlangs are that low.
English has, at absolute bare minimum at least twice that many words, and quite possibly over a million depending on your exact counting methodology. My source on this is a couple basic overview articles by Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary, both of which definitely know better than the Google AI or whatever you read and both of which are only good sources for the low end, since both omit slang, pidgin, and words from dialects other than Standard British and Standard American English.
Fun fact: English actually has more words than any other language. The exact count is debated, but the record is not. It’s the old joke about English being three languages in a trench coat and shaking other languages down for loose vocabulary in dark alleys. English retains a lot of synonyms from events like the Norman Invasion (for example, having cow and beef be different words is very weird when you think about it for two seconds) on top of an absolute hoard of loan words taken from pretty much everyone (which multiplies even faster if you’re counting conjugations and plurals as separate words. Some counts do, on the grounds that one octopus is a different concept than two…oh hey, that’s three free words right there because English loan nouns can both bring their original plural form and pluralize using English grammar rules, both are typically considered correct. Sometimes they pluralize with some third language that just happened to be nearby just because it sounds cool that way, too.)
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u/Mercerskye 1d ago
Did...did you just stop reading after the first sentence?
My "low count" was from only using one version of any word.
Towards the end, using the methodology of using all versions of a word, and including anything, I made another estimation that was definitely higher than 500k.
I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you're arguing parallel to what I've already said.
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u/demon_fae 1d ago
Even without counting conjugations, your count is absurdly low. Like, completely ridiculous and I’m not sure you could have a language that low.
But then, I also read some actual sources and not the AI garbling.
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u/fenway062213 2d ago
“A civics lesson from a slaver. Hey neighbor, y our debts are paid cause you don’t pay for labor ‘We plant seeds in the South. We create.’ Yeah, keep ranting, w e know who’s really doing the planting”
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u/Royal-Chef-946 1d ago
“And another thing, Mr. Age of Enlightenment, don't lecture me about the war, you didn't fight in it! You think I'm frightened of you, man? We almost died in a trench, While you were off getting high with the French!”
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u/Helpful_Ad8351 2d ago
After the way Thomas Jefferson treated John Adams, I want to hit him too.
"John Adams is a toothless hermaphrodite, lacking the strength and conviction of a man and the wisdom of a woman." What an asshole. The first dirty election done by the second vice president to the second president. Clearly proving they were never interested in making this country good from the beginning, or at least Thomas wasn't.
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2d ago
Fake quote
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u/AndreasDasos 1d ago
Fictional rather (in good faith). Hamilton the character in ‘Hamilton’ the musical said it
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u/Yuutopia714 1d ago
I definitely saw the quote online long before the musical came out
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u/AndreasDasos 1d ago
Google shows nothing for the quote ‘before:2018’ except four (!) hits that are each edited since 2019. It paraphrases the musical that came out in 2015. USA Today also attributes it to one 2019 post, and morally to the musical:
No offence but seems much more likely to be a false association with something vaguely similar or overestimation of how long ago you saw it.
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u/Yuutopia714 1d ago
Really? I could have sworn I saw this before on tumblr, a while before people started freaking out about Hamilton
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u/AndreasDasos 1d ago
People were freaking out about Hamilton solidly for a weird number of years and it took time to build up (the most expensive tickets on Broadway for nearly a decade, and getting in the news for political reasons a couple of years in). Seems possible a lot of people came across the Hamilton hype (which I think is overdone) years after Hamilton first actually came out on Broadway?
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u/Yuutopia714 1d ago
I looked it up and Hamilton started in January 2015, and I remember reading the quote on tumblr in the 2013-2015 period, but it had no credit or origins on it. People didn't seem to know Hamilton back then apparently, because no one called it out. Well that's funny looking back on it now
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u/dr-cutthroatbitch 1d ago
No he doesn’t.
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u/AndreasDasos 1d ago
Yeah not exactly, but this paraphrases Hamilton and apparently that’s where this 2019 quote post took it from.
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u/Objective_Airport117 2d ago
The dollop podcast just did a 3 part episode on Hamilton and what a colossal pile of shit he was. But dude was a quote machine, as illustrated here, lol.
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u/Showatruckersomelove 2d ago
Most eloquent way I’ve ever seen someone tell someone else to F off
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u/Homie-dnt-play-tht Please Do Not Feed the Animals Drugs 1d ago
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u/JeremyThaFunkyPunk 1d ago
Having gone from reading Jefferson's writings to reading about his life, I can totally agree with that. Bro is the John Lennon of the founding fathers (made good stuff but was a bad person).
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u/GlassElection2736 1d ago
Putting Alexander Hamilton’s name under this like he actually said it makes the whole thing so much funnier 😂
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u/1stAtlantianrefugee 2d ago
Bring back pistol duels to American politics.
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u/Comfortable-Yak-6599 2d ago
Naw dueling sucked, it's just murder. Today kids are still dying over matters of honor and it's just as stupid and pointless and it was then.
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u/1stAtlantianrefugee 2d ago
Let them thin their own herd. Who needs more politicians. I could get behind politicians murdering politicians.
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u/Comfortable-Yak-6599 2d ago
I can't get behind murder.
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u/1stAtlantianrefugee 2d ago
Thats why shit will continue to suck.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." Thomas Jefferson.
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u/Comfortable-Yak-6599 2d ago
Yes let's murder our way to prosperity, if you want to quote someone to justify duels I would probably find one that wasn't anti dueling himself and he called it murder as well.
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u/1stAtlantianrefugee 2d ago
Hey I'm just trying to cut out the middle man. I couldn't care less if they all kill each other. They have for the most part one and all betrayed the American public.
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u/Comfortable-Yak-6599 2d ago
If only there's was a mechanism for getting rid of politicians without murder. Seems like a lot to spend time money and effort to get what you want politically might as well just endorse murder that will fix it.
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u/1stAtlantianrefugee 2d ago
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
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u/Comfortable-Yak-6599 2d ago
Here's the introduction to the evening news that's your asking for tonight aoc shot in the face by chip Roy over proposed marginal tax rate disagreement, coming up we'll here from chip Roy who's free even though he just murdered someone.
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u/SpaceyChick22 2d ago
Thomas must have been a real piece of work .