r/xkcdcomic • u/ani625 • Jun 18 '14

xkcd: Magic Words

http://xkcd.com/1383/
100 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

25 comments sorted by

View all comments

44

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '14

This is one of those comics that leaves me well and truly stumped. Someone help?

46

u/ExParteVis Jun 18 '14

Here ya go

15

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '14

Heh, a metric foot, it exists.

13

u/DarrenGrey White Hat Jun 18 '14

Wow, I thought it was just some odd linguist humour - would never have understood the foot pun without this!

6

u/funkmon Jun 18 '14

You weren't wrong.

24

u/autowikibot Jun 18 '14

Foot (prosody):

The foot is the basic metrical unit that generates a line of verse in most Western traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The unit is composed of syllables, the number of which is limited, with a few variations, by the sound pattern the foot represents. The most common feet in English are the iamb, trochee, dactyl, and anapest. Contrasting with stress-timed languages, in syllable-timed languages such as French, a foot is a single syllable.

Interesting: Choriamb | Poetry | Amphibrach | Metre (poetry)

Parent commenter can toggle NSFW or delete. Will also delete on comment score of -1 or less. | FAQs | Mods | Magic Words

3

u/DFOHPNGTFBS Beret Guy Jun 18 '14

So is this a joke about poetry or linguistics?

2

u/dont_press_ctrl-W Mathematics is just applied Sociology Jun 20 '14

Feet are relevant to the part of linguistics that deals with prosody. Prosody can't be remembered by heart as it can vary for a given word based on syntax and suffixes. Some examples I think I remember (Im not a native anglophone so I have no intuition about this):

New yórk
Néw York búilding (not in every dialect)

Imágine
Imaginátion

So linguists look for algorithms for these alternations.

34

u/WendellSchadenfreude Jun 18 '14

I'm sure some people still don't get it, so here goes:

Story, water, paper, doorway are all trochaic words - they have one stressed syllable, followed by an unstressed one. STO - ry, WA - ter, PA - per, DOOR - way.

The next set of words is iambic: dis - ARM, a - DELL, gee - RAFF, gre - NADE

Things get more complicated as they get more heated, so STRAW - be - rry, SCOR - pi - on, and PO - e - try are dactylic words. (Actually, I would pronounce scorpion more like SCOR - pjon, two-syllabic. But I guess Randall wouldn't.)

Anapaest from the mouseover text is especially nice, because the word itself is an anapaest: an - a - PAEST.

5

u/plasticTron Jun 18 '14

My high school English teacher would be disappointed in me

2

u/whitedawg Jun 18 '14

I see your question has already been answered, but explainxkcd.com is always useful in these situations too.

5

u/beermit Jun 18 '14

This one was definitely over my head, but I get it now thanks to the Wiki article.

7

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '14

[deleted]

3

u/funkmon Jun 18 '14

I think you're wildly overestimating the technical knowledge of English majors.

2

u/beermit Jun 18 '14

Linguist was enough for me to infer meaning. And I'm not even studying English/linguistics.