The most controversial creature in linguistics

I immediate said that he "glung." I am so surprised that wasn't the most common response! - - 67-year-old man

i did a version of the wug test as part of a science project in high school. i went to an elementary school and did a wug test. none of the kids answered correctly but my favorite response to "this is a wug. now there are two of them. there are two ______" was "frens".

Years ago we had both a linguistics grad student and a very bright labrador retriever in the same household. I taught the lab to fetch or locate objects by name - if she knew the name, she'd select the corresponding thing (fantastic for finding your keys or the remote). So, we did some tests. "Toy" was a category, and all of the dogs stuff was a toy. Within the category of toy, were subcategories of ball, bone, rope, etc. When presented with a pile of stuff she'd never seen before and asked to fetch a ball, bone, or rope, she'd often pick things out by sight - but also would sometimes do tests. If the thing rolled when she pushed it with her nose, that was a ball. If it was nice to chew on that was a bone. Stick seemed to be a subset of bone, but she would pick it last out of various chewable things (with antlers actually being prefered over actual bones). Doing (ethical) science on your pets is fun!

"It's called thanksgiving because you eat lots of turkey" is literally (figuratively) the cutest thing I've ever heard.

Nah, he glinged. I was quite surprised when you said "glang" was in the majority. New words normally get the regular form.

it took me the entire video to realize people's basis for changing gling->glang is sing->sang. (maybe others? that is the only example i can think of for some reason) My immediate answer was "he glung" because my mind went to fling->flung. Saying "he glang" feels completely unnatural to me

I remember this being asked of us as kids in grade 1 (for fun in the classroom, not as an official study or anything), and my very honest response was, "I don't know, because I don't know that word. Could you teach me?" I'm sure that growing up with more than one language in the home must have impacted my view on the matter, and was probably an early indicator of both my perfectionistic tendencies and my anxiety 😅

I distinctly remember being given a similar test in preschool. When asked what a grocer does, I said "He grosses people out."

I treated "gling" like any other "foreign" word brought into English recently and made the past tense "glinged."

I remember my daughter in her early years used to use irregular past tenses quite well saying things like 'I saw', 'I thought'. We thought she was a genius. Later on she started getting them wrong and saying 'I seed' and 'I thinked'. It's like as soon as she worked out the rule she started applying it to everything rather than imitating what she heard. My son was a great one for making up words and phrases. He called helicopters 'copterplanes' or sometimes 'aerocopters' (we say 'aeroplane' in the UK rather than 'airplane'), trampolines were 'bouncealines' and he invented the word 'lasterday' for 'the other day, recently'.

In the UK they had formal assessments based on ‘alien words’ (I don’t know if they still do). At my daughters school a bunch of parents were irate because their children came home upset that they had failed a test for which there was technically no correct answers.

When I first started teaching little kids, it threw me off that my etymological explanations didn’t stick, but they preferred explanations like “because a quarter note is filled in black.” Very insightful!

My son didn't really start talking until he was about 18 months old, now he just turned 5 and constantly asks for the reason things are named the way they are (e.g. "Why is it called a 'house'?"). It seems like he really enjoys thinking about words. My daughter on the other hand started talking before she was 1 and was spontaneously telling stories about made up characters by the time she was 2, yet she has never outwardly shown any interest is words or language. It's really interesting watching them develop in such different ways.

My problem with Gleason is her sending emails to linguistics students threatening legal action if they didn't stop using the wugs. Also the wug being a linguistic stimulus raises weird questions when it comes to copyright as science needs to be replicatable.

My family was friends with a family from the Netherlands. Their eldest sone was about the same age as my sister and I and when he was 11 (I was 12 and my sister was 10) they sent the boy to stay with us over the summer. The catch was, he did not speak English, and none of us spoke Dutch. I remember this summer as just a really good time. But looking back, I can't imagine how terrifying it must have been for him. Here he is, an unaccompanied minor flying thousands of miles (or kilometers) from home to meet people he had never seen before and none there spoke Dutch. Any worries he might have had were quickly dispelled. Very quickly us kids fell in together and despite the language barrier we were all able to make ourselves understood. Even more amazing is the speed with which he learned English. Within the first week he could get the general idea of what was being said to him, and he could speak enough English to give us a general idea of what he wanted to say. In 2 weeks he was becoming proficient in English. And by the end of the summer he was speaking American English with almost no accent. This was a bit of a problem for him once school started again. Kids in his grade would begin English lessons. He was ready to skip the basics and head right into the advanced English classes. After he was speaking almost perfect English. He was sent home from his first English class with a not stating he had repandly tried to correct the teacher with this horrible version of American English, but she (the teacher) was determined to teach the students proper, British English. There were some mistakes and miscommunications. We took him camping in Oregon, to a camp ground I had been going to for many years. I taught him to fish, and the fishing was fantastic. In no time we had caught our limit, then I told him we had to clean the fish. He was a bit confused because we had just taken the fish out of the nice clean river and we were taking them to a pond full of salamanders to "clean" them. It made no sense to him, but he figured things would be made clear as I showed him how to clean the fish. I showed him how to make sure the fish was dead (it would be horrible to clean the fish alive) then I used my knife to slit the belly of the fish open. I heard a rustling and looked. He was gone. He told me later that he had never expected my to cut the fish open and got sick even before he started running away. I don't know if this was his first encounter with a seemingly familiar word that had a very different meaning in that context, but it was certainly the most memorable. I'm not sure he ever did clean any fish, but he loved catching them and eating them.

My son was somewhere between 2 and 3 when I caught him, in deep focused concentration, disassembing my little battery powered nose hair trimmer. He'd gotten it pretty well destroyed but had a few potentially functional pieces still in hand and he was so intently focused upon his work prying pieces apart that he failed to notice my approach. "Ah, what cha doing there, champ?" I queried. Instantly, his little body convulsed in a spasm of guit. The last pieces fell into the pile strewn about his little feet as the reaction reached his hands and he blurted out in his perfectly fluent toddler grammar, "i didn't didded it!" I had to laugh as i picked him up and contradicted him, saying, mirroring his language, " You did, too, didded it! I caught you red handed" Just one of many fond memories of raising that rascal.

I'm an English speaker, my children have been raised with Korean as their first language. I remember my son, at about age 2-3 was starting to learn a few English words, and he developed a rule, that English nouns have 's' on the end. So when he tried to communicate with my mum, he would say English nouns he knew, and also convert Korean nouns to English by adding 's' (eg. 사과 ('sa-gwa' apple) becomes 사과s ('sa-gwas')

me, a 22 year old adult feels PERSONALLY attacked because i shouted out to my computer screen, "GLINGED!! HE GLINGED!!!!!" only to find out IM in the minority yeah right pffffft

God I love these videos. Your passion is always apparent, and I enjoy your delivery.

I definitely need a video on the shortened words I’m so so interested in it