3 ms·
I bet that the "strangely coincidental meanings" are your human brain doing pattern-matching, rather than any etymological similarities. Which I think is why th
by CGamesPlay 10y ago
I bet that the "strangely coincidental meanings" are your human brain doing pattern-matching, rather than any etymological similarities. Which I think is why the anagrams are so fun in the first place!
- dahart 10y agoTotally, I think you're right. I suspect there are lots of infrequent and different ways to associate two words, and my brain conflates them all into one concept. It would be surprising if a random dissimilar anagram was frequently a pair of synonyms, but it might not be surprising that a pair has some association of some kind, where there are tens or hundreds of different ways to associate words. Probably not a perfect analogy, but this is vaguely reminding me of Ramsey's theorem from combinatorics; the idea that if you have enough stuff, some of it must be structured.
- JCzynski 10y agoWords with similar letter distributions will tend to be from the same root languages, which frequently maps to category of discourse (scientific, sophisticated, coarse, exotic, etc.)