I just cancelled my gas station rewards program because they moved everything to a mandatory app. I will not use your app.

(on mobile, so sorry for any formatting weirdness)

English teachers will only give you an arbitrary, subjective answer about whether it’s a word - you want a linguist if you want an objective answer.

Since we’re dealing with two different “words” (roots) here, factory and overclocked, the first thing to look for is compound stress. Many compound words in English get initial stress: compare “blackbird” and “a black bird”.

This isn’t foolproof, however. For some speakers there are compounds that don’t get compound stress - some speakers say “paper towel” as expected, while others say “paper towel”, but it’s still a compound either way.

So how can we actually tell that paper towel is one word? See if the first member of the potential compound (the non-head) can be modified in any way.

For example, we know doghouse is a compound because in “a big doghouse” big can only refer to the house, and cannot refer to “the house of a big dog”. Similarly, blackboard must be one word because it can take what appear to be contradictory modifiers: " a green blackboard".

So, in the same way, paper towel and toilet paper are one word because “big paper towel” can’t mean “a towel made from big paper” and “pink toilet paper” can’t mean “paper for a pink toilet”. (Toilet paper also gets compound stress.)

Yet another way to test is by semantic drift (meaning shift). As mentioned earlier, blackboards don’t have to be black, so the meaning of the compound doesn’t perfectly correspond to the pieces of the word - instead, the fact that it’s a vertical board you write on in chalk is much more important to the meaning. This is because once the pieces combine to form a new word, that new word can start to shift away from the meaning of the pieces. Again, however this process takes time, so it’s not a perfect test.

So, back to the original question: is “factory-overclocked” one word?

Well, it doesn’t get compound stress, and for me I can still say things like “it’s home-factory-overclocked” to mean that it was overclocked in its home factory, so the first member can take modifiers. And, the whole thing still means what the pieces mean.

So, in my grammar, “factory-overclocked” is two words. But for some of you “home factory overclocked” may not be possible, which would indicate that it’s started to become one word for you. Everyone’s grammar is different, but we can still test for these categories.

If you instead mean by your question, “can factory and overclocked be combined with a hyphen?”, however, I can’t help you, because language-specific writing conventions are subjective and arbitrary, and not something that linguists usually care very much about.

Linguists are still divided on this topic, called the “Critical Period” hypothesis - the question of whether there is a “Critical Period” during childhood when children naturally acquire language better than adults.

The data in favor cited in pop articles often comes from “feral children” like Genie, but as Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world mentioned, how much of this inability is due to natural brain development and how much is due to years of unimaginable trauma is hard to know.

Other research has cited brain plasticity differences and brain matter changes that occur during puberty that seems like it may be linked to language acquisition.

Again, however, the counterpoint of “It takes ten-ish years of pure immersion for children to learn a language, and how many adults actually do that” is pretty frequent.

I’m still undecided about what I think - maybe something in the middle, like “humans do lose some neuroplasticity during puberty that may inhibit language acquisition a bit, but adults acquiring native-like fluency is still possible with enough immersion”.

*puerile

This is literally the opposite of what happened. “To damp” was used to mean “to moisten” in the 1670s, a hundred and fifty years before “dampen” started to be used for it also in the early 1800s.

As with many if not most of the pedants in this thread, you’re dying on a hill that’s actually just straight-up wrong.

There’s been no meaning shift. The “possessive” and “envious” uses of jealous both date from the 14th century in English, and both senses were present in the ancestors of these words all the way back to Greek.

Same. Sauce ruins good fries.

I always just go to America’s Best. $80 for an eye exam and two pairs of glasses is hard to beat.

Thanks for taking the time to write such an informed and in-depth comment!

Still not buying a Samsung.

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted; the last somewhat good game Bethesda made was more than a decade ago at this point.

Maybe people think you’re insinuating that the games are bad because of the workers and not because of bonehead management?

If you took away the majority of the bacon this would be a really good breakfast 👍🏽

Since you’re being shit on in this thread, I just wanted to thank you for being so thorough and objective in your responses here, and for your links to sources. We need more people like you on Lemmy.

I’m just here to second the opinion that, while 7 was uninteresting, 8 basically destroyed Star Wars as a franchise, and that as imperfect as 9 is, it’s practically a miracle that it was as good as it was with what it had to follow.

Not on lemmy.ml there isn’t!

Qualcomm really does want to become Intel.

Just bought $50 of merch off their website – this is the sort of journalism we should all be supporting.

You’re the one that originally said that Anglo-Canadians didn’t realize how racist they are toward French-Canadians, not me. All I’m doing here is agreeing with you, and adding that French-Canadians do realize how racist they are, because for them it’s literally a matter of widely supported, highly publicized government policy in addition to being a deeply-ingrained cultural chip-on-the-shoulder.

You can either take our lived experience at face value and gain some perspective, or you can continue to bury your head in the sand. Either way I’m tired of yet another Quebecer gaslighting me about how good I have it here, so I think I’m done. Bonne nuit.

I’ve been here two years, so my family is right in the middle of the “get fucked” zone in basically every possible way for the foreseeable future. (This also includes being repeatedly denied permanent residency that we would automatically be granted if we lived 50km west of where we do, i.e. in Ontario. According to the HR director at my company, after the passage of the law Immigration has started an unofficial policy of putting residency applications that otherwise have enough points to qualify but don’t speak French directly into the “reject” pile.)

I appreciate you taking time to provide the links and advice though.

I’m definitely not saying that French-Canadians have it better in the rest of Canada and that has never been my argument – I completely agree with your original comment that Anglo-Canadians are unintentionally racist toward French-Canadians, but my original comment is also 100% true, that French-Canadians are instead intentionally racist toward English speakers.