[HN Gopher] How funny is this word? The 'snunkoople' effect (2015)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       How funny is this word? The 'snunkoople' effect (2015)
        
       Author : tintinnabula
       Score  : 11 points
       Date   : 2021-01-27 05:30 UTC (17 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.sciencedaily.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencedaily.com)
        
       | ggm wrote:
       | Mad Magazine cartoonist Don Martin, was extremely adept at
       | choosing .. sound-words.
       | 
       | Spladoingg.. Galoosh. Snert. You never knew what noise a man
       | would make, falling down a manhole. He pretty much confined it to
       | sound-effects.
        
         | na85 wrote:
         | >sound-words
         | 
         | Those are called onomatopoeia:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia
        
           | ggm wrote:
           | Except Don Martin appears to have operated by taking that
           | list, and Roget, and inventing new ones. None of which
           | (AFAIK) subsequently entered widespread use. Unlike the
           | yiddish slang Mad used, which I think it helped perpetuate
           | into modern times.
        
       | steve_g wrote:
       | This article describes higher probability letter combinations as
       | higher entropy and lower probability combinations as lower
       | entropy. For example, "yuzz-a-ma-tuzz" is low entropy because z's
       | generally appear with lower probability in English.
       | 
       | I thought entropy worked the other way round - high probability
       | means low entropy and low probability means high entropy. Which
       | is it?
        
         | refactor_master wrote:
         | It does indeed sound like it's written the wrong way around.
         | 
         | Random information = high entropy. A common word is therefore
         | low entropy.
         | 
         | Here's a good analogy I found:
         | 
         | > Informally, the amount of information in an email is
         | proportional to the amount of "surprise" its reading causes.
         | For example, if an email is simply a repeat of an earlier
         | email, then it is not informative at all. On the other hand, if
         | say the email reveals the outcome of a cliff-hanger election,
         | then it is highly informative. Similarly, the information in a
         | variable is tied to the amount of surprise that value of the
         | variable causes when revealed. Shannon's entropy quantifies the
         | amount of information in a variable, thus providing the
         | foundation for a theory around the notion of information.
         | 
         | https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.2061.pdf
        
       | fredophile wrote:
       | This is an interesting result but it doesn't tell us if this is a
       | universal aspect of humor or if it's a cultural thing. I'd be
       | very interested in further studies showing if this applies to
       | other languages and cultures.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-01-27 23:01 UTC)