macaronic and nerd fun vampires

[trochee]

lifted from a comment thread over in eyeteeth.

Bigram is a piece of macaronic; to be completely faithful to Greek in both morphemes it should probably be digram (and it would be more appropriate to say monogram statistics rather than unigram statistics, but engineers are remarkably averse to arguments from etymology).

Also, to stick strictly to Greek, four word phrases would be tetragrams and five, pentagrams (yes!) but to my disappointment the field says "unigram, bigram, trigram, 4-gram, 5-gram".

I tell you, sometimes the pocket-protector nerds take all the fun away from the tweed-and-elbow-patches nerds. (I'm both, so I should know!)

Comments

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

"macaronic" is a funny word.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

isn't it? I like it too.