Author Topic: clonkier  (Read 1926 times)

mkenuk

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clonkier
« on: March 13, 2017, 11:50:28 PM »
Chi seems to like superlative adjectives as 'big words' especially in the 9-letter games; drippiest came up recently, and I think freakiest a week or so ago.
I was a bit surprised when clonkier got 'sorry, not known' in the 'interlock game.
clonky is in COD, so presumably there are inflected forms clonkier and clonkiest as well.

MK

 :-C

I must get this exhaust pipe seen to; it's definitely sounding clonkier than it did yesterday.

Alan W

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Re: clonkier
« Reply #1 on: April 26, 2017, 05:25:49 PM »
First threshold question: is clonky in the Chihuahua word list? Answer: no.

Second question: is clonk in the word list? Answer: yes. In fact clonk, clonked and clonking are all in there as common words.

I accept your point that clonky is listed in some Oxford dictionaries. Although the online Oxford lists it in the British and World dictionary without a definition - just the direction to "see clonk". However it provides five quite long example sentences that look like they came from real publications. Presumably this is do-it-yourself lexicography. From these examples, I infer that clonky can have much the same range of meanings as clunky. It can mean making a knocking sound, but it can also mean cumbersome, awkward, inelegant, etc.

So I think clonky should be added to our list, but definitely as a rare word. In the massive News on the Web corpus there are only two examples, both referring to cars, like your made-up example, MK. One was from the British Daily Express website, from earlier this month, where Rowan Atkinson was quoted as using the word about the vintage Citroen cars used in the Maigret TV series, in which he plays the title role.

Now, as far as I can see, no dictionary lists clonkier or clonkiest. This is not necessarily a fatal objection, since the derivation from clonky is a standard application of English rules, and the meaning of clonky allows of comparison. But still, these words are very, very rare. There are no examples in the NOW Corpus I mentioned above. In another corpus, Global Web-Based English, I found one instance of clonkiest, in a reader comment posted on the KiwiMormon Blog ("Mormon reflections from the antipodes"). "...and a pair of mens shoes, no socks and they were loose and they made the clonkiest noise."

I feel some words are just too rare to accept, and that includes clonkier and clonkiest.

While I'm at it, I think I should change clonk, clonked and clonking to rare. These words are not used often, and mainly in Britain, so I don't think they qualify as common words in our sense.
Alan Walker
Creator of Lexigame websites

mkenuk

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Re: clonkier
« Reply #2 on: April 26, 2017, 09:12:41 PM »
Thanks once again, Alan, for the painstaking research into what was, at least in part, a tongue-in-cheek suggestion.

Interesting that Rowan Atkinson should provide an example of the use of clonky.
 
He and I come from the same part of the country, so maybe it's used more in the North-west Durham dialect than in the rest of the English-speaking world?

MK


cmh

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Re: clonkier
« Reply #3 on: April 27, 2017, 01:03:33 AM »
I am originally from Yorkshire and a common saying in my youth was"if you don't behave you'll get a clonk!"ie be thumped!