📔 Words and Rules

There is a lovely technical term for a word that appears once in a body of text: a hapax legomenon (plural: hapax legomena), Greek for “once said.” The term comes from philology, the study of old texts.

A memorized chunk is sometimes called a listeme, that is, an item that has to be memorized as part of a list; one can argue that this book ought to have been called Listemes and Rules.

The flip side of failing to recall an irregular form is tripping a false alarm for one when the verb is in fact regular. Word lookup is not instantaneous, and as it proceeds a few irregular verbs in memory might crudely match a regular probe. That could temporarily slow down the rule until the last jots and tittles of the word are properly matched and the false matches have petered out; only then will the rule be allowed to proceed unhindered.