How funny is this word? The 'snunkoople' effect (2015) | Hacker News Reader

How funny is this word? The 'snunkoople' effect (2015)

sciencedaily.com

12 pointstintinnabula6 comments

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?

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

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.

>sound-words

Those are called onomatopoeia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia

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.

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.

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