Ugly Word Construction

Later on, after we LetHotPagesCool, I suggest we use the recently created TeleVision as an example to illustrate the reasoning, some of it are good, but probably the choice should be different

Consider the neologism "self-talk". Someone made a page devoted to it which violates the first and most important naming rule; the neologism "self talk" will never, ever occur naturally in what anybody writes. Why is that? Because it's not only unnatural, but it's ugly to boot.

The person who made that page didn't invent the phrase. The phrase "self-talk" could occur naturally in someone's writing, because it's a real phrase used in psychology.

It's an ugly construction of self- on one hand (self-destruction, self-flagellation, self-aggrandization, self-reference) and -talk on the other (backtalk, small talk, crosstalk) that just doesn't fit together. You can extend the first pattern by substituting any other verb to make up nonsense words like self-retardation, self-masturbation, self-interrogation, but not self-talk since talk is a noun. You can extend the second pattern by substituting any short adjective, to make up nonsense words like overtalk, bluetalk, grasstalk, gangtalk, but again it doesn't work since self is a noun too. I don't know whether noun-noun can work, but I know it sure as hell doesn't in this case.

Take that up with whatever psychologist invented the term. Are you proposing that the wiki invent its own special synonym for "self-talk" and use it instead?

It takes a good 60 seconds of head scratching to figure out what "self talk" is even supposed to mean (some weird combination of Self and Smalltalk?) and that's fatal for an actual word.

It took me 0.2 seconds to figure out what "self talk" is supposed to mean, because I'm familiar with the term. Don't assume that because you don't know the phrase then it's some sort of random construction.

Point taken. I just want to point out that I did think the self-talk page had something to do with SelfLanguage or SmalltalkLanguage or both. And also that there's probably a reason why the term "self-talk" never became popular outside of psychology circles; it's ugly. I think we could do a lot worse than coining our own word, or phrase, for it.

We use SelfTalk in a round about way in regular speech. For example "telling yourself that you can do it when in fact it is beyond your (current) financial means is deluding yourself". That type of telling is most often done using SelfTalk

Can we have peace (RK and the c-24-21.. person) please? I created this SelfTalk page and lets go create content to promote understanding, shall we? An example from Google search is http://www.pe2000.com/anx-selftalk.htm -- dl

Nobody's fighting. Relax a bit. Not yet, I hope

Anyway, I have added a change to AlmostTrue, where the word SelfTalk was used there before current controversy started.