• LordAmplifier@pawb.social
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    6 months ago

    Wiktionary says

    In the original result of the Wug Test, children consistently produced wugs for the plural. However, plurals other than the standard wugs are sometimes used humorously, including wuggen (by analogy with oxen), weeg, and wuggi (by analogy with Latinate plurals).

    Wuggi sounds nice. Huggy wuggi :3

  • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 months ago

    This test screwed me up in first grade. I thought it was some kind of grammar test so I kept asking if it was a verb, a noun, or an adverb. The test giver was some researcher and was convinced I wasn’t taking the test seriously because I wouldn’t say wugs. He got kind of angry and I found the whole thing to be kind of distressing. I asked to stop and he just got even angrier and said something like, “No one has ever had trouble with the wug test before”. I was convinced I was bad at grammar for years after that. Anyway, wugs! =)

      • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        6 months ago

        I mean, that could have been it, but it seemed like everyone else got through unscathed. I was older than average, I was 7 and the rest of the kids were 6. I think that was his explanation anyway.

      • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        6 months ago

        It was awhile ago since I took the test. I definitely wasn’t given this exact meme as a child though. I probably would have said wugs if I had been given this on a sheet of paper. I think the test was given verbally and he only busted out paper when I was struggling.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      What a shite researcher. The whole point is to judge children’s inferrence - that’s why they don’t use real words. There is no right answer. There’s just an expected answer based on similar words.

      • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        5 months ago

        I wouldn’t be too hard on him. I was a weird kid who grew up into a weird adult. I ended up doing lots of tests as a kid with him or researchers just like him. I did the test where you’re told to electrocute a person if they answer a question wrong and they pretend to scream. And the test where they use a wire to knock over water bottles. I gave weird responses to those tests as well. I just started pressing the button for the electrocution and laughing. I apologized after. And when the water bottles got knocked over I just sat there and waited for him to come back. It occurred to me that I might get in trouble, but then I figured he would just take my word on it. I was like, “Your structure fell over!”. These tests make for fun stories.

        edit: With the electrocution test I definitely tried to reason with the researcher that electrocuting people wasn’t scientific, but I very quickly realized he wasn’t going to listen to me. I realized it was an opportunity to electrocute a person and that I was never getting another opportunity to do that ever, so I just went for it. Egg on my face when it turns out it’s both not real and I’m a awful person. I did feel bad though.

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          … do your parents happen to own any sort of lair? Does your dad’s fashion sense involve insulated gloves and welding goggles? Because this is starting to sound like a therapy session for someone supervillain-adjacent.

          ‘Grade school, am I right? The beep test, the Milgram experiment, pop quizzes, that prison thing, haha. I’m sure everyone gets those stress dreams where you haven’t studied for your Voight-Kampf test.’

          • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            5 months ago

            No, the elementary school I went to had this program called Learning Lab for K-3 grade. I didn’t even tell my parents what was going on at the time because I assumed they just somehow knew everything that happened at school without me telling them.

              • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                5 months ago

                No, at the time the principle was a woman. She was one of the those career administrators who raises kids tests scores by any means necessary and then takes a better job in a larger town with a bigger school. The principle before that was a teacher who took the job because no one else wanted it.

                I’m not sure who was in charge of Learning Lab. They mostly helped kids who needed to improve their academic performance, including myself. They used the same space as the researchers, I don’t know how it was organized or where the researchers were from. Just that the pool of kids who were pulled out of class for Learning Lab was the same pool who interacted with any researchers. I don’t know how many kids had the same experience as me. At least one, probably more.

                edit: There was someone who was like a teacher, who was in charge in of the kids, and instruction. I’m not sure who that person reported to or who came up with the program. They were not my regular teacher for any given grade.

    • GojuRyu@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      This sounds a lot like my reaction to questions in the test i got for autism (except it was writtwn so i just scribbled these thoughts out).
      I don’t know if you are on the spectrum, but it sounds like the test giver would have been horrible at administering it to children on the spectrum either way.

      • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        5 months ago

        I took a lot of tests for autism as a kid because I would stand on my toes. All the specialists said I wasn’t autistic. I got my hamstrings stretched and I stopped standing on my toes.

  • ℛ𝒶𝓋ℯ𝓃@pawb.social
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    6 months ago

    Wugs, if its an Anglo root, unless it’s derived from Latin “Wug*, wugīs” in which case there are two Wugi (wûg-eye). Unless its one of the random Latin words where we don’t do that and it’s still “wugs.” Unless it’s a loanword from germanic then we might anglicise it or we might say “wugar.” Because eNgLIsH iS EaSY…

    • drspod
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      6 months ago

      unless it’s derived from Latin “Wug*, wugīs” in which case there are two Wugi (wûg-eye).

      Wouldn’t a wug, wugis group noun be wuges plural?

      • eldain@feddit.nl
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        6 months ago

        Wouldn’t that be Wux, Wuges? It would need to be Wug, Wugines for the ol romans to not condense the word base into ending with x before English gets invented.

      • ℛ𝒶𝓋ℯ𝓃@pawb.social
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        6 months ago

        Correct! Thank you for catching that, I accidentally put it in third declension. So yes Wuges. I was referencing when second declension nouns borrowed into English sometimes remain -i for the plural (as in radii, stimuli etc.) So Wugus, Wugi.

        Oh yeah and sometimes it’s actually Greek causing irregulars (looking at you, criteria)…

  • almost1337@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    My daughter does the opposite in such an intelligent way. Kix cereal for example - one piece of it is a kik. And the singular for clothes is a cloe.

    • Robaque@feddit.it
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      6 months ago

      Only if the amount of wug is a prime number.

      This is because non-prime numers of wuggi are highly unstable and will split into separate prime factors of wug if there’s enough space (and in most atmospheric conditions).

    • Stamau123@lemmy.worldOP
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      6 months ago

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Berko_Gleason

      Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge children’s acquisition of morphological rules‍—‌for example, the “default” rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an /s/, /z/, or /ɪz/ sound depending on the final consonant, e.g. hat–hats, eye–eyes, witch–witches. A child is shown simple pictures of a fanciful creature or activity, with a nonsense name, and prompted to complete a statement about it

        • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          I don’t think there is one beyond “hey look we all know this thing”.

          Americans: “We are a diverse patchwork of cultures and saying the US is one gigantic boring monoculture just because we share a common language is offensive”

          Also Americans: hundreds of millions of people literally all relate to the same quirky element of childhood imposed through immense conformist institutions, can’t even process the idea that other cultures exist that do not relate to this specific element.