Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
And as they say, "a bird in the hand
is worth two in the bush."
What it means
is that it's better to have a certain advantage
than to have nothing, except the possibility
of a greater one.
But two birds in the bush?
Who calculated that?
What really is the value
of a bird in the hand?
Well, according to Julian Baggini,
a bird in the hand is technically worth
2.48 birds in the bush.
He calculated that number by looking at
observations from studies of what psychologists call
loss aversion. Loss aversion is a name
given to the tendency we humans have
to more strongly prefer to avoid losing
something we have
than to gain something that we don't. 
In general, it's been shown that if someone
loses
a hundred dollars, they lose more satisfaction
than someone who receives a hundred dollars acquires.
Researchers have been able to get more
granular with loss aversion.
In one study, they gave half of the
participants something nice, like a fancy
mug,
and the other half they gave nothing.
Then
they asked the people
with mugs to come up with a value
for the mug were they to sell it and
never have it again.
They also asked the people who never got
a mug how much they would be willing to
pay
to have a mug.
Now, the people who would never had one,
estimated that the value of the muh
would only be about $2.87
But those who did have the mug and knew that
they would never have it again if they
sold it
estimated its value to be about
two-and-a-half times larger,
around 7 dollars.
So, according to the evidence, in a general sense
having is actually slightly more than twice as good
as not having.
But why just cover that aphorism?
Let's talk about some other literary
terms, because our language can do some
pretty funny things
and those things it does have specific
names. Let's begin
with the blind date murderer.
A meme
people create that starts off all scary
and frightening,
but then turns out to actually be nice
and cuddling. For instance,
I'm going to rip off your face...book
status, you are so funny!
I'm gonna cut you... out some coupons for
that pizza place you like.
If you struggle, it'll only make it worse...
according to this fascinating article
I'm sending you about quicksand.
Many other memes use a similar structure
and the reason it's funny
is that it's an example of what is known
as paraprosdokian.
A paraprosdokian is a sentence or
phrase you can use
that begins one way,
leading people to think a certain thing,
but then, in the second half, completely
reverses or in some way changes
that initial opinion.
I will eat your baby...
carrots if you don't want them.
Syntactic ambiguity
is when you can't figure out exactly
what a sentence means,
because the order of the words doesn't
help. It frequently occurs in newspaper
headlines.
For instance,
"Police Help Dog Bite Victim."
Well, did the police help a person
who'd been bit by a dog or did the
police help a dog
bite a victim?
"Free Hat!" Are you giving away hats for free
or are you trying to get a guy named Hat out of jail?
Lexical ambiguity, in my opinion,
is often more fun.
This happens when a word has multiple
meanings and figuring out which one is
being used in a sentence
is a challenge. The word "buffalo" can mean
a number of different things.
It's the name of an animal, the name of a
city and it can also be a verb,
which means to bully or confuse or baffle,
as in "Hm, this video buffalos me."
I tweeted about this a few months ago.
Because "buffalo" has those three meanings,
it is possible to make it completely sensical
and correct, legitimate sentence using
only the word "buffalo."
Buffalo buffalo
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."
You have to think about it for a long time
for it to make sense,
but what it's really saying is that bison
from the City of Buffalo,
that bison from the City of Buffalo bully
also happened to bully other bison from
the City of Buffalo.
Tongue twisters.
All I have to say here is that the "she"
inside "she sells seashells by the
seashore" is an actual
"she," not just some random girl.
"She" most likely refers to Marry
Anning, a British paleontologist who
collected fossils from beaches nearby
where she lived her entire life
and discovered the very first Ichthyosaur's skeleton
when she was only 12 years old.
Now it's time for my favorite literary term,
tmesis. This word is great because you
get to spell it with the "T"
and then an "M," and no vowel in between.
Tmesis is a figure of speech
when you stick a word inside another
word. For instance,
why say "absolutely,"
when you could say "abso-freakin-lutely?"
And why say"you're welcome,"
when you could say "you're wel-diddly-elcome?"
And of course, "legend... wait for it...
dary."
Finally, a spoonerism
is a specific type of verbal mistake
where you switch the first two letters
of two words.
Many of us do this occasionally, but it's
named after William Archibald Spooner,
a reverend who did this a lot.
For instance,
instead of saying that the Lord is a
loving Shepherd, he would tell everybody
that the Lord
is a shoving leopard.
He would get his "merds wixed up."
One of my favorite, however,
comes from Sarah Palin.
When you spoonarise her name,
she becomes Parah Salin.
And as always,
wanks for thatching.
