With everyone in our houses craving any
form of socialization, Animal Crossing
New Horizons came at the perfect time.
We can socialize with our friends online
or just with the animal villagers, we can
de-stress by fishing or watching for
falling stars, and something pretty
useless but surprisingly entertaining: we
can give our characters titles. Of course
these can be serious, but almost everyone
I know is doing something silly for
their title. Some are repetitive like
Animal Animal or Friendly Friend.
Some are ironic like Pro Rookie and Weak
Muscle. Others take a more edgy route or
give a subtle hint to their fandom. But I...
I am a linguist. So I couldn't simply
look at this incredibly vast expanse of
possible word combinations without
desperately needing to analyze it.
New Horizons provides us with all types
of adjectives and nouns. We've got some
participles, some two-word phrases, some hyphens, an... adverb for some reason?
I don't know how that got in there. Anyway
the point is with all this variety
there's actually a surprising amount of
potential for a hilariously ambiguous
villager titles, which can show us a lot
about how compound words and adjectives
work in English.
I'll start with my own
villager title because... well, I'm really
proud of it. My villager wants to be
known as Animal Consumer. I just...
I really think this is perfect because it should be terrifying to any villager because
they're all animals... and... you get, it you get it. Okay, enough bragging about my clearly
flawless title. I want to talk about why
it works linguistically. Because of
course when you gain the Consumer title
it's intended to refer to being a
consumer of goods at Nook's Cranny.
But compound words in English have this
fun little feature: they can change
meaning depending on which type of
compound word you're using. There are
several categories of compound words but
the three most common in English are
copulative, determinative, and
possessive. New Horizons clearly expects
us to interpret all of their potential
word combinations as copulative
compounds, in other words a compound
where both words are of pretty much
equal weight. Some good examples of this
are student teacher or actor director. 
New Horizons clearly expects us to use
Animal in this way by saying, for example,
I'm a loner who also happens to be an
animal or a stylist who also happens to
be an animal. But some of these compounds
lead our brain to see things more
determinatively. Determinative compounds
occur when the first word acts more like
an adjective describing the second noun.
For instance, a coffee cup is not an item
that is simultaneously a cup and coffee.
It's a cup that is used for coffee.
Determinative compounds often follow
this "a Y that is for X" pattern. So, sure,
an Animal Consumer could be a consumer
who is also an animal or it could be a
consumer of animals.
Some other fun examples I found of this
are Night Owl Authority, like are you an
authority who also likes to stay up late
or are you the authority over people who
stay up late? And Novice Crusher, like are
you a new person who's just really
crushing it or are you someone who gets
some sick pleasure out of crushing new people?
Other titles are clearly supposed
to be adjective-noun combinations but
they can change meaning depending on how you parse them. For example, is a Very
First Bill Payer the first person who
paid their bill or a person who only
paid their very first bill? Are you a
music lover who's unique or do you love
music that's unique? Maybe you'll only
solve problems that you think are
soothing, or perhaps you only like bugs
that you caught by mistake.
When you describe a two-word phrase you run the risk of your reader associating
the descriptor with the wrong word, which is what makes these phrases fun.
For some titles it's not so much about the
syntax of the phrase. For those of you
who hate diagramming sentences, you can relax now that section is over. :)
No, with some titles it's semantic
ambiguity that trips us up, which is to
say at least one of the words involved
has an alternate meaning. Here's a
rapid-fire segment of some examples.
Smart Phone Cleaner sounds like a
special solution for cleaning your phone screen. Small-Fry Consumer is what I am
when I get to the bottom of a box of
fries. To be an Active Crybaby you don't
need to work-- out you just need to cry
regularly. A Pocket Model can be a tiny
model who could fit in your pocket, or it
can be someone who just models pockets
specifically. Of course for every Pocket
Model you need a Pocket Designer too. A
Comparative Enthusiast is someone who
gets really excited about words ending
in -er. A Crafty Ghost may not be into
arts and crafts, but they're probably
pretty cunning. A Crafty Moneybags sounds like a movie villain from the 1960s .
An Aggressive Loner may actually be pretty nice, but their loneliness needs to be
truly excessive. And lastly a Responsible
Resident isn't just a resident who takes
good care of things.
No, Responsible Resident is what they
call me when everyone's like, "Okay, who
put all these TURTLES everywhere?
Is it Bex? Is she the responsible
resident? Sometimes semantics ambiguity
gives a phrase a whole new meaning like
Pocket Cleaner could be a product that's
designed to clean pockets specifically
or it could be a hip new slang term for
someone who steals all your money.
Down-and-Out Force just sounds like
someone trying to describe centrifugal motion.
It's... it's like this force that's like... pulling you down-- or like feels like it's pulling you down? But it's
actually really pulling you out. You know? Like a... like a down and out force.
And Friendship Fowl sounds like a sadder, more terrible party foul.
She didn't tell me that I had spinach in my teeth before my job interview? Friendship Fowl.
Finally, let's look at participles. For those of you who haven't thought about participles since high
school and you have a voice in the back
of your head going, "Dang it, I know what a
participle is, just give me a second." I
won't keep you in suspense any longer.
A participle is an adjective that stems
from a base verb usually by adding -ing
or -ed. As any English speaker knows,
participles aren't the only thing that
end in -ed. That's also the default
ending for our past tense verbs. So there
are some adjectives on this list that
look like they could be a participle or
a past tense verb depending on what
words you pair them with. For example,
does Discovered Coconut mean you are a
coconut that got discovered, or is it
like an accomplishment that you're
really proud of so you wanted to put it
on your ID? Like, "I am the one who
discovered coconut." Another one that I
like is Connected. Of course the intended
meaning of Connected is something along
the lines of "immersed in the community,"
but what if you're using Connected in
the past tense? For example maybe you
want to brag about the fact that you
connected two pieces of grass. I don't
know that's pretty impressive! Of course
I couldn't just stop at simple
linguistic analysis of potential
villager titles. I had to gather
quantitative data to see if other people
were hyper-analyzing the potential
linguistic hilarity of each word, and...
yeah, no, they weren't. I mean some of the
titles that you guys shared were really
funny but not necessarily because of
linguistic ambiguity. But I did find some
interesting things. Within my small
sample size of 29 people, Full-Fledged
was the most common selection for word
#1. This makes a lot of sense
because Full-Fledged just kind of acts as
an intensifier for whatever word comes
after it, so it kind of works with
anything. So-Called was also pretty
popular, which I think has to do with
that like, millennial self-deprecating
humor. Like we can't just compliment
ourselves, we have to buffer it with
something silly. And that brings us to
our most common selection for word #2,
drum roll please,
it's... trash!
Who's surprised? I'm not. 21% of participants selected Trash
as their second word. Again, not too
surprising considering that most of the
people who responded to my queries on
social media are millennials. Yep, it
looks like even when we want to just
chill and have some positive vibes with
a nice game of Animal Crossing, we still
can't resist the amusement of literally
trash-talking ourselves.
So, that's it for my linguistic analysis of Animal Crossing titles. I actually learned a lot
about compound nouns while researching
for this video and I hope you guys learned
something too. If you play New Horizons
let me know what your character's title
is in the comments below. I'd love to add
more titles to my data and maybe even
post an updated version of that chart on
Twitter hint hint
@sheccabaw, go follow me maybe I dunno if you
want to. If you like this video make sure
you give it a thumbs up and subscribe
because I put out videos every other
Friday. Thanks so much for watching. See
ya!
