iad58 | Irregular expressions (Reply)

I went to Limerick as one of a group of four. One of the others, by the name of M., was to be my assistant. A dutiful and responsible person, on the whole, but very given to worrying about her performance in just about every situation (not without reason, I'd say, but never mind), very easily frightened and intimidated. A constant worry of hers was that her English might be laughed at. Irish undergrads, by the way, will laugh at almost anything, however trivial. That's just the way they are. But it can be embarrassing.

We were teaching two courses, Artificial Intelligence (one I'll tell you about some day) and Compiler Design (the one I'm about to tell you now).

There was an exercise which I had chosen for a tutorial. It involved writing a regular expression for ‘all words containing all five vowels in order’ (presumably {a, e, i, o, u}). I told M. how to get the students through the exercise, how to point out the special case where each vowel only occurs once. And then I suggested: ‘Ask them what English words fit that pattern. I wonder if they know of any.’

Well, M. didn't, and I could only think of facetious, but I knew that was not the only one, so I went and checked the online Merriam–Webster's—gave it a pattern to work on and then used WinWord's regexp tools to select what I wanted. Here is the list: abstemious, abstentious, arsenious, arteriosus (not much of a word, since it only occurs with conus), facetious, and the two compounds have it out and trade discount, which had separate entries in the dictionary. So I printed them out, complete with short definitions (but with no transcription), and gave them to M. to use at the tutorial.

Here's what happened. M. asked the students what words had ‘all five vowels in order’, and (when they turned out not to know of any) produced my sheet of paper and started reading, making her best guesses as to the pronunciation. That caused a certain amount of chuckling and giggling, so M. handed the sheet to one of the students and asked her to read the words aloud. The student stared at it for a confused instant and passed it on to her neighbour; and somehow the situation became less hilarious. Then it was M.'s turn to be amused.

(A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia lists quite a few such words, including some – such as acheilous – whose meaning I haven't been able to determine.)