Some people have great trouble splitting words into their component parts, as if their internal GPT just stores everything as single token like “redneck”, so they never split it semantically or conceptually into red+neck.
I guess Germans do need to be particularly good at this, based on the mega words they can have.
On the other hand, when listening to American Youtubers read something onscreen, it seems like they use some internal rainbow table to look up prefixes of words, and then just autocomplete the word based on probability.
I say this because during reading they often substitute words with some that sound similar, but are not semantically close to what is written.
Oh this is easy, but you may not thank me for it. Hum, whistle or sing, anyone near you will do the same after a minute or so. It’s timeless and it even has it’s own website
The point isn’t that it’s a mystery, but that it’s a word people usually don’t really think about.
No one’s reacting to it with “Hussa, finally this mystery that’s been plaguing me for ages has been resolved for me”, they are reacting to it with “Huh, never really thought about it. Makes sense”
They took a negative and turned it into a rallying cry.
Same as with “Yankee Doodle.” Yankee was a derogatory term for Americans, because many were of Dutch origin. “Jan” was a popular Dutch name. Doodle mean, well doo-doo.
Funny how some derogatory terms get embraced and others don’t.
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