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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

in spanish i've adopted the portmanteau word muertiposa for this phenomenon, from muerto/muerta 'dead' and mariposa 'butterfly'. if you're gothy you might prefer that the butterflies embroidered on your backpack be dead

the underground high school newspaper i wrote for was called 'the crucified butterfly'

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I think this must be a local sub-culture word, as a Spaniard I've never heard "muertiposa" and google search for "muertiposa" literally returns me no results.

The GP does say "_I've_ adopted", seems pretty specific to them.

True, but when searching for it there's no results? Like I expected that to be a thing in some sub-community and adopted by GP. Otherwise, wouldn't it be more accurate to say "I/we've created"?

I think they may have meant "adapted", as in "created the portmanteau", but I'm not sure.

I think "adopted" works fine. You can adopt a manner of speech the same way you can adopt a habit. The practice you adopt can be preexisting, but doesn't have to be.

It's sense (2) here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/adopt .

it's very, very local. my wife made it up, and this is probably the first time it's been posted to the web

Definitely going to be stealing this now though! :)

cc0 ;)

There was apparently a debate in wiktionary's early days over how (and whether) to license their content. They ended up licensing it, which seems wrong to me.

a word isn't copyrightable under at least usa copyright law, but a definition can be if it involves enough creative expression, which i think most of them probably do

What other things are there that exhibit this phenomenon? I am curious, I bet there are quite a few.

Anything where the image we associate with X is not the real X for some historical reason.

Or more generally it could extend to prose, art etc.

literally everything in the world

everything you have been taught is a lie

literally nothing is the way you think it is, because only extreme oversimplifications of reality fit in our heads

wow, i didn't expect 'the map is not the territory' to be so controversial ;)

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