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.