The proper word is “Venusians,” because that’s what we’ve decided to call it, and language is defined by usage. #descriptivelinguistics
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Venus is Roman. Venereal is formal Latin Genitive. That’s what make it "proper”.
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Thats also a proper clap back
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Word origins are awesome. I always tell my geology students that subduction leads to orogeny. However, I am glad that I don't have Venereal love, but Venusian love instead.
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The proper word for someone from Uranus is Suppositarians. Probably
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Probe-ably.
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You’ve got me wondering now. Did they ever send a probe into Uranus?
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Just the five moons.
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Five moons??!! You’d think it would share em out and give us another one.
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What about Jupiter? He’s got 69 moons
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Hella
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Per a technicality, Doctor Who can use either of them.
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But that's not how demonyms work. "Venereal" is an adjective, whereas by definition demonyms are nouns. While "Venusian" can serve as an adjective, it is primarily a noun; "venereal" is only rarely used as a noun and then not in the sense you intend.
#Englishpic.twitter.com/hK6DUXhM2J
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This is true now, but is there any reason (at origination) that “venereal” couldn’t have been a noun?
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The photo above right is a screenshot of _every_ nominal (i.e., noun) sense of "venereal" in the
@OED. Those citations are of the earliest known references in print to any given sense of English words. As you see, there is no sense of "inhabitant of Venus." -
[See "Thesaurus" balloon in the screenshot on the left. One single word—Venusian—is listed for such inhabitants.]
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