otp

One of the tricky things with English is that we often have words that can be combined to form different words.

Like greenhouse. It's a combination of green + house. But a greenhouse is something very different from a green house. Autocorrect may cause some people to make this mistake, but generally, the concepts are understood to be different.

On the other side of things, there's things like "alot" which is mistakenly used so commonly that my autocorrect didn't even care that I typed that (and it's not just because of the quotes!).

Then there are words like login, which as a noun is definitely one word, but as a verb, should almost definitely be two words ("log in to this website", but "this is my login for the website")...but "login" seems to be universally recognized as standard for a verb, even though we don't say loginned for the past tense (we still say "logged in").

And of course, there are other words that are commonly paired together that we don't often see with the space removed, like "Takecare", "Noway", or "Ofcourse". These could all be potential candidates for the "alot" treatment. What makes "alot" special?

So what causes "Please login to the website" to be "correct", but "I workout everyday" to be incorrect? (And maybe everyone is "wrong" about login, or everyone is right about "workout" and "everyday", and the compound word is an acceptable alternative to the versions with the space)

I feel like this would be better in an AskLinguists community here... maybe there's an active one that someone could point me to? But I'm still curious to see what people think

I know MediaBiasFactCheck is not a be-all-end-all to truth/bias in media, but I find it to be a useful resource.

It makes sense to downvote it in posts that have great discussion -- let the content rise up so people can have discussions with humans, sure.

But sometimes I see it getting downvoted when it's the only comment there. Which does nothing, unless a reader has rules that automatically hide downvoted comments (but a reader would be able to expand the comment anyways...so really no difference).

What's the point of downvoting? My only guess is that there's people who are salty about something it said about some source they like. Yet I don't see anyone providing an alternative to MediaBiasFactCheck...

Bananas are ridiculously cheap even up here in Canada, and they aren't grown anywhere near here. Yet a banana can grow, be harvested, be shipped, be stocked, and then be purchased by me for less than it'd cost to mail a letter across town. (Well, if I could buy a single banana maybe...or maybe that's not the best comparison, but I think you get my point)

Along the banana's journey, the farmer, the harvester, the shipper, the grocer, the clerk, and the cashier all (presumably) get paid. Yet a single banana is mere cents. If you didn't know any better, you might think a single banana should cost $10!

I'm presuming that this is because of some sort of exploitation somewhere down the line, or possibly loss-leading on the grocery store's side of things.

I'm wondering what other products like bananas are a lot cheaper than they "should" be (e.g., based on how far they have to travel, or how difficult they are to produce, or how much money we're saving "unethically").

I've heard that this applies to coffee and chocolate to varying extents, but I'm not certain.

Anyone know any others?