Contractions Work, Until They Don't

Tom Scott is going off on the peculiarities of the English language again. We use a lot of contractions, but there are a lot of other possible contractions that we could use, but we don't because they are weird. Oh sure, there is a logical explanation, which is what this video is all about.

The example he leads with is "Is this introduction weird? Yes, it's." Then he goes on to explain why that's weird. It sure is, because anyone who wants to use a contraction in this case would have said, "Yes, 'tis." The contraction "'tis" is old fashioned, but that has been the contraction of "it is" for quite some time. He eventually gets around to that one. Still, there are linguistic reasons we don't have words like "there'dn't've" (there would not have) but we do have words like "gonna" (going to). Tom explains them as clitics with syntactic gaps and stress patterns. Try to keep up, this is complicated.