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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: avaricious
This word has appeared in six articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
run after
If you run after someone, you chase them and try to catch up with them by running.
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Word of the Day
intemperance
Definition: (noun) Excess in action and immoderate indulgence of bodily appetites, especially in passion or indulgence.
Synonyms: self-indulgence.
Usage: A slouching, moody, drunken sloven, wasted by intemperance and vice, sat on the stoop and lamented his lot in life.
Discuss
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Language Log
AIs on Rs in "strawberry"
The screenshot I show everyone who tells me they're using AI for anything
[image or embed]
— Chris PG | PapaGlitch (@papaglitch.bsky.social) Aug 26, 2024 at 5:20 AM
More, from author John Scalzi and a different LLM:
It's worse than that: You can point out to "AI" that there are three "r"s in Strawberry, and after it disagrees with you, work with it to make it acknowledge the correct number, and then, once it agrees with you, ask it the same question in the same thread and it will give the wrong answer again.
[image or embed]
— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) Aug 27, 2024 at 9:44 AM
[Note: "The author of the quoted post has requested their posts not be displayed on external sites" refers to the post John Scalzi quoted, which was therefore omitted from the embedding…]
No strawberries in this one, but it's worth adding:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ColinDickeyChatGPT.png
A few relevant past posts:
"LLMs as coders", 6/6/2023
"LLMs can't reason?", 8/8/2023
"More on LLMs' current problem-solving abilities", 8/12/2023
"The reversal curse", 9/27/2023
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: atrophy
This word has appeared in 36 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
bring forward
to change the date or time of an event so that it happens earlier than originally planned
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Word of the Day
irreverent
Definition: (adjective) Characterized by a lightly pert and exuberant quality.
Synonyms: impertinent, pert, saucy.
Usage: Sally's irreverent gaiety and ease of manner drew people to her and made her immediately likeable.
Discuss
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Language Log
Stop throwing eggs and get to work
It's a card game with a strange name. "Throwing eggs" is a shedding-type card game in which the players (2 pairs of 2 partners) try to get rid of all their cards before their opponents.
The characters in Guandan (掼蛋) literally mean "Throwing Eggs". The second character is a homophone of the character 弹, meaning bomb, which is also suggested as an origin for the game's name. An alternative name for the game is Huai'an Running Fast (淮安跑得快), referencing the city where the game originated.
(Wikipedia)
I've overheard card players in the West refer to decisive card plays as "throwing a bomb", so the name makes sense after all, if you think of "dan" metaphorically.
"‘Decadent and passive’: China cracks down on ‘throwing eggs’ card game: Craze for the four-player game known as guandan may lead to the formation of cliques, Communist party warns", Helen Davidson and Chi-hui Lin in Taipei, The Guardian (Sat 24 Aug 2024)
—
As recently as last year, Chinese state media was hailing guandan as the card game that “can get you a promotion in China”.
The country was holding open tournaments, and workers were encouraged to use it as a social and professional networking tool.
Guandan, or “throwing eggs”, is a four-person, two-team game of strategy. It has been around for decades, beginning in Jiangsu province, and was a favoured pastime of former leader Deng Xiaoping.
But it has had a recent resurgence, with surveys suggesting there are about 140 million enthusiasts. In 2014, the municipal government in Jiangsu tried to have it designated as “intangible cultural heritage”, and it featured in the 2023 spring festival gala – the annual lunar new year television special.
But now it appears to have fallen out of favour with the highly interventionist ruling Communist party – being blamed for encouraging a “passive attitude” towards work, and encouraging the formation of cliques among party cadres.
A recent run of articles in the state-run Beijing Youth Daily described guandan as intoxicating and “decadent”, warning that it was “time to control the trend of ‘laying flat’ among all guandan players”. Laying flat (tangping in Chinese) is the term given to a social trend among young people who are rejecting high-pressure jobs for an easier lifestyle, which has alarmed authorities.
In a country where people's work and productivity are prized above all by CCP officials, any sign of slacking off sets off government alarm bells — especially if they are linked to social groups that are beyond the direct control of the party.
The crackdown on guandan is not proving very popular among users. The Beijing Guandan Club posted a furious defence online, asking “where this evil wind came from?”.
It said “circle culture” flourished in China no matter the sport, pointing at previous crazes among business executives and officials for badminton and golf. “According to the logic of those who criticise the game of throwing eggs, should badminton, table tennis, bridge, golf and other sports also be criticised? Should they also be banned?”
Some online comments suggested the furore over guandan may instead encourage more people to play. One wrote: “What the state resists is what the people support.”
The CCP criticism (after once encouraging the game for promoting social cohesion, as it once encouraged Falun Gong) is that playing cards is too much like ‘lying flat’, copping out of the high pressure employment rat-race.
I remember clearly how successful Fǎlún Gōng 法輪功 ("Dharma Wheel Practice") became after its emergence in the early 1990s. Falun Gong was a type of spiritual and physical cultivation that, by the mid-90s, was subscribed to by tens of millions of believers who met in parks and other public spaces to do carefully designed physical and meditational exercises. My wife en[...]
Language Log
More on gendered badass
Following up on yesterday's "'Badass'" post, here's a recent and relevant article complaining that the word has been bleached into meaninglessness, especially as applied to women — Jackie Jennings, "We Need a Word Besides 'Badass' for Our Heroines", Jezebel 6/3/2024:
I am finished with the b-word. It’s been applied to every woman who has ever been publicly competent at anything. It’s been worked to death and rendered meaningless. Everyone from Courtney Love to Martha Stewart to Rosa Parks has been described as one and, at this point, it’s so overused that to call a woman this is a form of dada performance art.
In short: We simply have to stop using the word “badass” to describe any/every woman on earth who has entered the cultural dialogue for something other than a federal crime. And, I’m not a language cop but just know that if you use “badass” and think it conveys anything at all, you simply must think again.
What was once patronizing and gendered is now maddeningly vague and borderline inscrutable. It’s a collection of AI-generated slay queen, #girlboss memes gathered into a single word.
The article gives some of the history, including a link to Megan Garber, "How ‘Badass’ Became a Feminist Word", The Atlantic 11/22/2015 ("The term used to celebrate the Clint Eastwoods and Chuck Norrises of the world. Now, it celebrates the Beyoncés and the Everdeens.")
The 2024 Jezebel article's take:
The word badass first originated in the 1950s and was used to describe cool dudes and bad boys. (You know, leather jacket, pompadour, authority issues, etc.) The connotation was slightly negative and generally only applied to men. At some point, badass became a term used for women who liked video games or could wield a sword. Sure you could call Luke Skywalker a badass but it felt way more applicable to Leia. Fast-forward several decades to 2015 when Google Trends reported that searches of “badass women” were at an all-time high. That year was also when the discourse around women-as-badasses seemed to begin in earnest.
Some folks were like, “Awesome! Women are badasses too! This, indeed, is feminism.” Others felt differently. Being called a badass felt like being called “ballsy” or told to lean in, all nods to the idea that the main problem with women is that they aren’t men.
There are two (somewhat contradictory) objections here: first, that the term implicitly praises women for being like men; and second, that the term has undergone semantic bleaching to the point of being "worked to death and rendered meaningless".
Both complaints seem to be somewhat true, although semantic bleaching of frequently-used words is pretty much inevitable, and you can find complaints from the other direction about female-associated words being used to praise men who are thereby seen as insufficiently masculine — so that the change can be seem as part of a general relaxation of gender stereotypes.
In any case, neither complaint seems to be working, in that the frequency of describing (and generally praising) women as badass has continued to increase, according to Google Ngrams: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/BadassWomenNgrams.png The frequency of "badass men" has not increased to the same extent. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/BadassWomenMenNgrams.png …which might be because the default badass gender is still masculine, rather than because radically fewer males are being described by that word — although the previously cited COCA statistics (mostly based on texts from the 2010s) certainly suggest that the balance has changed.
FWIW, a current Google Trends search for badass woman shows a peak in 2018: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/BadassWomenTrends.png Ben Thompson's Badass of the Week site, in action since 2004, is still somewhat behind the sociolinguistic gender curve: the 2004 archive has 24 males and 0 females; the 2005 archive has 35 males and 2 females; and fast-forwarding to 2023, the archive lists 20 males and 13 females.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
Yankee | Yank
an American, a person from the United States of America
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Idiom of the Day
leave much to be desired
To be very inadequate or unsatisfactory; to lack a large amount of what is desired or required. Watch the video
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to build the Church of St Asaph, Bala Cynwyd.
[VHM: "Pencoyd in 1291 was written as "Pencoyt". The name derives from the Celtic 'penn' with 'coid', meaning 'wood's end'." (source) Cf. Welsh coedydd ("woods"),
When I start to think about it, everywhere I turn I find how important Wales and the Welsh are for the history and character of this region, and that holds from institutions to individuals. My colleague at Sino-Platonic Papers, Paula Roberts, is of Welsh extraction, but not via the Quaker route. The first Roberts (then spelled Roberds with a D) she knows about came to Philadelphia in about 1730 from Wales, to take up lands as a farmer but refused to become Quaker. All that side were farmers. They started moving west, like many Americans. Paula's Roberts ancestors had many interesting and exciting adventures on the way, but eventually her father and mother settled in Boise, Idaho, where she grew up.
Somehow, Paula's Welsh roots called her back to the Philadelphia area, and when I met her she was living in Wynnewood. Wynnewood was named in 1691 for Dr. Thomas Wynne (< Welsh gwyn ["fair white"]), William Penn's physician and the first Speaker of the Pennsylvania General Assembly. Roberts is a surname of English and Welsh origin, deriving from the given name Robert, meaning "bright renown" – from the Germanic elements "hrod" meaning renown and "beraht" meaning bright. The surname, meaning "son of Robert", is common in North Wales and elsewhere in the United Kingdom
(Wikipedia)
Lingering observation: the Welsh certainly do love "ll", "dd", and "y"! Selected readings
* "Welsh 'prifysgol'" (4/25/18) — means "university", as, for example, Aberystwyth
* "Tolkien on walh" (5/26/07) — J.R.R. Tolkien on the Germanic root of words such as Welsh, Walloon, Vlach and walnut (from his essay "English and Welsh", originally a lecture given at Oxford in 1955), highly recommended
Etymological notes on "Welsh":
From Middle English Walsch, Welische, from Old English wīelisċ (“Briton; Roman; Celt”), from Proto-West Germanic *walhisk, from Proto-Germanic *walhiskaz (“Celt; later Roman”), from *walhaz (“Celt, Roman”) (compare Old English wealh), from the name of the Gaulish tribe, the Volcae (recorded only in Latin contexts).
This word was borrowed from Germanic into Slavic (compare Old Church Slavonic Влахъ (Vlaxŭ, “Vlachs, Romanians”), Byzantine Greek Βλάχος (Blákhos)). Doublet of Vellish. Compare Walloon, walnut, Vlach, Walach, Gaul, Cornwall.
(Wiktionary)
—–
Old English Wielisc, Wylisc (West Saxon), Welisc, Wælisc (Anglian and Kentish) "foreign; British (not Anglo-Saxon), Welsh; not free, servile," from Wealh, Walh "Celt, Briton, Welshman, non-Germanic foreigner." In Tolkien's definition, "common Gmc. name for a man of what we should call Celtic speech," but also applied in Germanic languages to speakers of Latin, hence Old High German Walh, Walah "Celt, Roman, Gaulish," and Old Norse Val-land "France," Valir "Gauls, non-Germanic inhabitants of France" (Danish vælsk "Italian, French, southern"). It is from Proto-Germanic *Walkhiskaz, from a Celtic tribal name represented by Latin Volcæ (Caesar) "ancient Celtic tribe in southern Gaul."
As a noun, "the Britons," also "the Welsh language," both in Old English. The word survives in Wales, Cornwall, Walloon, walnut, and in surnames Walsh and Wallace. It was borrowed in Old Church Slavonic as vlachu, and applied to the Rumanians, hence Wallachia.
(etymonline)
* "Elective affinities: Japanese bonds of affection" (8/24/24)
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Learn English Through Football
Newspaper Headline: Ten Hag Rage at Sloppy Red Devils
In this football language post we explain the newspaper headline, 'Ten Hag Rage at Sloppy Red Devils' from the Express newspaper about the Manchester United defeat at Brighton in the Premier League.
The post Newspaper Headline: Ten Hag Rage at Sloppy Red Devils appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
kisser
the mouth
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Idiom of the Day
be left (out) in the cold
To be ignored, forgotten, or excluded, as from a group, activity, benefit, etc. Watch the video
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Language Log
Kinds of science
Today's xkcd — "The Three Kinds of Scientific Research":
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/three_kinds_of_research_2x.png
Mouseover title: "The secret fourth kind is 'we applied a standard theory to their map of every tree and got some suspicious results.'"
A not-so-secret fifth (or zeroth?) kind, which even has an three-letter initialism: exploratory data analysis (EDA).
The original idea of EDA, as Wikipedia tells us, was "analyzing data sets to summarize their main characteristics, often using statistical graphics and other data visualization methods". John Tukey, who invented the term and promoted the idea, was especially concerned with finding and summarizing patterns in data, while avoiding the potentially misleading consequences of fitting "standard" models that assume normal distributions, ignore outliers, multimodality, uncontrolled co-variates, and so on. But another way of framing the goals of EDA focuses less on summarizing data and more on identifying hypotheses to pursue further.
These issues are especially important in speech and language research, where most distributions are not at all "normal", where outliers and uncontrolled covariates are ubiquitous, and there's almost never enough data. Modeling of "large numbers of rare events" is a common aspect of the problem in dealing with text, and multimodality and non-normality are to be expected in acoustic analysis.
These things matter for hypothesis-testing (and for classification and prediction efforts), but responsible researchers spend a lot of their time deciding what hypotheses to test, based on EDA as well as on subjective insight and common sense.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
wicked
very good, excellent, outstanding
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Idiom of the Day
be left in the lurch
To be left or abandoned without assistance in a particularly awkward, difficult, or troublesome situation. (Sometimes written as "left in a lurch.") Watch the video
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thusiastically participated in these public Falun Gong sessions for several years whenever we would go to China. It was obvious that the exercises were beneficial to the practitioners, and even the government agreed to the extent that the army publishers printed their written materials. By the latter part of the 90s, however, the government became frightened because so many people were joining up that they could no longer keep the groups under complete control. By the late 1990s, the government started to harass Falun Gong adherents, and, in April, 1999, a brutal government crackdown began, to the point that now half of China's labor camp population consists of Falun Gong practitioners, and the latter are also the favorite target of government sanctioned organ harvesting (see here and here)
I doubt that the CCP attack on the egg throwers will ever come to such a pass, because the latter are not so well organized as Falun Gong, nor do they have a spiritual, ideological basis as do the Falun Gong adherents. Still, egg throwers should keep their heads low until the government dissatisfaction blows over. Selected readings
* "The growing supinity of Chinese youth" (7/11/23)
* "'Lying flat' and 'Involution': passive-aggressive resistance" (6/4/21)
* "'Lying flat' and 'Buddha whatever' (part 2)" (6/24/21)
* "Kong Yiji ('Confucius ABC'), another self-deprecating meme for young Chinese" (3/31/23)
* "WU2WEI2: Do Nothing" (3/10/09)
* "Blindly busy" (8/26/18)
* "'Involution', 'working man', and 'Versailles literature': memes of embitterment" (12/23/20)
* "Involution, part 2" (12/25/20)
* "'Farcical names'" (4/3/15) — "Hébì 何必?" ("Why bother?)
* "Roll out of here like an egg, Xi" (4/9/20)
* "'Either… or…'" (4/9/16)
* "Bad Egg" (4/5/11)
* "Roll out of here, Mubarak" (4/3/11)
* "Fennel fry stupid eggs " (4/9/13)
[Thanks to AntC]
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America NEEDS To Know: Elizabeth Warren Answers Hard Hitting Questions At The DNC
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: hatchling
This word has appeared in six articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
make up for
to do something to improve the situation after you've done something wrong
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Word of the Day
complaisant
Definition: (adjective) Exhibiting a desire or willingness to please.
Synonyms: obliging.
Usage: In her behavior she was respectful and complaisant, even to servility: she attempted to flatter and fawn upon me at first, but I soon checked that.
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Language Log
The Welsh heritage of Philadelphia
Whenever I drive through the near northwest suburbs of Philadelphia, the names of the towns and streets there make me feel as though I've been transported to Wales: Bryn Mawr, Bala Cynwyd, Narberth, Uwchlan, Llanalew Road, Llewelyn Road, Cymry Drive, Llanelly Lane, Derwydd Lane…. By chance, through some sort of elective affinity, today I happened upon the following article about that very subject:
"Welcome to Wrexham, Philadelphia and the Welsh language", Chris Wood, BBC (11/12/23) Rob McElhenney's attempts to learn Welsh provided a highlight of television show Welcome to Wrexham. But if things had been different, the language may not have been so alien to him – and he might have spoken it in school or even at home.
It was the intention of settlers in parts of his native Philadelphia for the government and people to use Welsh.
However, the attempts in 1681 did not prove as successful as those later in Patagonia, Argentina.
I knew that, early on, German was widely used in America but that, with the coming of the First World War, its prestige rapidly plummeted. The story of Welsh in America was somewhat different in its details, though the results were the same.
Despite the fact that I have been a professor at the University of Pennsylvania for nearly half a century and was well aware that our mascot is the Quaker (it seems that nobody objects), I have learned many new things about Penn's Welsh Quaker roots from this article. Quakerdom is also important for the superb colleges at Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, and Haverford, as well as some of the finest high schools in the region. But I didn't realize the full extent to which Quakerdom, and its Welsh background, were intertwined with the history of the Philadelphia region. http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQABVirBXYF2ikk1J5LErPtVA8JRsdDQbMQZG-8WYJ3YwzMbdcLIDpx_fKjZCf__PJHc7LSpSFc8ibr-I4SK7sV37lqC-6PzA … It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia actor, writer and creator McElhenney started learning Welsh after buying Wrexham AFC with Hollywood star Ryan Reynolds.
But the language was spoken in his hometown on-and-off for four centuries, after two waves of immigration helped shape the state of Pennsylvania.
In fact, the original intention was to call Pennsylvania "New Wales", according to Connor Duffy, who is from Philadelphia and gives presentations on the history.
Hundreds of Welsh-speaking Quakers from rural parts of Wales began arriving in the late 1660s, after facing persecution in Great Britain for their beliefs, Mr Duffy said.
He added: "William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, converted to Quakerism at a young age and was a strong advocate of religious freedom and democratic values.
"The king granted him a massive tract of land in North America to settle a debt with the Penn family.
"Believe it or not, Penn's first idea for a name for this land was 'New Wales', but King Charles II overruled him and the name Pennsylvania or 'Penn's Woods' was chosen to honour Penn's father, whom the king owed a debt to."
The Welsh Quakers believed an agreement was reached to create a "Welsh Tract" on 40,000 acres (160sq km), where the language of government, law, business and daily life would be Welsh.
But Mr Duffy said this failed to happen, adding: "The Welsh came to know Penn as 'Diwyneb', or 'Faceless' for reneging on their agreement."
However, the settlers left their mark.
In the 1880s, when the Pennsylvania Railroad was built, laying the foundations for suburban Philadelphia, it ran through what was the Welsh Tract.
Giving new areas Welsh names was seen as a sign of affluence by the wealthy residents who moved in.
Many were named by the president of the railroad – George Brooke Roberts, a direct descendant of one of the first Welsh settlers in the 1680s.
He lived at his ancestor's estate "Pencoyd" and raised funds[...]
Language Log
"Badass"
Screenshot of a post on Threads: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/WhitmerHarris_badass.png The audio:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Why wouldn't we choose
a leader who's tough,
tested,
and
a total badass.
Of course there was extensive mass-media coverage of Whitmer's remark and others' use of the same word in evaluating Harris, as well as plenty of other social media notice. And we should note the flurry caused by Mark Zuckerberg's assertion last month that Donald Trump's response to the July 13th assassination attempt was "one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life".
The valence of the term badass is ambiguous. Wikipedia gives two glosses:
1. (US, sometimes considered vulgar, slang, negative connotation) A belligerent or mean person; a person with an unpleasantly extreme appearance, attitudes, or behavior.
2. (US, sometimes considered vulgar, slang, positive connotation) A person considered impressive due to courage, skill, daring, audacity, and/or toughness.
The OED defines the noun as "A tough, aggressive, intimidating, or uncompromising person", and the adjective form as "Belligerent or intimidating; ruthless; tough. Also as a general term of approval: formidable, superlative", with a link to the entry for bad IV.13:
Originally in African American usage. Of a person: (originally) dangerous or menacing to a degree which inspires awe or admiration; impressively tough, uncompromising, or combative; (in later use also) possessing other desirable attributes to an impressive degree; esp. formidably skilled.
It seems to me that the positively-evaluated form of badass has become increasingly common, especially as a term of praise for women. As a first step in checking current usage, I took 50 examples at random from the 1,920 instances in the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
22 (44%) were applied to women, 14 (28%) to men, 1 was ambiguous, and 13 were non-human (stapler, belt buckle, sword, dragons, moment, …) Essentially all of the examples seemed to be positively evaluated, or at least a sign of admiration.
It looks to me as if searches on current social-media platforms (X, bluesky…) give similar results…
A small sample of the female-associated examples from COCA:
Mia, you are so much like your father. Out on that field, so badass. I'm so proud of you.
I think the only legitimate reason to ban that catsuit, it was so badass that it gave her psychological advantage on the court.
Your girl seems like a serious badass.
Geraldine, you are such a badass.
That is, while she realizes nothing will make them stop believing in monsters, it's much easier to make them believe she's enough of a badass to take them.
"We get beat by J.Lo. She's a badass pirate," he added.
Female roles have continued to adapt and evolve and thanks to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, yes, even blondes can be badass monster killers.
As far as girls go, I have a really badass personality. I'm smart and I can be really funny and interesting and I can go toe-to-toe with anybody in a conversation.
Here's one worth a bit more context — "On Feeling (A Little Bit) Like A Badass", Simple Lovely 9/14/2012.
Some semi-relevant past posts:
"Root haughtiness", 8/20/2011
"Can '[adjective]-ass' occur predicatively?", 11/18/2013
"A productive-ass suffix", 1/29/2018
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: menial
This word has appeared in 38 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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