28487
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Language Log
Annals of lenition
What do you hear?
Your browser does not support the audio element.
…or here?
Your browser does not support the audio element.
The context is a clip from the British TV series Taskmaster, presented in "'Your mum's just like…' or 'Your mum's a slag'?", r/TASKMASTER 10/25/2024:
Your browser does not support the video tag.
The source appears to be episode 172, aired 9/12/2024.
The speaker is Babátúndé Aléshé, and what he's saying (in conventional orthography) is
Your browser does not support the audio element.
You're sitting at home, right,
and now your mom's just like
would you like some dessert?
Here's an aligned spectrogram of the first clip:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/YourMomsJustLikeX1.png
And the ambiguous audio:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
An explanation of the ambiguity would be a good intro phonetics exercise.
And as usual, translation into IPA is not an especially helpful part of the story.
[h/t Daniel Sterman]
Update — some more context here.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Jon Gabrus Still Remembers His Drunk History Story (Inside The FOD Vault Episode 3)
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Doing Drunk History Made Jon Gabrus Nauseous (Inside The FOD Vault Episode 3)
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Jon Gabrus Wants To Preserve The Magic Of Improv (Inside The FOD Vault Episode 3)
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Jon Gabrus Had An Embarrassing Moment On The Set Of Bombshell (Pt2) - Inside The FOD Vault Episode 3
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
go away (1)
to leave or go to another place
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Word of the Day
politic
Definition: (adjective) Smoothly agreeable and courteous with a degree of sophistication.
Synonyms: bland, smooth, suave.
Usage: He was too politic to quarrel with so important a personage.
Discuss
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Gungan Style, 2012 (Inside the FOD Vault Episode 3)
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Jon Gabrus' Favorite FOD Sketch (Inside The FOD Vault Episode 3)
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Language Log
Trespassed update
I'm at a motel in Nampa, Idaho.
A sign posted on a side entrance reads:
DO NOT LEAVE DOOR
OPEN YOU WILL BE
TRESPASSED.
I asked the manager what she meant by that.
She replied, "You will be prohibited from coming on this property."
In our previous discussions of this usage, I do not recall that the grammatical property of "causative" came up. Coming from Chinese, where causative verbs are common, I would think of this expression, "You will be trespassed" as a sort of causative passive.
Compare Mandarin "bèi zìshā 被自殺" ("be suicided"), "bèi shīzōng 被失蹤" ("be disappeared"), and so forth.
A similar causative-passive construction is also to be found in Japanese:
Watashi wa sensei ni shukudai o dasaseraremashita.
私は先生に宿題を出させられました。 (わたしはせんせいにしゅくだいをださせられました。
"I was made to submit my homework by the teacher."
(source)
A lively discussion with vivid examples in many languages:
"Suicided: the adversative passive as a form of active resistance" (3/24/10)
Analytically, it may seem hard to wrap one's head around a grammatical construction that is simultaneously passive and causative, but such constructions do occur, e.g., "be defenestrated" (see "Translating the untranslatable" [10/28/10], comment 9).
Selected readings
* "Passed" (10/14/24)
* "Thou shalt be trespassed, as it were" (4/27/24)
* "You will be trespassed automatically" (8/1/23)
* "Not permission, to violate to punish" (5/8/14)
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Jon Gabrus Inside The FOD Vault: How Social Media Transformed Podcasting + Acting Nude With Al Roker
Actor, comedian, and podcaster Jon Gabrus (101 Places to Party Before You Die, High and Mighty, ActionBoyz) brings us “Gungan Style” from the Funny or Die Vault. He and our host, Marcos Gonzalez, take a deep dive into how the comedy landscape has changed since Jon got his start. From the internship to PA pipeline to TikTok dances and crazy stories on set, Jon and Marcos unpack where trend chasing is leading us.
Get notified when we drop new episodes, news, and show extras: https://norby.link/ctdAJD
Jon’s pick from the FOD Vault is “Gungan Style (Gangnam Style Parody)” from 2012: https://youtu.be/2df6x2YEeu8
Bio:
Jon Gabrus is an American actor and comedian, best known for his work on Guy Code, the podcast Comedy Bang! Bang!, and TVLand's Younger. He was a performer at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and hosts the High and Mighty podcast (https://headgum.com/high-and-mighty), as well as co-hosting the Raised By TV and Action Boyz podcasts. To access a free episode to Jon’s podcast ActionBoyz, use the link: https://free.actionboyz.biz
0:00 Intro
3:17 Why Jon chose Gungan Style
6:50 College comedy group to PA pipeline
9:28 When video sketches started to take off at UCB
16:00 How podcasting has changed
25:23 The nature of trend chasing
36:38 Bombshell story, best and worst gigs
43:21 Drunk History story
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
gob (2)
to spit
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Idiom of the Day
a little leery
Cautious, wary, or uncertain of a given person, place, or thing. Watch the video
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Full Interview TOMORROW Jon Gabrus Acting Nude In Front Of Al Roker (Inside The FOD Vault Episode 3)
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
The Unexpected Celebrities Behind Drunk History's Origin Story
Drunk History creator Dreek Waters remembers how the famously booze-soaked history series came to be.
Check out the full episode of Derek Waters on Inside The Funny Or Die Vault: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4TXV4PC2PA
Get all 10 episodes of season 1 now, and stay in touch for new episodes, news, and show extras: https://norby.link/ctdAJD
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Gungan Style (Pt. 2) - Inside The FOD Vault Episode 3
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Gungan Style (Pt. 3) - Inside The FOD Vault Episode 3
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Adam Pally Was A UCB Trendsetter (Inside The FOD Vault Episode 3)
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Jon Gabrus Had An Embarrassing Moment On The Set Of Bombshell (Inside The FOD Vault Episode 3)
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: disseminate
This word has appeared in 50 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Idiom of the Day
filled to the brim
Completely full; teeming; having no room to spare. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
veejay | VJ
a presenter of music videos, usually on television
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
justice for the Natasha Lyonne Beetlejuices #BeetlejuiceBeetlejuice
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Welcome Jon Gabrus Inside the FOD Vault (Inside The FOD Vault Episode 3)
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Language Log
Invisible text via Unicode tag characters
If you open this file in your browser, you'll see only an an left square bracket followed by a right square bracket, with nothing in between: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/LanguageLogInTags0.png But if I run the file through a perl script that I wrote long ago to print out character codes and their names, I get
|[| 0x005B "LEFT SQUARE BRACKET"
|| 0xE004C "TAG LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L"
|| 0xE0061 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER A"
|| 0xE006E "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER N"
|| 0xE0067 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER G"
|| 0xE0075 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER U"
|| 0xE0061 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER A"
|| 0xE0067 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER G"
|| 0xE0065 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER E"
|| 0xE0020 "TAG SPACE"
|| 0xE004C "TAG LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L"
|| 0xE006F "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER O"
|| 0xE0067 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER G"
|]| 0x005D "RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET"
Or you can cut and paste the bracketed sequence into the ASCII Smuggler page, and you'll see this: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/LanguageLogInTags1.png For an explanation, see Johann Rehberger's blog post "ASCII Smuggler Tool: Crafting Invisible Text and Decoding Hidden Codes", Embrace The Red 1/14/2024, which starts:
A few days ago Riley Goodside posted about an interesting discovery on how an LLM prompt injection can happen via invisible instructions in pasted text. This works by using a special set of Unicode code points from the Tags Unicode Block.
The proof-of-concept showed how a simple text contained invisible instructions that caused ChatGPT to invoke DALL-E to create an image.
The meaning of these “Tags” seems to have gone through quite some churn, from language tags to eventually being repurposed for some emojis. […]
The Tags Unicode Block mirrors ASCII and because it is often not rendered in the UI, the special text remains unnoticable to users… but LLMs interpret such text.
It appears that training data contained such characters and now tokenizers can deal with them!
For more recent coverage, see Dan Goodin, "Invisible text that AI chatbots understand and humans can’t? Yep, it’s a thing.", Ars Technica 10/14/2024, which explains Rehberger's "Copirate" hack:
What if there was a way to sneak malicious instructions into Claude, Copilot, or other top-name AI chatbots and get confidential data out of them by using characters large language models can recognize and their human users can’t? As it turns out, there was—and in some cases still is.
The invisible characters, the result of a quirk in the Unicode text encoding standard, create an ideal covert channel that can make it easier for attackers to conceal malicious payloads fed into an LLM. The hidden text can similarly obfuscate the exfiltration of passwords, financial information, or other secrets out of the same AI-powered bots. Because the hidden text can be combined with normal text, users can unwittingly paste it into prompts. The secret content can also be appended to visible text in chatbot output. […]
“The fact that GPT 4.0 and Claude Opus were able to really understand those invisible tags was really mind-blowing to me and made the whole AI security space much more interesting,” Joseph Thacker, an independent researcher and AI engineer at Appomni, said in an interview. “The idea that they can be completely invisible in all browsers but still readable by large language models makes [attacks] much more feasible in just about every area.”
Microsoft has mitigated the threat to Copilot, according to Ravie Lakshmanan, "Microsoft Fixes ASCII Smuggling Flaw That Enabled Data Theft from Microsoft 365 Copilot", The Hacker News 8/27/2024. I'm not sure where things stand with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and so on. As far as I can tell, WordPress removes tag characters from the text that it stores and presents.
For more details about the Copilot exploit, see this video:
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: concurrent
This word has appeared in 83 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
stand out
If somebody stands out, they are easy to see because there is something unusual about the way they look or the way they behave.
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Word of the Day
cagey
Definition: (adjective) Showing self-interest and shrewdness in dealing with others.
Synonyms: canny, clever.
Usage: The jurors saw right through the cagey lawyer's attempt to divert their attention away from the evidence.
Discuss
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
"Don't work with kids, animals, or drunks": How Drunk History Was Made
Yes, they were really drunk and it was real history.
Watch the full episode with Derek Waters here: https://youtu.be/t4TXV4PC2PA
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Language Log
Shaikh Zubayr
Sean Swanick, "Shaikh Zubayr", Duke University Libraries Blog, 4/13/2016:
A man lost at sea, having drifted far away from his native Iraqi lands, comes a shore in England. In due time he will be nicknamed the Bard of Avon but upon landing on the Saxon coast, his passport reportedly read: Shaikh Zubayr. A knowledgeable man with great writing prowess from a small town called Zubayr in Iraq. He came to be known in the West as Shakespeare and was given the first name of William. William Shakespeare of Zubayr.
Or at least this is loosely how a story goes about The Bard’s origins. It was purportedly first suggested by the famous Lebanese intellectual, Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq and later popularised by the Iraqi intellectual Dr. Ṣafāʾ Khulūṣī. Khulūṣī in 1960 published an article entitled “The Study of Shakespeare” in al-Ma’rifa (1960) where he paid homage to the Bard while also expanding upon al-Shidyāq’s theory. This perplexing theory has generated much rebuttal and discussion. This theory rested upon “that most of Shakespeare’s language could be traced back to Classical Arabic…[t]o give one example : the Arabic adjective nabīl which means ‘noble’ and which occurs, naturally enough, throughout the plays and poems.” (“Shadow Language” in Ormsby, Eric L. 2011. Fine incisions: essays on poetry and place. Erin, Ont: Porcupine’s Quill.) The former Libyan dictator, Mu’ammar al-Qadhāfī is also reported to have supported the theory of Shaikh Zubayr.
See also Abdul Sattar Jawad, "Shakespeare in Baghdad", The Chronicle 12/2/2011, who spells it Sheikh Zbair.
I recall reading in one of Sir Richard Burton's works about his discussion with a Somali host, who argued that the English might be good at making machines, but they lacked the poetry for which the Somalis were notable. Burton countered by quoting Shakespeare, to which his host responded "And this Sheik Subeer, how many camels does he have?"
Or maybe I dreamed it, as I haven't been able to locate the passage. I thought it was in First Footsteps in East Africa, but it's not.
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