Posts Tagged ‘language’
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”*…
In an piece adapted/updated from his recent book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, Stefan Fatsis explores process(es) that determine our “Word[s] of the Year”…
Thirty-five years ago, the late English professor Allan Metcalf [see here] had an idea. “I was thinking that Time magazine has its Person of the Year,” he told me, “and why can’t we do for words what Time did for people?”
Metcalf assumed that the language pros at the American Dialect Society, which held the first WOTY vote in 1990, would nominate words “headed straight for our everyday vocabulary and secure places in the dictionaries.” But he misjudged human behavior. Lexicography is sober research committed quietly and alone. Word of the Year is a key party: You can’t be sure who you’ll go home with. The inaugural winner, bushlips, meaning “insincere political rhetoric,” barely lasted a news cycle.
After some eye-rolling, criteria were established: Was the word completely new? Had it been used before in other contexts? Was it “a major focus of human activity or behavior” in the previous year? Did it have staying potential? WOTY could be brand-new or newly popular. But it had to have been used widely and reflect the zeitgeist of the annum gone by.
Today there are around a dozen Words of the Year (Word of the Years?) in English, and WOTY season runs from late fall to early January. Dictionaries duke it out for attention, some touting their scientific methodology for picking a winner, others offering a nebulous alchemy of number-crunching and feel. The dialect society, the WOTY OG, conducts a live popular vote in a hotel ballroom at a language conference, the outcome based more often than not on vibes alone.
No matter the formula, selecting one word to define a year is serious business. It’s about the sharp lines of language and usage, how society adopts and spreads new terminology, and, increasingly, the dramatic ways that social media influence the way we write, talk, and interact. As a culture we’re forever searching for ways to make sense of our big, complicated, confusing world. WOTY neatly boxes up 365 days in a single, simple word (technically a “vocabulary item”; phrases, compounds, and affixes also are eligible). It’s media catnip and hot-take gold.
“It gives people this sense of ownership,” says New York Times Wordplay columnist Sam Corbin, who’s writing a book about what she calls the WOTY-verse. “We have always been exploring new ways to fill gaps in vocabulary but also respond to culture with words. It’s delicious.”
For the dialect society, which crowns a champ last, the job is so weighty that it takes two days to pick a winner—nominations one night, balloting the next. I’ve participated in around a decade’s worth of votes. I check my journalistic objectivity at the door and do my linguistic duty. Every year, a pattern emerges. A few words totally surprise, some a product of Gen Z (or Gen Alpha) or gamer culture that’s bypassed middle-aged me (hello, skibidi, a 2023 nominee). Recency bias is common—as you’d expect in a vote of trending language. So is observer bias, with crowd approval often directly proportional to shock value (the suffix -ussy winning in 2022; rawdog in 2024).
Looking at the victorious words from a distance, you might nod in recognition of a specific event (chad, 2000; bailout, 2008), cringe at terminology that dates you (World Wide Web, 1995), or wonder what the hell people were thinking (to pluto, a verb meaning to demote, as in what happened to Pluto when it was reclassified from full-fledged to dwarf planet, 2006). But that’s the genius of Word of the Year. We’re suckers for media-driven argument engines. It’s a short walk from “LeBron is better than Jordan!” to “They should have picked rizz!”
Since around 2010, when the newsy app defeated the funner nom—as in the onomatopoetic nomnomnom, to connote eating—younger voters (mostly grad students and junior faculty) have tilted the conversation away from dictionary-type words toward social media and online slang. “It’s generally who makes the best argument in the room, and you can’t predict that,” says Ben Zimmer, chair of the society’s New Words Committee.
A couple of votes stand out for me, for linguistic and cultural reasons. One was in Austin, Texas, in January 2017. Donald Trump had just been elected president, and nearly half of the WOTY nominees were related to him: post-truth, basket of deplorables, unpresidented, alt-right, fake news, locker-room banter, yuuuge. But the mood was ominous, not apocalyptic. It was, after all, pre-inauguration, pre-Charlottesville, pre-impeachments, pre-pandemic, pre-2020 election, pre-January 6, pre-felony indictments, pre-felony convictions, pre-assassination attempts, pre-2024 election, pre-ICE raids: pre-everything.
WOTY promised closure, and everyone was down for that. In the middle of the room, Dan Villareal, a linguistics postdoc, stood up. “Okay,” he said. “It’s 2016. Dumpster fire?” Earlier in the evening, the fire emoji, and also the trashcan and fire emojis used together to represent dumpster fire, won the emoji category. One of the older attendees had asked what dumpster fire meant. “It is used to describe an incredibly catastrophic situation,” Zimmer explained. “Like some people think 2016 was one long dumpster fire.”
Normalize, post-truth, and the fire emoji also got WOTY nominations—the first time an emoji had made the final group. So did woke. “Granted it’s been around a while,” cherubic Stanford linguist John Rickford, a titan in the field, said. “But only if you stay woke can you put out the dumpster fire.” The house was brought down, and I figured it was game over. But then another postdoc, Nicole Holliday, lobbied against the word—“because it was appropriated from the Black solidarity movement in the 1960s and I think that we are so late to this game and last year was anything but woke,” she said. Dumpster fire beat woke in a runoff.
The journey of the two words since then demonstrates WOTY’s unpredictability and its historical value. Dumpster fire was relatively new and the WOTY early-warning system worked; Merriam-Webster added it just 14 months later. Woke, by contrast, would take a far more disturbing linguistic ride. The dialect society voters who (literally) snapped their fingers in approval for woke would watch it get twisted by political commentators and a demagogic right-wing into what was tantamount to a slur.
The dialect society’s last two votes also feel, in hindsight, like markers. When the group gathered in New York to pick the 2023 winner, Joe Biden was president and Trump was a long shot to return to power. The Israel-Hamas war drew a nomination of ceasefire, but the Barbie movie, AI, and online slang dominated the discourse. The most spirited debate was over a word that didn’t appear in Sam Corbin’s Times write-up of the event: cunty, “having an audaciously exceptional appearance or attitude.”
The winner straddled the line between serious and fun: enshittification, meaning a gradual deterioration in the quality of internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. The word captured the growing frustration with internet subservience and AI overlords. The 2024 vote, in Philadelphia, also was relatively apolitical; maybe we were all terrified about Trump’s impending inauguration. Rawdog was subversive and fun. The runner-up, sanewashing, was doomy, but more of a criticism of how the media handled Trump than of Trump himself.
Kicking off the 2025 WOTY campaign, Dictionary.com eschewed the perilous state of the union and opted for the ubiquitous (and annoying, to adults) Gen Alpha nonsense catchphrase 67 (also written 6-7 or six seven). The British dictionary Collins went with the AI term vibe coding, which it said “captures something fundamental about our evolving relationship with technology.” Other dictionaries are likely to lean into our quick descent into competitive authoritarianism and choose an existing word that was of the moment and looked up a lot: totalitarian, fascism (for which former Dictionary.com editor John Kelly made the case), deportation, crackdown, tariff, shutdown. (Surreal and unprecedented, fyi, have already had a turn; chaos is available.)
For the American Dialect Society voters, current-events words need to capture the seriousness of the political moment, possess some cultural stickiness, and be lexically dynamic. Language writer Nancy Friedman, who tracks potential WOTYs on her Substack, Fritinancy, flagged DOGE as a verb meaning to fire or purge and as a “combining form,” as in DOGEboys or DOGEbags. Various tariff spinoffs—such as tariffied, which has appeared in lots of headlines—also show promise. Other candidates unite the sober and the clever: Kavanaugh stop, broligarchy, trolligarchy, sadopopulism.
Brianne Hughes, a linguist and writer, maintains a running list of 2025 WOTY hopefuls on the alt-dictionary site Wordnik—around 250 of them so far, including #NoKings, Coldplayed, clanker, aura farming, Straw Hat Pirates, Gen Z stare, and chopped unc, a combo of the internet slang chopped and unc. (Some late additions: Young Republicans, in the wake of a Politico story revealing racist banter in a GOP group chat; Trumpstein files; and Gestapo Barbie, a derogative nickname for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.)
“Choosing the Word of the Year is No Easy Feat“- the history of who and how, from @stefanfatsis.bsky.social in @literaryhub.bsky.social
See also Fatsis on the precarious status of the dictionary: “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
* Lewis Carroll (Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass)
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As we contemplate coinage, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that The Animals recorded “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” which had been first recorded by Nina Simone earlier that year. It was the first single released from their album Animal Tracks (followed by “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”).
“Show, don’t tell”*…
Some things are very difficult to explain using words alone; they require physical demonstration. Consider, for example, the distinction between right and left. It turns out that this difficulty has been at the heart of the great scientific debates about the nature of space…
… explain right and left to a friend using language alone and without using the words right and left. As you can only use language, you can’t show your hands or use pictures!
It’s tricky, isn’t it? The difference between right and left isn’t as straightforward as it seems. If we dig a little deeper, we will find that the science behind right and left is surprising, complex, and profound.
How can two things be identical yet different at the same time? This was the question that puzzled one of humankind’s greatest thinkers, Immanuel Kant.
Many of the great debates of the Scientific Revolution during the 16th and 17th centuries concerned the nature of space. The English polymath Sir Isaac Newton proposed that space was absolute: space is an entity in itself and exists even without objects, matter, or living beings filling it.
In contrast, Gottfried Leibniz, Newton’s bitter rival, argued that space was relational: it only existed because of the relations between the objects that fill it. If objects do not exist, then space doesn’t either.
Meanwhile, Immanuel Kant used handedness to give his two cents. He asked us to imagine a solitary hand floating in an otherwise completely empty space. The hand must either be a right hand or a left hand, and this will be the case even in a space where no relationships between objects can be observed. Kant noted that our hands are geometrically and mathematically identical in every way possible, whether it be the lengths of the fingers or the angles between them. Yet, the one fundamental difference between them—that one is a right hand, and the other is a left hand—exists in itself; it is intrinsic to the hand and not related to any other object, similar to space itself. Space has an absolute property.
Ultimately, Kant’s theories of handedness were not foolproof and could not be used to prove that space is absolute. Indeed, Kant would switch between the Newtonian and Leibnizian schools of thought during his lifetime. However, Kant did show just how puzzling and difficult it is to explain why right hands and left hands are identical but different. That intrinsic quality of handedness is almost impossible to explain without showing, and this is the root of the Ozma Problem.
In 1960, Project Ozma was launched in West Virginia. Named after the ruler of the fictional Land of Oz, Project Ozma was a huge telescope that listened for signals from space, signals that could be proof of extraterrestrial intelligence. Unfortunately, the project only ran for a few months, and it had no major success.
Let’s say the telescope had picked up these signals. How would we on Earth respond? We would need to convert their signals, after which we would send our own. Telescopes and computers use binary code. And directionality is crucial to understanding binary, as it is read left to right and decoded right to left. So, if we are sending binary signals to aliens, we need to be sure they understand which direction is left and which is right. How can we be sure they share our understanding of directions?
This is the Ozma Problem, a thought experiment first described by Martin Gardner [see the almanac entry here] in his 1964 book, The Ambidextrous Universe. In this book, Gardner pitched a number of solutions.
Before going into Gardner’s work, here’s a seemingly simple solution: lay your palms face down on a table and equally spaced from your body. The thumb that’s closer to your heart? That’s the left side. The right side is defined by the thumb farther away from the heart.
Another potential solution would be to use north and south as reference points: when facing north, everything towards east is the right side, and everything pointing west is the left side.
The problem with these solutions is that they both rely on a shared point of reference, like the direction of north-south-east-west and the location of the heart. In no way can we be certain that an alien species would share these!
Some of the solutions that Gardner proposed in his book use magnetic fields, planetary rotation, and the direction of current flow. And as we discussed before, they all fail because of the need for a shared point of reference.
So, after centuries of wondering whether we are alone in the universe, we finally make contact with an alien species, only to find that our inability to explain something as mundane as right and left precludes meaningful dialogue. The Ozma Problem demonstrates the limits of our language, and it challenges anthropocentrism, which is the notion that human beings and our experiences are the center of the universe.
Many thought problems are hypothetical and can’t be solved, but the Ozma Problem does have a solution. In fact, the solution already existed when Gardner first described it. But it’s not immediately associated with right-left asymmetry or aliens.
While we cannot be sure that aliens share our anatomy or our perception of north-south-east-west, if they inhabit the same universe as us, we can assume the fundamental forces of physics apply to them too.
There are four fundamental forces of physics: gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear forces (the force that binds atomic nuclei together), and weak nuclear forces (the force that causes atomic decay).
Up until 1956, it was assumed these fundamental forces all display parity. Parity is an important concept in physics, and it can be demonstrated visually by using a mirror. If we stand in front of a mirror holding an apple in our right hand and then drop it, the reflection will show it falling to the ground, but the apple will fall from your left hand. Gravity still works in the reflection. Likewise, if we look at the strong forces binding atomic nuclei and then observe them in a mirror, the images would be identical, just with right and left switched.
But in 1956, Professor Chien-Shiung Wu, a physicist, conducted a ground breaking experiment. She was able to prove that the weak nuclear force—the decay of atoms—did not always demonstrate parity. The weak nuclear force does not adhere to mirror symmetry.
Professor Wu showed this by observing the decay of cobalt-60 atoms. When atoms decay, they spin out electrons. Up until then, scientists had always observed these electrons spinning out equally in all directions. But Professor Wu saw that cobalt-60 will always preferentially spin out electrons in a certain direction. In other words, the movement is asymmetric. For some reason, the decay of atoms is the one fundamental force that does not adhere to parity or mirror symmetry, thus showing that directionality is intrinsic to the universe, just as Kant had postulated in the 18th century.
For the first time in history, it was proven that nature can prefer one direction. Very soon after Wu’s findings, physicists were able to prove that elementary particles known as neutrinos always spin towards the left.
What does this mean for our communication with aliens? If the aliens can replicate Professor Wu’s experiment and visualize the spin of electrons while cobalt-60 decays, they can orient right and left!
Ironically, Professor Wu was not afforded any sort of parity herself during her working life. Other scientists were recognized for research that could not have been achieved without hers. Today, the weak force remains one of the most important and mysterious topics in physics today, thanks to Professor Wu.
So, if the only way to scientifically and definitively define the difference between right and left is to build a particle accelerator and observe the decay of cobalt-60, clearly the difference is not as straightforward as it may first seem! The Ozma Problem is proof that the most mundane concepts are sometimes directly linked to the cosmos and speak to the nature of existence itself…
An essay by Dr. Maloy Das (see the bio in this unrelated– but also fascinating– article by him). From the remarkable blog, Fascinating World, scored a highly credible source by the MBFC for having proper sourcing, no failed fact-checks, and “highly factual” reporting. It’s the work of Krishna Rathuryan, currently a senior at a prep school in Princeton (where he’s also apparently a pretty accomplished distance runner) and team of his friends.
When language fails: “What Is The Ozma Problem, And Why Does It Matter?“
* attributed to playwright Anton Chekhov, who said said “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” It has, of course, become a motto for many writers across genre.
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As we explore explanation, we (especially any readers in or near Manhattan Beach, California) might note that today is one of the two days of the year (symmetrically on either side of the winter solstice, 37 days before and 37 after) when the public sculpture there, “Light Gate,” becomes a portal “unlocked” by the rays of the setting sun… as Atlas Obscura puts it, “a bit of Druidic paganism by way of high modern design.”
“We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive”*…
The estimable Robin Sloan on the challenge of keeping our language– our words and our use of them– up to the task of wrestling with our present and our future…
The overloading of common words is well underway: new language models have “thinking” modes, “reasoning” capabilities! What this means, in practice, is that they’ve learned to produce a special kind of text, the conversion of the linguistic if-then into a dynamo that spins and spins and, often, magically — yes, it is magical — produces useful results.
Here is one distinction among several: this process can only compound — the models can only “think” by spooling out more text — while human thinking often does the opposite: retreats into silence, because it doesn’t have words yet to say what it wants to say.
Human thinking often washes the dishes, then goes for a walk.
So, if you redefine “thinking” to mean “arriving at a solution through an iterative linguistic loop” … yes, that’s what these models do. That definition is IMHO pretty thin.
We talk about humans thinking harder, which is not the same as thinking longer. I think most people know from experience that thinking longer generally just makes you anxious. But that’s what the models do, and not only longer, but in parallel, all those step-by-step monologues spilling out simultaneously, somewhere in the dark of a data center. “Quantity has a quality all its own,” said Stalin, maybe …
Well, okay — what does it mean for a human to think harder? Reasonable people will disagree (and in interesting ways) but, for my part, I think it means prospecting new analogies; pitching your inquiry out away from the gravitational attractors of protocol and cliché; turning the workpiece around to inspect it from new angles; and especially bringing more senses into the mix — grounding yourself in reality. You’ll note these moves are challenging or impossible for systems that operate only on/with/inside language.
A couple of years ago, when I wondered if language models are in hell, I expressed some hope about the richness of multimodal training. So far, this hasn’t panned out. Rather than images anchoring text in a richer, more embodied realm, the marriage seems to have gone the opposite direction. The models chop images into sequences of tokens — big bright pictures become spindly threads, a bit sad — and feed them in along with everything else.
We are going to lose this word — we might already have lost it — but/and we can put a marker down; a gravestone, you might call it; for a kind of thinking that used to mean more than “more”.
Other useful words, still with us, include: imagination, ingenuity, insight. Clarity, most of all. Clarity is what Einstein was seeking when he sat and thought hard about the relative motion of magnets and conductors. He wanted to push through language, beyond it, beyond even the formalism of physics — because there wasn’t physics yet for the things he wanted to understand.
I am still waiting for models that aspire to pack complex systems — whole economies — into high-dimensional space, “hold it all in their heads”, then make observations and predictions way out beyond the if-then of “reasoning” language.
Think harder!
“Thinking modes,” from Sloan’s wonderful newsletter.
Pair with “Horseless Carriages, Digital Paint, AI,” Quentin Hardy‘s meditation on the ways in which new technologies shape both our language(s) and the ways we think (from Hardy’s also-wonderful newsletter).
[Image above: Rodin, “The Thinker” (source)]
* Albert Einstein
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As we ponder pondering, we might recall that it was on this date in 1963 that “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen entered the Billboard Hot 100.
For more on how the record came to be (and the ruckus over language that followed), see here (and here and here).
“Algorithms are the culprits, influencers are the accomplices, language is the weapon, and readers are the victims”*…
On the occasion of the publication of his new book, Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language, Adam Aleksic — aka the “Etymology Nerd” — talks with Liz Mineo about how social media algorithms are transforming language…
… I’m a big believer that the medium is the message. The way the information is being diffused is going to affect how we communicate. For example, with the arrival of writing, there was this big shift away from us telling stories with rhyme and meter. Plato said that writing was going to make us worse at remembering things. With the printing press, information is diffused more quickly, and more people have the ability to be literate, but there are still gatekeepers, which is affecting who gets to tell the story. And then the internet allows us to lose the gatekeepers; anybody can tell the story now, and that’s another paradigm shift in language. Algorithms are a new paradigm shift because the centralization of the internet that occurred in the late 2010s, coupled with how these algorithms push content through personalized recommendation feeds, are changing how we understand the very act of communication…
… Algorithms are shaping the way we speak. Platforms’ priorities play an important role in organizing and shaping how our language develops. The algorithm pushes more trends, creates more in-groups that then create new language. New trending words are amplified by social media; creators replicate words that they know are going viral, because it helps them go more viral, and then they push the words more into existence. This is the cycle that we’re constantly in. I think it’s because of the algorithm, which amplifies trends, that we’re getting more rapid language change than before. The biggest takeaway from my book is that algorithms are deeply affecting our society right now, and we should be paying attention to them…
When I say algorithms are the culprits, I mean that they are, in this metaphor, responsible for the perpetuation of slang at this speed, and influencers are being accomplices because we’re playing a part. The algorithm doesn’t do anything by itself; it doesn’t come up with the words or spread the words by itself. It’s humans who are doing that, with our own ideas of what the algorithm is or should be, and that pushes the words faster than otherwise. Eventually, those words enter your vocabulary, and that, I guess, makes you the victim…
What concerns you about the way social media and its algorithms are changing language?
As a linguist, I have no concerns because language is the means by which humans connect with one another. As a cultural critic, I’m pretty concerned by the way in which language is more commodified than ever before, and I’m concerned that certain groups are influencing our language more than other groups, like incels. Words that are part of the incel vocabulary like “pilled,” “maxxing,” or “sigma” are very popular. For example, if I like burritos, I can say, “I’m so burrito-pilled,” or if I want to eat more burritos, I can say “I’m burrito-maxxing.” The fact that we are using these words is an indicator that this culture is influencing us, and it also indicates that the way ideas spread and percolate in the online space can be dangerous. Incels are incredibly misogynistic and have a worldview that causes them to dehumanize other people. They have been able to spread their ideology because of the nature of the internet right now. If we pay attention to how language is changing, we should also pay attention to how culture is changing.
As a linguist, I’m very excited to see that language is developing faster than before. To me, language is almost a form of resistance. Every single new meme that emerges is a reactive cultural force to the over-organization of society. This summer, the term “clanker,” which is a speculative slur for artificial intelligence, became very popular. In March, we saw “Italian Brain Rot,” a meme that uses AI subversively to generate ridiculous cartoon characters. Both of these memes create a commentary about our current state of technological progress. A lot of memes and slang words are emerging in reflection to our current cultural moment. There’s something really beautiful about that…
“Our viral vocabulary,” from @etymology.substack.com.web.brid.gy (TotH to J O’D)
Apposite: “Understanding the new economics of attention” (gift article from The Economist)
(Image above: source)
* Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language
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As we pause to parse, we might note that today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day… that’s to say, a day on which to speak in English with a stereotypical West Country accent.
Created in 1995 by John Baur and Mark Summers of Albany, Oregon, it has since been adopted as an official holiday by the Pastafarianism movement.
“I quit school in the sixth grade because of pneumonia. Not because I had it, but because I couldn’t spell it.”*…
At the other end of the spectrum are the kids who make it to– and in– the Spelling Bee. Sebastian Stockman shares his unique perspective…
Every March, I get an email from Joan Lanigan at City Hall: The Binder has arrived.
The Spelling Bee words are in The Binder. I need The Binder because I’m the Pronouncer.
And so, my annual participation in the Boston Citywide Spelling Bee begins with a bit of spycraft—not the Tom-Cruise-scales-the-Burj-Khalifa type, more the George-Smiley-hands-you-a-file kind.
The handoff always takes place somewhere on my campus in between classes. Over the years, Joan has popped out of the passenger seat of an illegally parked car to hand me the nondescript white three-ring binder. She has waited for me in the rain, under an umbrella, outside my classroom building. She’s shown up in sunglasses and workout clothes, dropping The Binder off before her run. This year we met on the steps of the Museum of Fine Arts.
Joan’s not paranoid. She just does things by the book. As Program Manager at the Boston Centers for Youth and Families, Joan is the city’s point of contact between the Scripps National Spelling Bee and the several dozen public and private schools in Boston who send representatives to the regional competition. The winner of that competition receives a trophy, various wordy prizes, and travel and accommodations to the National Spelling Bee, just outside of Washington, D.C., where they’ll have their words pronounced by Dr. Jacques Bailly, the affable, unflappable LeBron James of the Bee world.
The Scripps people do not provide the word list digitally, because they want to limit sharing. It says so at the top of the first page, centered in red italics:
“Please do not give this guide to any spellers, parents or teachers.
The Scripps National Spelling Bee will provide your regional champion with study materials for the National Competition.”This is the Spelling Bee. OpSec is critical…
A proctor’s-eye view: “Confessions Of A Spelling Bee Pronouncer,” from @substockman.bsky.social in @defector.com.
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As we honor orthography, we might recall that on this date in 1988, Rageshree Ramachandran won the Scripps National Spelling Bee (correctly spelling “elegiacal”). 13 years old (and In the eighth grade) at the time, Ramachandran proceeded to race through high school in three years. At age 15, she won a $10,000 Westinghouse Science Talent Search scholarship. She started Stanford at age 16, and graduated in 1995 with both a B.S. and an M.S. She moved then to medical school at the University of Pennsylvania where she earned a Ph.D. in 2022 and an M.D. in 2023, then moved back to the Bay Area to do her residency at UCSF… where today she is a professor of clinical pathology.
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