Posts Tagged ‘words’
“Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children. They disappeared so quietly that at first almost no one noticed – fading away like water on stone.”*…
Tales of love and adventure from 1,000 years ago reveal a dazzling range of now-extinct English pronouns. They capture something unique about how people once thought about “two-ness.” Sophie Hardach on why they died out…
Which word would you use to refer to yourself? “I”, presumably, in the singular. And how about you and a group of people? “We”, of course, in the plural.
But how about you and one other person?
In modern English, there is no word for that. You would probably just use “we” or “the two of us”.
But more than 1,000 years ago, you would have said: “wit”.
This term, once also used affectionately to describe the closeness between two people, is one of many personal pronouns that have been lost or transformed amid huge social and political change over the centuries. The English language has become simplified – but at times this has left gaps, creating confusion.
“Wit” means “we two” in Old English, a Germanic language spoken in England until about the 12th Century, which evolved into the English we speak today. Now completely lost, “wit” was part of an extinct group of pronouns used for exactly two people: the dual form, which also includes “uncer” or “unker” (“our” for two people) and “git” (“you two”). That dual form vanished from the English language around the 13th Century. (You can hear how some of these were pronounced in the short clips later in this article.)
“There’s a whole history in the [personal] pronouns”, including the impact of Viking and Norman invasions on the English language alongside shifting norms and customs that have changed how we talk, says Tom Birkett, a professor of Old English and Old Norse at University College Cork in Ireland.
Many Old English pronouns are still in use, says Birkett. Our oldest English personal pronouns include “he” and “it”, as well as “we”, “us”, “our”, “me” and “mine”, Birkett says. They have made it through more than 1,000 years of history and upheaval, almost intact.
“‘He’ definitely is a very old English form, and also ‘hit’, which lost the ‘h’ and became ‘it’,” Birkett says. The Old English “Ic” has also been resilient, losing only one letter, to become the modern English “I”.
But other pronouns were cast off – such as the once-common dual form. “It’s fairly widespread in Old English texts. Particularly in poetry, we get the use of ‘wit’ and ‘unc’ for ‘us two, the two of us’,” says Birkett…
Fascinating- read on: “Wit, unker, git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy.”
* Robert Macfarlane, The Lost Words
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As we choose our words, we might recall that it was on this date in 1828 that Noah Webster copyrighted the first edition of his American Dictionary of the English Language. Published in two quarto volumes, it contained 70,000 entries, as against the high of 58,000 of any previous dictionary. Webster, who was 70 at the time, had published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, in 1806, and had begun then the campaign of language reform (motivated by both nationalistic and philological concerns) that initiated the formal shift of American English spelling (center rather than centre, honor rather than honour, program rather than programme, etc.). His 1828 dictionary cemented those changes, and continued his efforts to include technical and scientific (not just literary) terms.
“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”).
“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).
“I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”*…
“Obsolete (adj.): no longer in use or no longer useful”… Stefan Fatsis on the challenges faced by the purveyors of today’s dictionaries…
In 2015, I settled in at the Springfield, Massachusetts, headquarters of Merriam-Webster, America’s most storied dictionary company. My project was to document the ambitious reinvention of a classic, and I hoped to get some definitions of my own into the lexicon along the way. (A favorite early drafting effort, which I couldn’t believe wasn’t already included, was dogpile : “a celebration in which participants dive on top of each other immediately after a victory.”) Merriam-Webster’s overhaul of its signature work, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged—a 465,000-word, 2,700-page, 13.5-pound doorstop published in 1961 and never before updated—was already in full swing. The revision, which would be not a hardback book but an online-only edition, requiring a subscription, was expected to take decades.
Not long after my arrival, though, everything changed. Pageviews were declining for Merriam-Webster.com, the company’s free, ad-driven revenue engine: Tweaks to Google’s algorithms had punished Merriam’s search results. The company had always been lean and profitable, but the financial hit was real. Merriam’s parent, Encyclopedia Britannica, was facing challenges of its own—who needed an encyclopedia in a Wikipedia world?—and ordered cuts. Merriam laid off more than a dozen staffers. Its longtime publisher, John Morse, was forced into early retirement. The revision of Merriam’s unabridged masterpiece was abandoned.
Call it the paradox of the modern dictionary. We’re in a golden age for the study and appreciation of words—a time of “meta awareness” of language, as one lexicographer put it to me. Dictionaries are more accessible than ever, available on your laptop or phone. More people use them than ever, and dictionary publishers now possess the digital wherewithal to closely track that use. Podcasts, newsletters, and Words of the Year have popularized neologisms, etymologies, and usage trends. Meanwhile, analytical software has revolutionized linguistic inquiry, enabling greater understanding of the ways language works—when, how, and why words break out; the specific contexts for expressions and idioms. And all of that was true long before the rise of AI.
But these advances are also strangling the business of the dictionary. Definitions, professional and amateur, are a click away, and most people don’t care or can’t tell whether what pops up in a search is expert research, crowdsourced jottings, scraped data, or zombie websites. Before he left Merriam, Morse told me that legacy dictionaries face the same growing popular distrust of traditional authorities that media and government have encountered…
[Fatsis recounts the recent troubled commercial history of lexicography: Merriam, Dictionary.com, et al…]
It’s hard to know what future business model might save the industry. Getting swallowed by a tech giant expecting hockey-stick growth has proved untenable. A billionaire willing to let the dictionary just be the dictionary—a self-sustaining company with a modest staff performing an outsize cultural job that might not always be profitable—looks less likely after Dan Gilbert’s foray. A grand national dictionary project—some collaboration among government, private, nonprofit, and academic institutions—feels like the Platonic ideal. But with universities and intellectual inquiry under assault in 2025, I’m not holding my breath.
At Merriam-Webster, the standard capitalist model is working, at least for now, as is its hybrid print-digital approach. The publisher has rebounded from its mid-2010s struggles. It was a social-media darling during the first Trump administration, racking up likes and retweets for its smart-alecky and politically subversive social-media persona. (When Donald Trump tweeted “unpresidented” instead of “unprecedented,” the Merriam account responded: “Good morning! The #WordOfTheDay is … not ‘unpresidented’. We don’t enter that word. That’s a new one.”) Britannica invested in software, hardware, and humans to enable Merriam to better navigate Google’s algorithms. Merriam added a phalanx of games, including Wordle knockoffs and a dictionary-based crossword, to attract and retain visitors.
Merriam has outlasted a long line of American dictionaries. But plenty of household media names have been humbled by the shifting habits of digital consumers. Even before Google’s AI Overview began taking clicks from definitions written by flesh-and-bone lexicographers, the trajectory of the industry was clear.
After Merriam shut down its online unabridged revision, I stuck around the company’s 85-year-old brick headquarters, reporting and defining. I eventually drafted about 90 definitions. Most of them didn’t make the cut. But a handful are enshrined online, including politically charged terms such as microaggression and alt-right, and whimsicalones such as sheeple and, yes, dogpile.
While I’m proud of these small contributions to lexicography, my wanderings through dictionary culture convinced me of something far more important: the urgent need to save this slowly fading business. Twenty years ago, an estimated 200 full-time commercial lexicographers were working in the United States; today the number is probably less than a quarter of that. At a time when contentious words dominate our conversations—think insurrection and fascism and fake news and woke—the need for dictionaries to chronicle and explain language, and serve as its watchdog, has never been greater…
Adapted from Fatsis” new book, Unabridged- The Thrill of and Threat to the Modern Dictionary: “Is This the End of the Dictionary?” @stefanfatsis.bsky.social in @theatlantic.com.
* Steven Wright
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As we look it up, we might we might send carefully-chosen words of birthday greeting to William Cuthbert Faulkner; he was born on this date in 1897. A writer of novels, short stories, poetry, essays, screenplays, and one play, Faulkner is best remembered for his novels (e.g., The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August) and stories set in “Yoknapatawpha County,” a setting largely based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. They earned him the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Faulkner inadvertently expressed (what would pass in the context on the piece above for) confidence in the longevity of Ernest Hemingway’s work: in 1951 he observed that “he has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
On the other hand…
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
From Requiem for a Nun, Act I, Scene III, by William Faulkner
“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.
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