Posts Tagged ‘words’
“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.
“Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss”*…
What greater joy than that of creation? John Crace on the all-time champion coiner of English words…
To many scholars he is still the sublime English poet. To the rest of us, he’s the blind bloke who wrote the scarily long and difficult epic about heaven, hell and the failure of the English revolution we were made to read at school. But John Milton… deserves to be remembered for rather more than Paradise Lost. Step aside Martin Amis, Will Self et al; Milton is in a league of his own for neologisms.
According to Gavin Alexander, lecturer in English at Cambridge university and fellow of Milton’s alma mater, Christ’s College, who has trawled the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for evidence, Milton is responsible for introducing some 630 words to the English language, making him the country’s greatest neologist, ahead of Ben Jonson with 558, John Donne with 342 and Shakespeare with 229. Without the great poet there would be no liturgical, debauchery, besottedly, unhealthily, padlock, dismissive, terrific, embellishing, fragrance, didactic or love-lorn. And certainly no complacency.
The OED does tend to privilege famous writers with first usage,” Alexander admits, “and early-modern English – a composite of Germanic and Romance languages – was ripe for innovation. If you couldn’t think of a word, you could just make one up, ideally based on a term from French or Latin that others educated in those languages would understand. Yet, by any standards, Milton was an extraordinary linguist and his freedom with language can be related to his advocacy of personal, political and religious freedoms.”
Milton’s coinages can be loosely divided into five categories. A new meaning for an existing word – he was the first to use space to mean “outer space”; a new form of an existing word, by making a noun from a verb or a verb from an adjective, such as stunning and literalism; negative forms, such as unprincipled, unaccountable and irresponsible – he was especially fond of these, with 135 entries beginning with un-; new compounds, such as arch-fiend and self-delusion; and completely new words, such as pandemonium and sensuous.
Not that Milton got things all his own way. Some of his words, such as intervolve (to wind within each other) and opiniastrous (opinionated), never quite made it into regular usage – which feels like our loss rather than his…
“John Milton – our greatest word-maker,” from @mrjohncrace.bsky.social in @theguardian.com.
For an appreciation of the revolutionary afterlife of Milton’s masterwork, Paradise Lost, see Orlando Reade‘s What In Me Is Dark. (TotH to PN)
* John Milton, Paradise Lost
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As we reach for the right word, we might send articulate birthday greetings to Anthony Burgess; he was born on this date in 1917. An author primarily of comic fiction (e.g., the Enderby quartet), he strayed to other turf (like Earthly Powers, one of your correspondent’s faves). He is, of course, best known for his dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange— for which he invented a slang argot (“Nadsat“) that, while it added little to the vernacular, certainly had an impact on those of us who read the book or saw Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation.
“Take a good book to bed with you—books do not snore”*…
From Greg Ross, a helpful vocabulary lesson for those of us who would talk about people’s relationships with books…
rarissima
n. extremely rare books, manuscripts, or printsIn The Book Hunter (1863), John Hill Burton identifies five types of “persons who meddle with books”:
- “A bibliognoste, from the Greek, is one knowing in title-pages and colophons, and in editions; the place and year when printed; the presses whence issued; and all the minutiae of a book.”
- “A bibliographe is a describer of books and other literary arrangements.”
- “A bibliomane is an indiscriminate accumulator, who blunders faster than he buys, cock-brained and purse-heavy.”
- “A bibliophile, the lover of books, is the only one in the class who appears to read them for his own pleasure.”
- “A bibliotaphe buries his books, by keeping them under lock, or framing them in glass cases.”
These groups seem to have been proposed by French librarian Jean Joseph Rive. Bibliographer Gabriel Peignot added four more:
- bibliolyte, a destroyer of books
- bibliologue, one who discourses about books
- bibliotacte, a classifier of books
- bibliopée, “‘l’art d’écrire ou de composer des livres,’ or, as the unlearned would say, the function of an author.”…
For the bibliophiles among us: “In a Word,” from Futility Closet.
(Image above: source)
* Thea Dorn
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As we love our labels, we might send eerie birthday greetings to Howard Phillips Lovecraft; he was born on this date in 1890. The creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, he was a pioneer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction. H.P. Lovecraft was almost unknown in his lifetime, but has become one of the most influential writers of the Twentieth Century– Jorge Luis Borges, Joyce Carol Oates, and Stephen King, among many other writers, comic artists, and filmmakers, have all proclaimed their indebtedness.
“Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all”*…
Jack Shepherd, in praise of phrases that persevere…
I don’t want to sound too alarmist, but they walk among us. We thought they were dead, but they clung to life through a loophole, travelers from a distant past living tourist lives in the host homes they have somehow carved out of our alien present. These are the “fossil words,” obsolete and active all at once; common as dirt, but strange to the touch. If you saw one out alone at night, you’d recognize it as an interloper right away — they often wear their unbelonging openly — words like “wend,” “knell,” “druthers,” “eke,” and “dudgeon.” But they are adept at hiding in plain sight: “Wend your way.” “Death knell.” “If I had my druthers.” “Eke out a living.” “A state of high dudgeon.” And some are even better hidden, revealing their antediluvian sensibility only on close inspection — “point” in “in point of fact;” “needs” in “must needs;” “the” in “nonetheless,” “step” in “stepson.”
A rather marvelous but mostly forgotten 1901 book called Words & Their Ways in English Speech by J. B. Greenough and G. L. Kittredge is (as far as I can tell) the earliest text to describe these remarkable anachronisms as “fossils”…
Some of the fossils the authors single out (such as “whilom”) have themselves mostly vanished from the language since the book was published, but many more are still with us: “Umbrage,” for instance, which is never seen outside of the phrase “to take umbrage at,” is a word that literally means “shade” or “shadow” (as in umbrella), and someone takes umbrage at something (presumably) because it has cast a shadow on them (a converse of the more contemporary “throwing shade.”) “Dudgeon,” similarly, can’t walk on its own two feet outside of the phrase “High dudgeon.” Greenough and Kittredge speculate that it could be related to an earlier dudgeon that referred to the wood used to make knife handles, but most other sources are skeptical of this. In fact, it may have its roots in the Italian aduggiare, “to overshadow,” which would make it, rather satisfyingly, a cousin to umbrage.
Armed with the concept of “fossil words,” you can start to see them everywhere: The “Pale” that only exists in “Beyond the Pale” is unrelated to the “Pale” that means “colorless” — it’s an otherwise obsolete word from the Latin palus, meaning “stake” and, by extension, “boundary.” The “Dint” that can nevermore escape from the phrase “By dint of” was once a mighty sword strike — the Old English dynt means “a blow from a weapon.” “Offing,” a nautical term for the open sea as it’s seen from the shore, now survives only in “In the offing,” which itself probably only survives because it was a favorite phrase of Bertie Wooster…
Unlike the “Step” that means “moving a foot forward” and comes from the Old English steppan, the “Step-” in “Stepchild” is the last remaining vestige in English of a word that meant “bereaved.” As Greenough and Kittredge explain:
“The step- in stepson and the like is the adjective stēop, ‘destitute,’ ‘bereaved,’ so that stepson or stepchild is the same as orphan, which comes from the Greek for ‘bereaved.’ Stepfather and stepmother are therefore terms which could only have arisen after the step- had lost its proper sense. A stepmother is not a ‘bereaved mother,’ but one who takes the place of a mother to the bereaved children. This illustrates the tendency of language to form groups, and to make new words to fill out any gaps that may be observed in any group.”
Which is to say that not only have these charming little time travelers made homes of their own in the language, some of them are starting families…
More examples of long-lived lexicography: “These Lovely “Fossil Words” Are Hiding in Plain Sight,” from @expresident.
* Winston Churchill
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As we honor our elders, we might note that the work that went far to popularize the word “bohemian,” Giacomo Puccini‘s La bohème, premiered in Turin at the Teatro Regio on this date in 1896. It was conducted by the then 28 year old Arturo Toscanini. While it was dismissed by some critics at the time as simple and unchallenging, it has become a central part of the standard Italian opera repertory and is one of the most frequently performed operas worldwide.
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