Language Log

BREAKING: University of Florida students chose to breakdown their encampment after being handed this of Allowable Activities and Prohibitive Items and Activities.

Look at those Consequences for Non-Compliance

University of Florida's chapter of Young Democratic Socialists of… pic.twitter.com/l4jYjrSVcr

— Stu (@thestustustudio) April 26, 2024

Most Americans probably know a few Japanese loanwords, especially those who were alive in the two or three decades after WWII, when so many terms from Japan entered the English language — kamikaze, banzai, bonsai, origami, and so forth — with soldiers returning from the war in the Far East.

In the recent two or three decades, Japanese words, continued to enter English but from different avenues — anime, manga, sudoku, karaoke, etc.

Laura Baisas, “We were very wrong about birds”, Popular Science 4/1/2024:

Birds combine genes from a father and a mother into the next generation, but they first mix the genes they inherited from their pirates when creating sperm and eggs. This process is called recombination and it is also something that occurs in humans. Recombination maximizes a species’ genetic diversity by ensuring that no two siblings are exactly the same.

In "At the rind of the debate" we noted an odd use of the word exegesis in the Charlatan  Magazine: "the foreign-born population has grown by 4.5 million under Biden's exegesis". Readers diagnosed this as a malapropism for aegis, and another example from a more recent issue of the same publication ("Nightingale", 3/17/2024) confirms the analysis:

While a woman's role within the home was written into the original 1937 constitution under the exegesis of the Catholic Church in Ireland, 2015's Gender Recognition Act and Marriage Act has re-imagined these roles within the once traditional home.

Here are a couple of puzzling word-choices from Charlatan Magazine, sent to me by someone who was somehow put on their mailing list.

This one is from "The Politics of Immigration", 3/3/2024 [emphasis added]:

While Biden patrols the Texas border (taking a wide berth around the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas) he assuages the American voter whose ire toward illegal immigrants under his presidency has doubled. “There were 49.5 million foreign-born residents in the United States (legal and illegal) in 2023,” according to the Center for Immigration Statistics, and the foreign-born population has grown by 4.5 million under Biden's exegesis.

My correspondent identified "exegesis" as a malapropism, but we couldn't figure out what it might be a substitution for. I guess the author might have meant something like "Biden's interpretation (of immigration policy)", though there's nothing else in the article to raise the question of alternative interpretations of such laws or policies.

Xinyi Ye, who sent this to me, thought the idea of multiple languages and the Tower of Babel in a game would be quite cliché, but this one is actually good.  You will be surprised at what you see and hear.

A bit belated, but better late than never.

Merriam-Webster's online dictionary entry for folx defines it as a re-spelling of folks "used especially to explicitly signal the inclusion of groups commonly marginalized".

The etymology is given as "respelling of folks, with x after MX., LATINX".

The entry also notes that the first known occurrence was in 1833, without clarifying that older uses (and many recent ones) are examples of eye dialect rather than inclusionary reference.

This is the theme of the forthcoming CCTV Spring Festival Gala to ring in the new year of 2024:

(source)

The bio from a recent talk announcement described the speaker as a "Production Engineer …, a job which, for the most part, means he is a professional toil tackler."

That's a striking phrase, and one that was new to me. I soon discovered that it's new to Google as well, though the search turned up the source of its constituent words in Chapter 6, "Eliminating Toil", from a Workbook associated with  Google's Site Reliability Engineering (=SRE) page.

Choices for the 2023 Word Of The Year are starting to come out —

1. The Macquarie Dictionary chose cozzie livs ;
2. Merriam-Webster chose authentic;
3. Oxford University Press has announced their choice, but it's "UNDER EMBARGO until 00.01 GMT Monday 4 December 2023".
   So we'll let you in on the secret tomorrow… [Update — it's rizz …]

From The Japan Times:

A foray into the realm of Japanese ‘dead words’

Trendy buzzwords tend to be most at risk of dying out as they often reflect ideas and trends that are fleeting.

By Tadasu Takahashi
Staff writer
 
Oct 31, 2023

Sometimes whole languages go extinct, more often certain words within languages cease to exist as part of the living lexicon.  There are political, demographic, and other socioeconomic reasons why languages disappear.  The reasons why individual words die out are related more to fashion — in culture, science, and similar emotional and intellectual reasons.

Tadasu Takahashi's interesting article provides some specific examples from contemporary Japanese language.

I recently learned about the lexical blend calimony, which refers to a planned multi-million-dollar annual payment from UCLA (the University of California, Los Angeles) to Berkeley (the University of California, Berkeley, known in athletic contexts as "California" or "Cal"). Why will this payment exist? And why is it a metaphorical form of alimony?

Short form: As of next year, UCLA is leaving the Pac-12 for the Big 10, and 7 others of the 12 schools that gave the Pac-12 its name are also leaving. As a result, the Pac-12 will probably vanish, at least as a source of broadcast revenue. Because UCLA and Berkeley are both part of the state of California university system, the budgetary consequences… …don't matter in detail to the history of the lexical blend, but help to explain why the alimony metaphor makes sense.