Language Log

John Burn-Murdoch, "Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite", Financial Times 3/28/2026:

Every media revolution has transformed who distributes information, what messages are distributed and what form they take. As such, some media are fundamentally democratising and polarising, widening the pool of publishers and views beyond a narrow elite and amplifying radical and anti-establishment voices. TikTok and the printing press arrived almost 600 years apart but share these characteristics. Others push the opposite way: radio and television had high barriers to entry, creating a monopoly for the voices and views of elites and experts.

As the use of AI chatbots takes off, it’s worth pausing to ask which of these categories they fall into. There is good reason to believe it is the latter.

Anne Abeillé's recently-published book "La Grammaire se Rebelle" describes linguistic prescriptivism as "la jungle puriste" / "the purist jungle".

But wait, don't prescriptivists want to turn the natural linguistic wilderness into a well-tended formal garden? Maybe, but in fact prescriptive rules are often incoherent as well as contrary to elite as well as informal usage, as we've often observed.

There's more to say about the many metaphors for linguistic prescriptivism — for example, the parallels with socio-political authority and rebellion —  but for now, here's the avant-propos of Abeillé's book, followed by Google Translate's (very good) English version:

…and other applications of non-linear dynamics. A press release from Northwestern University — "Bell-bottoms today, miniskirts tomorrow: Math reveals fashion's 20-year cycle":

Fashion insiders and beauty magazines have long cited the "20-year-rule"—the idea that clothing trends often resurface every two decades. According to Northwestern University scientists, that observation isn't just anecdotal. It's a mathematical reality.

In a new study, the Northwestern team developed a new mathematical model showing that fashion trends tend to cycle roughly every 20 years. By analyzing roughly 37,000 images of women's clothing spanning from 1869 to today, the team found that styles rise in popularity, fall out of favor and then eventually experience renewal. Along with supporting common perceptions about the life cycles of fads, the researchers say these results could help explain how new ideas spread in society.

The study's lead author, Emma Zajdela, will present these findings on Tuesday, March 17, at the American Physical Society (APS) Global Physics Summit in Denver. Her talk, "Back in Fashion: Modeling the Cyclical Dynamics of Trends," is part of the session "Statistical Physics of Networks and Complex Society Systems."

Tao Lin et al., "The audience shapes the information content of the honey bee waggle dance", PNAS 3/23/2026:

We show that the honey bee waggle dance changes depending on how many followers a dancer has and how many appropriately aged bees are available to follow it. When followers were scarce, dancers became less precise, even if the dance floor was crowded with young bees that do not follow dances. These declines in precision appear to arise because dancers search more widely for an audience, increasing their movement during the return run. The results suggest that dancers use simple social cues, such as tactile contacts, to sense follower availability. Thus, waggle dancing is not a one-way signal but a socially responsive behavior shaped by feedback from followers.

Regional names for alleyways…

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— Clare Downham (@downham.bsky.social) January 17, 2026 at 4:51 AM

From Frederick Newmeyer: "A sign in the breakfast room of a not very classy hotel in Amsterdam:"

"The middle language is Esperanto! Who could have decided on Esperanto as the third language and who can read it? The hotel receptionists have no idea."

Sima Kotecha, "Soham murderer Ian Huntley taken off life support, BBC understands", BBC 3/6/2026:

Soham murderer Ian Huntley is close to death after being taken off life support following an attack in prison, the BBC understands.

The 52-year-old has been in hospital since 26 February after being beaten over the head with a makeshift weapon at HMP Frankland in County Durham. The high security prison houses some of the most violent inmates.

Prison sources said Huntley was found lying in a pool of blood after the attack. He suffered significant head trauma from his injuries.

For the past couple of years, internet advertising has been promoting (increasingly unexpected) things to me as "tactical": tactical shorts, tactical pants, tactical belts, tactical gloves, tactical hoodies, … These are basically imitations of military garments (to be worn in action as opposed to on parade), and I guess if my internet profile were different, I'd see more ads for imitation military firearms, not just knives and sticks and flashlights. More recently, I've seen tactical ice scrapers and tactical scissors. And most recently (and absurdly?), tactical pajamas.

From Coby L:

I wonder if you can refer me to a discussion of the appropriateness of the very common omission of "the" when a person's name is preceded by their position or occupation and is not a title or rank (like Professor, Colonel or President). For example, linguist Mark Liberman, writer Stephen King and the like. (In The New Yorker it would almost certainly be "the linguist" etc.)

As regards titles, specifically relating to political positions and used as forms of address, the I have also wondered why some are usually preceded by Mr. or Madam (President, Speaker…) and others are not (Governor, Senator, Prime Minister…). Any insights?

As Wikipedia explains,

Sealioning […] is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter. It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate",[9] and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings.[10] The term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic Wondermark by David Malki, which The Independent called "the most apt description of Twitter you'll ever see".

In part 1 of this post, "The (ir)reality of the MingKwai typewriter" (10/17/25) and many preceding, related posts (see "Selected readings" and the links to which they lead), we saw what a boondoggle and fiasco the Chinese typewriter (especially Lin Yutang's MingKwai) was.  Yet people are still glorifying and extolling the clumsy, clunky, cumbersome Chinese typewriter as though it were leading the IT revolution (when the reality is quite the contrary).  So much hype and sensationalism about the retrograde Chinese typewriter!

The following bilibili video, although in Chinese, will show how complicated and expensive to replicate such a device is:

[N.B.:  The archeologically recovered objects, such as those described in this post, are still referred to as "Roman dodecahedron", but that is partly to distinguish them from the scientific study of such figures in chemistry, crystallography, geometry, mathematics, and so forth.  Considering the most recent archeological discoveries and studies, we will have to stop calling them "Roman dodecahedron" and may well have to begin styling them "Gallo dodecahedron" or at least "Gallo-Roman dodecahedron" (see below for the reasoning).

In geometry, a dodecahedron or duodecahedron is any polyhedron with twelve flat faces. The most familiar dodecahedron is the regular dodecahedron with regular pentagons as faces, which is a Platonic solid.

China to Enshrine Xi-Era Ethnic Policy in New Law
by Chenghao Wei, NPC Observer (3/5/26)

The following is the introductory paragraph to the prospectus for the NPC's proceedings next week:

Next week, China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) is expected to adopt a Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (Law) [民族团结进步促进法]—designed to codify General Secretary Xi Jinping’s new orthodoxy for governing China’s ethnic minorities. That doctrine, known as the “Important Thinking on Improving and Strengthening Ethnic Work,” reflects the “Second-Generation Ethnic Policies” promoted by several prominent scholars. In a nutshell, this new “assimilationist” approach aims “not just to strengthen citizens’ sense of belonging to a larger, unified Chinese nation under the Party but also to mute expression of other—in the Party’s view, competing—identities.”