Language Log

Jen Rose Smith, "Excuse my French? The swear words that used to be illegal in Canada", BBC 11/4/2026:

Speakers of Québécois French are known for using a unique class of blasphemous swear words derived from Catholic terms known as sacres ("sacred" profanities). Among the most famous are the seemingly innocent tabarnak ("tabernacle"), câlisse ("chalice") and Criss ("Christ"). But when angrily deployed, they carry all the offensive heft of English profanity.

I.A. Richards had a flair for striking metaphors and memorable phrases, as in the first few sentences of his 1928 book Principles of Literary Criticism:

A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive. This book might better be compared to a loom on which it is proposed to re-weave some ravelled parts of our civilisation. What is most important about it, the interconnection of its several points of view, might have been exhibited, though not with equal clarity, in a pamphlet or in a two-volume work. Few of the separate items are original. One does not expect novel cards when playing so traditional a game; it is the hand which matters.

And his quirky ramblings have become increasingly relevant as the decades roll by. I recently read (or at least skimmed) the text of his 1936 Bryn Mawr lectures, published as The Philosophy of Rhetoric, in which many passages serve as prescient commentaries on Large Language Models.

From Donald Trump's pre-election speech at the Reflecting Pool, at time point 26:40 —

We've achieved more in less than two years
   than any administration ((in)) American history and I've kept
every single promise I made except far more –
I've actually kept far more promises than I made.
We've done much more than I promised.

In a comment on yesterday's post ktschwarz informed us that

"Pronunciation respelling" is Wikipedia's name for things like "KUV-uh-nuhnt"; I don't know if it's used more widely.

I've somehow managed to fail to learn that term, though of course I was familiar with the practice, which is why I invented lah-lah-lah as a placeholder.

From L.J.:

Could you explain the real pronunciation of "covenant"? In American English, the first vowel is not like that in British English as shown in the Oxford English Dictionary. Please see the attachment. However, theoretically, a word cannot have three schwas because the stress cannot be assigned. Could the first vowel be actually a longer one?

Today's xkcd:

The Weather Channel recently published a story about the value of duct tape in keeping out flood water: "Duct tape kept out more flood water than sandbags in laboratory tests". Its newletter advertised that story as "A victory for dads everywhere":

Norbert Wiener's 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings makes some uncannily accurate predictions, e.g.

It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.

And those messages will be an "ever-increasing part" of an ever-growing whole, alas — just ask anyone who has recently spent time with WorkDay and its ilk ☹️.

Following up on yesterday's "Singularities" post, today's SMBC:

The OED gives citations for singularity going back to the 14th century, e.g. this example from 1398 in the sense "The fact or condition of being alone or apart from others; solitariness":

Men vsyd to ete togyders in open place, leest syngularite schuld brede lechery.

A mathematical singularity, as Wikipedia tells us,"is a point at which a given mathematical object is not defined, or a point where the mathematical object ceases to be well-behaved in some particular way, such as by lacking differentiability or analyticity", with an obvious example being what happens to the reciprocal function 1/x at the point x=0. I'm not sure when that usage began, but it's easy to find references back to the 19th century, e.g. Charlotte Angas Scott, "On the higher singularities of plane curves", American Journal of Mathematics 1892.

Most uses of the term these days involve a metaphorical extension of the mathematical concept to the idea of a technological singularity, which Wikipedia describes as "a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization."

"AI is doing job interviews now—but candidates say they’d rather risk staying unemployed than talk to another robot", Fortune 8/2/2025:

AI is replacing human hiring managers in job interviews—and candidates are pushing back. Despite being unemployed, professionals told Fortune they’re refusing to take calls with bots, calling it an “added indignity” and a red flag for company culture. Still, stretched-thin HR teams say it’s the only way to handle thousands of applicants.

Evaluations of these interview bots don't seem to have improved over the past year — see e.g. "Dystopian and dehumanising: that’s what it felt like when I was interviewed by an AI assistant", The Guardian 10/12/2026, and many similar reactions.

There are lots of other reasons for interacting with a chatbot, like it or not, and one of the things that often bothers people about those interactions is what's come to be called glazing, which means "to hype and compliment someone in a way that is over-the-top and cringey."

Over the past few weeks, Graham Dot Zip has created several amusing (fake?) interviews that feature glazing responses from job-interview chatbots, prompted by nonsensical inputs:

Mayur Naik has invented "MathDuels: A Self-Play Benchmark That Grows":

… in which models occupy dual roles: each authors math problems under adversarial prompting and solves problems authored by every other participant. A generation pipeline produces and filters the problems, and a psychometric model jointly estimates solver abilities and problem difficulties, from which author quality is derived. Experiments across 19 frontier models reveal that authoring and solving capabilities are partially decoupled, and that dual-role evaluation exposes capability separations invisible in single-role benchmarks. As newer models enter the arena, they produce problems that defeat previously dominant solvers, so the benchmark’s difficulty co-evolves with participant strength rather than saturating at a fixed ceiling. [Abstract taken from today's lecture.]

There's an evolving MathDuels leaderboard here.

Some of the comments on "Filthy comfortable" (10/9/2026) related to the issue of an adjective being used as an adverbial intensifier, which is a fairly common though always irregular development.