Language Log

Last Tuesday's post "Pneumatic, pneumonic, whatever" was based on a New York Post headline announcing that "Trump calls reported pneumatic plague outbreak ‘big problem for Russia’". It was implicit in the discussion that the headline writer was ignorant or careless or both.

But yesterday, Bob Ladd pointed out to me that Science magazine committed a similar error in the references to a paper dated 9/25/2026 (Morvai, Boglárka, Kinga G. Tóth, Marianna Boros, Dorottya S. Rácz, Ivaylo Iotchev, Kitti Szabó, and Attila Andics. "Neural evidence that dogs segment the speech they hear with a humanlike consonant bias." Science (2026).

Beth Simone Noveck, "How AI can be good for democracy", NYT 10/6/2026:

Governments can also use their enormous purchasing power to demand more from A.I. companies and to build more A.I. with them. In return for providing government funding, South Korea is securing contracts with multiple tech and telecom companies to give A.I. access to all of its 51 million citizens.

Giving AI access to everyone! That sounds like a good idea, right?

New information about the Memorial Service for Victor Mair, Saturday 10/10 from 2:00 to 5:00pm: For those who can't attend in person at  Swarthmore Friends Meeting (12 Whittier Place, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania), it will be available here through Zoom.

"Trump calls reported pneumatic plague outbreak ‘big problem for Russia’: ‘The microbes and the germs have gotten stronger’", NY Post 10/5/2026.

President Trump gave an ominous assessment of the suspected outbreak of pneumonic plague in Siberia Monday, calling it a “big problem for Russia” and adding cryptically that “the microbes and the germs have gotten stronger.”

A few weeks ago, I got an interesting email from Jean Charconnet, referencing a 9/10/2026 LLOG post, noting general issues about the logic of analogies and metaphors, and offering to submit a guest post on the topic.

Philadelphia seems to attract Google Maps weirdness. The last time I opened a map to verify some local directions, it popped up an image of the Grand Concourse ceiling of the 30th St. Amtrak station, identified as "Philidelphia Train ticket office":

Myriam Toua, "Donald Trump's advisers 'urge him to declare martial law' amid latest grim poll", The Mirror_us 9/26/2026:

[emphasis added] Martial law in the US would mean the temporary replacement of government and regular law enforcement by a solely military force.

Standard civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, assembly, or protection from detention without trial, are all suspended in the case of martial law being enacted.

The president has already tried to claim greater federal control over elections, which under the Constitution are administered primarily at the state and local levels of government.

In February, he said Republicans should nationalize boating in at least 15 places.

The latest Tank McNamara strip imagines a conversation between referees before today's Ravens versus Cowboys game in Rio:

From Donald Trump's recent UN speech:

The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, hereinafter officially called Super Intelligence, changing the name, and that the use of the word "artificial" makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake. And it is not fake. It's actually amazing, but we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports.

From this point forward, all of United States documents and, hopefully the world's will be changed to use the much more accurate term "super" as opposed to "artificial". So it's Super Intelligence. In other words, welcome to the new world of Super Intelligence-SI. SI, let's see if that goes, it sounds much better. It is much better, and it's much more accurate. Let's see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don't. We're going to find out pretty soon.

A recent congratulatory email, from a successful scientist to a member of his lab:

Teriffic!

I make similar mistakes myself all the time, and felt the need to check that the correct spelling is actually "terrific".

See "Conservation of (orthographic) gemination" (3/29/2004) for a nerdish exploration of the psycholinguistic issues involved.

At least in British primary schools, according to The Guardian: "‘That’s so AI!’ What gen Alpha’s biggest insult tells us", 9/24/2026.

Today's Frazz:

As counterpoint to Scott Alexander's impressive "King Ludd" exploration, consider this thematic image from The Spectator magazine ("The autistocracy: the men on the spectrum who rule our world"), featuring caricatures of Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman engaged in modeling a cubical world: