Language Log

Reading the NYT 11/7/2026 morning newsletter, I was taken aback by a phrase in the "Game of the Week" passage [emphasis added]:

College football rivalry: Can Michigan State football find its way out of its deepest hole ever? The Spartans are rocking an embarrassing 2-6 record. In their home conference, where the team has played its worst stretch of football in almost 75 years, it’s 0-5.

I associate that figurative sense of transitive verb rock with the positive valence suggested by the Wiktionary gloss:

To wear (a piece of clothing, outfit etc.) successfully or with style; to carry off (a particular look, style).

Too few people know about the trail-blazing generative language model snarXiv, "a random high-energy theory paper generator incorporating all the latest trends, entropic reasoning, and exciting moduli spaces." 16 years later, it's apparently still generating random titles and abstracts.

Over the past decade or so, this right here and that right there have become increasingly common as fixed expressions, further emphasizing this here and that there, beyond the simple demonstrative pronouns this and that. Or so it has seemed to me — and Google Ngrams confirms it:

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."