Language Log

…and speech? or at least "vocal control"?

Chiara De Gregorio, Marina Davila-Ross, & Adriano R. Lameira, "Rhythm and timing in laughter reveal that human vocal plasticity falls on a hominid continuum", Nature Communications Biology, 6/25/2026:

Laughter is an important, universal form of human non-linguistic vocal expression and, being shared by all extant great apes, offers a valuable proxy for tracing the evolution of vocal control that ultimately enabled language. Yet surprisingly little is known about the evolution of its defining feature, rhythm. Here we show, through comparative analyses of laughter across all extant great apes (orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees, humans), that the laughter of the last common ancestor was already isochronous, becoming faster, more variable, and increasingly context-sensitive over hominid evolution. The evolution of laughter’s rhythm reveals a progressive increase in vocal rhythmic plasticity, with humans following the overall trajectory toward enhanced vocal control.

The title of Sal Mercogliano's latest "What's Going on With Shipping?" vlog offers two idiom extensions: "Understanding Global Shipping Risks: Black Swans, Black Jellyfish & Black Elephants".

The "black swan" metaphor starts from Juvenal (Satire VI, line 165), who described a virtuous wife as "Rara auis in terris, nigroque simillima cycno ("a rare bird on earth, and very like a black swan"). This made sense in 1st-century Rome, because the only swans the Romans knew were white.

Stephen Collins' August 14 comic in the Guardian, "Meet David Advance Plus+, genius of toothpaste marketing", starts with these four panels:

The latest xkcd:

[SORRY for previously writing "the Economist" instead of "the Guardian" "-)…]

Steven Collins' January 9 cartoon from the Guardian starts with a man's sudden displacement after he places a simple fast-food order:

Paul Krugman's latest Substack echoes Winston Churchill's famous 1940 speech:

Today's SMBC:

From the Wikipedia page on Pafnuty Chebyshev:

The surname Chebyshev has been transliterated in several different ways, including Tchebichef, Tchebychev, Tchebycheff, Tschebyschev, Tschebyschef, Tschebyscheff, Čebyčev, Čebyšev, Chebysheff, Chebychov and Chebyshov (which provides the closest pronunciation in English to the correct pronunciation in old Russian). Chebychev is an erroneous mixture between English and French transliterations. In English, the transliteration Chebyshev has gained widespread acceptance. The correct transliteration according to ISO 9 is Čebyšëv. The American Mathematical Society adopted the transcription Chebyshev in its Mathematical Reviews.

Prescriptivist peeving has faded from public discourse, but UK politics recently brought us a blast from the past:

The August 6 Economist discussed AI threats to government bureaucracy:

• "How AI is breaking the British state: Equipped with models and agents, citizens could bring government to a halt"
• "From parking tickets to planning, the state is under siege by AI: The people-versus-state arms race"
• "The tragedy of the commons, AI edition: Britain’s employment courts are clogged with AI cases"

Travis LaCroix, Fintan Mallory, and Sasha Luccioni. "Strategic polysemy in AI discourse: A philosophical analysis of language, hype, and power." In The 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2026:

Abstract: This paper examines the strategic use of language in contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) discourse, focusing on the widespread adoption of metaphorical or colloquial terms like “hallucination”, “chain-of-thought”, “introspection”, “language model”, “alignment”, and “agent”. We argue that many such terms exhibit strategic polysemy: they sustain multiple interpretations simultaneously, combining narrow technical definitions with broader anthropomorphic or common-sense associations. In contemporary AI research and deployment contexts, this semantic flexibility produces significant institutional and discursive effects, shaping how AI systems are understood by researchers, policymakers, funders, and the public. To analyse this phenomenon, we introduce the concept of glosslighting: the practice of using technically redefined terms to evoke intuitive—often anthropomorphic or misleading—associations while preserving plausible deniability through restricted technical definitions. Glosslighting enables actors to benefit from the persuasive force of familiar language while maintaining the ability to retreat to narrower definitions when challenged. We argue that this practice contributes to AI hype cycles, facilitates the mobilisation of investment and institutional support, and influences public and policy perceptions of AI systems, while often deflecting epistemic and ethical scrutiny. By examining the linguistic dynamics of glosslighting and strategic polysemy, the paper highlights how language itself functions as a sociotechnical mechanism shaping the development and governance of AI.

I was curious about the Unicode characters involved in the "shrug" text art:

 ̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄

so I ran it through charnames.pl: