Language Log

From here (at least that's where I saw it):

A learned friend recently sent me a draft composition on medieval Chinese history in which he referred to "*" as an "asterix".  This reminded me that ten years ago I wrote a post, "The many pronunciations of '*'" (12/17/15), on this subject and we had a lengthy, vigorous discussion about it.

Given that lately we've been talking a lot about Celts, Galatians, and so on, I think it is appropriate to write another post on Asterix the Gaul, that famous French comic book character, and how he got his name.  Also inspired / prompted by Chris Button's latest comment.

I often hear "*" pronounced "asterix" or "asterick", and so on (e.g., "astrisk" [two syllables], esp. in rapid speech).  It's hard even for me to pronounce "*" or type the symbol those ways, so ingrained is the pronunciation "as-ter-isk".

From Elle Cordova, yesterday:

Last weekend, a number of crosswalk buttons in Silicon Valley were hacked so as to play (faked) messages from Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. This got lots of (social and mass) media coverage — for one useful summary, see Zoe Morgan, "Silicon Valley crosswalk buttons apparently hacked to imitate Musk, Zuckerberg voices", Palo Alto Online 4/12/2025, or check out various other sources…

Some audio samples:

From Kai Ryssdal:

I always find it helpful to remember tariffs end with FFS

[image or embed]

— Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal.bsky.social) March 6, 2025 at 4:00 PM

There are a number of videos in this series, some of them several years old, but I don't think we've been exposed to them yet on Language Log.  They are quite hilarious and linguistically sophisticated, so it's worth listening to at least one.

Recent events invite a reprise of the famous Abbot and Costello skit — and Josh Johnson has obliged:

In comments on "Affected brogue", 12/19/2024, Benjamin Orsatti and others put Bernard Mayes forward as a quintessential RP speaker, including this advice:

[I]f you'd like to listen to, say, 150 consecutive hours of Bernard Mayes (the man narrates my dreams now), you can do what I'm doing and borrow "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" audiobook, Blackstone edition from your local library.

This seemed like a good way to use one of the Audible credits that I've somehow accumulated, so I downloaded Mayes' narration of volume 3 of that work, all 39:03:05.09 of it. Listening to a few minutes of it, I was reminded of a joke that I (believe I) heard from Michael Studdert-Kennedy:

The archetypal Englishman, being forbidden by custom to wave his hands, waves his larynx instead.

OpenAI comms: [underspecific hype-y 'big tings coming!!' pls like and subscribe]
Google comms: [corporate vagueness about Gemini3-0011 v2 FINAL.docx on Vertex available to 14 users]
GDM comms: [we have simulated a rat's brain capable of solving 4D chess, but we're not sure why]…

— Séb Krier (@sebkrier) December 3, 2024

Previous LLOG coverage: "AI on Rs in 'strawberry'", 8/28/2024; "'The cosmic jam from whence it came'", 9/26/2024.

Current satire: Alberto Romero, "Report: OpenAI Spends Millions a Year Miscounting the R’s in ‘Strawberry’", Medium 11/22/2024.

OpenAI, the most talked-about tech start-up of the decade, convened an emergency company-wide meeting Tuesday to address what executives are calling “the single greatest existential challenge facing artificial intelligence today”: Why can’t their models count the R’s in strawberry?

The controversy began shortly after the release of GPT-4, on March 2023, when users on Reddit and Twitter discovered the model’s inability to count the R’s in strawberry. The responses varied from inaccurate guesses to cryptic replies like, “More R’s than you can handle.” In one particularly unhinged moment, the chatbot signed off with, “Call me Sydney. That’s all you need to know.”

Found on X:

The first four panels of today's SMBC: