Language Log

From Kai Ryssdal:

I always find it helpful to remember tariffs end with FFS

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— 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:

[This is a guest post by Michael Witzel]

A few months ago you published a discussion of whimsical surnames. Since then I have paid attention and have found new ones in  almost every news broadcast.

It is said that there are 1 million (!) surnames in the German speaking area of some 95 million people (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Alsace, Luxemburg, Eupen in Belgium and some 1 million remaining in Poland). I leave aside the many millions of German immigrants in America  etc., such as the notorious politician Witzel in Rio de Janeiro. Also, many Jewish names are the same as “regular German” names (;like Schuster =Shoemaker, head of the German Jewish Central Committee).

What I found is that almost all (hair) colors, animals, etc. are used, just as are designations of occupations, etc.. etc.

Following up on Rapscallion, here's another culinary pun with a lexico-musical connection:

When two names far apart
Share a PIE start
That's a *móri…

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— New-Cleckit Dominie (@ncdominie.bsky.social) November 3, 2024 at 11:57 AM

A recent Bluesky post by George Takei, re-skying (?) @GraniteDhuine:

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— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) November 3, 2024 at 10:00 AM

Jonathan Weisman, "As Trump Arrives, Aurora Insists It’s Not the ‘War Zone’ He Sees", NYT 10/11/2024.

And today's xkcd: