There seem to be a lot of people complaining about it these days, so maybe there's something to worry about here. Francois Lang, who called this current wave of criticism to my attention asks whether academia is isolated from such horrors.
This article was amended on 3 January 2023. The original furniture said the fireworks display was on Christmas Eve. This was incorrect and has been removed.
If you want to get an idea of what preoccupies Chinese people, one good way is to take a gander at current lingo. SupChina provides a convenient compilation from two authoritative sources. In the past, I've been disappointed by many Chinese words of the year lists because they seemed to have been blatantly chosen by government bureaus with a political bias in mind. The lists assembled below strike me as more genuine and less skewed toward the wishes of authorities. That is to say, they match well with my own perception of what people are thinking and talking about on a daily basis, and the words they use to express themselves. So here goes:
Two year-end lists of popular slang words and internet catchphrases were published this week. The words offer a glimpse into what’s on the minds of Chinese internet users and Chinese government officials. Here are all 16 words on the lists.
Andrew Methven, SupChina (12/8/21)
The fact that four of the expressions appear on both lists is reassuring that they represent actual preferences of Chinese citizens.
I was just reading Bradley Efron's original paper for the first time in years and couldn't help but chuckle at this gem in the acknowledgments:
I also with to thank the many friends who suggested names more colorful than Bootstrap, including Swiss Army Knife, Meat Axe, Swan-Dive, Jack-Rabbit, and my personal favorite, the Shotgun, which, to paraphrase Tukey "can blow the head off any problem if the statistician can stand the resulting mess."
Just imagining writing in a paper that "the meat-axed 95% confidence intervals are presented in Table…"
Martin Shields and Paul Mora met in 2004, at the London office of Merrill Lynch. […]
Today, the men stand accused of participating in what Le Monde has called “the robbery of the century,” and what one academic declared “the biggest tax theft in the history of Europe.” From 2006 to 2011, these two and hundreds of bankers, lawyers and investors made off with a staggering $60 billion, all of it siphoned from the state coffers of European countries.
The scheme was built around “cum-ex trading” (from the Latin for “with-without”): a monetary maneuver to avoid double taxation of investment profits that plays out like high finance’s answer to a David Copperfield stage illusion. Through careful timing, and the coordination of a dozen different transactions, cum-ex trades produced two refunds for dividend tax paid on one basket of stocks.
One basket of stocks. Abracadabra. Two refunds.
You can learn more about this from the source at cumex-files.com. But since this is Language Log rather than Evil Bankers Log, I'm going to focus on the claim that "cum-ex" is from the Latin for "with-without".
The article may have a plain title, but it is full of gibberish. The concluding sentence takes the cake:
Therefore, the securities market as the focus of the internationalization of the entire financial market must be targeted in order to truly realize the internationalization of the market and the internationalization of finance.
The whole world is transfixed by the gutsy rebellion of Hong Kong citizens against the militarily powerful PRC imposed government under which they live. Language — spoken, written, and gestural (see the "Readings" below for examples of all three types) — plays an important role in maintaining their solidarity and camaraderie and in emphasizing their identity as Cantonese citizens. Their common mother tongue of Cantonese already sets them off from Mandarin speakers from the north, but their development of a unique jargon further distinguishes them from Cantonese speakers who are not part of their movement:
Although many would accuse the protesters of making light of violent unrest, the use of slang “keeps people sane,” argues Wee Lian Hee, a language professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. “If [protestors] talk formally all the time, I suspect the movement would soon become tiresome,” he tells TIME.
So, from one jargonista to another: here’s a frustrating set of related neologisms, again from my increasingly confused and pathetic campus administration:
We’ve gone from “interdisiplinary” and “crossdisciplinary” to “multidisciplinary”, but the new buzzword on our campus is “transdisciplinary” (not sure if hyphens are used in some cases). Our entire campus is trying to recluster itself around 5 key “Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence”, of all things.
Perhaps not worth analyzing, but a deplorable sign of the times, when academic institutions are focused on “branding”.
In response to "May I ask you a question?" (6/12/17), we've been having an energetic discussion about the origins and meaning of the expression "reach out", culminating (as of this moment) in Nick Kaldis' good question:
This topic causes an interesting related neologism to come to mind: when did “outreach” come into currency? Our campus has, for instance, a “Community Outreach” office.
I missed Heather McHugh's poem "Hackers can sidejack cookies" — a collage of fragments from the Jargon File — when the New Yorker published the text in 2009. Here's the author reading it at B.U. on 4/17/2010:
A friend of mine who works in the Federal government recently received an email posing this rhetorical question:
How do agencies mitigate risks and achieve FedRAMP compliance in multi-tenant environments to successfully pave their way to the cloud?
He naturally wondered whether there can ever be a paved road leading to a cloud. And I naturally wondered how anyone could get paid for writing jargon-laden garbage as bad as this. We can but wonder.
(I actually live in a multi-tenant environment. It's great; all the other tenants are lovely people. But I'm not sure whether I am FedRAMP-compliant. I hope I am.)
British comedian Richard Herring is the author of a 2003 book entitled Talking Cock: A Celebration of Man and his Manhood, so he naturally seized upon the republicization opportunity provided by the recent story of the world's first successful penis transplant. He made it the topic of his weekly humor column in The Metro, the trashy free newspaper that I sometimes reluctantly peruse in my constant search for linguistic developments that might be of interest to Language Log readers.
In a bravura display of diversity of lexical choice, Herring contrived to use a different euphemism for the anatomical organ every time he could find an excuse for mentioning it, which, believe me, was a lot. And he left me pondering a serious lexicographical question: just how many euphemisms are there for the appendage in question?
[Unusually, this post is restricted to adult males. Please click "Read the rest of this entry" to confirm that you are male and over 18.]
