Language Log

According to a recent BoingBoing segment,

Ballots for a special election in England's Clacton-by-Sea are the longest ever produced in U.K. electoral history despite¹ only one major party contesting the race.

The footnote:

1. This is the journalist's despite, wherein the word implies disregard when there is in fact a blatant causal relationship.

Randoh Sallihall at unscramblerer.com sent an email offering his company's 2026 study of "America's most searched words" — what he sent is presented verbatim below.

From J.L.:

Language Log has only one entry on slop (Dec. 21,2025), and I couldn't figure out how to comment there. I was wondering about its origins. Could it be a non-ethnic version of schlock? The sound is similar, and the meaning is identical. If so, the change might be part of a more general trend — Yiddish terms fading from American speech, even or especially in social and geographic places where they were more common. At least that's my very unscientific impression. Is there any data on this?

Below is a guest post by Matt Rips (and Google Gemini).

In a discussion of linguistic matters, an LLM began using a word, an adjective, repeatedly, to describe a concept. The word does not exist. There were multiple instances, such as:

One possible explanation for the tendency of quantified plural event nominals to resist direct actorive eventuality recovery is that many such nominals encode inherently multi-party relational events.

This word does not show up in OED, Google, etc. It is not an English word. Google AI suggests: “if you are studying historical texts or phonetics, you might find it useful to know that "actorive" is an archaic or reconstructed variant that sometimes appears in early phonetic research or mistranscribed Latin."

Regional names for alleyways…

[image or embed]

— Clare Downham (@downham.bsky.social) January 17, 2026 at 4:51 AM

We need a new word in English:  "roboton"

The reason I thought of this is because it reflects my reaction to the constant, mindless, monotonous repetition of Chinese government spokespersons with ready-made responses to any should-be difficult questions that may be put to them.  For example, "China maintains a position of strict neutrality in the Ukraine crisis and never does anything contrary to international law" (or words to that effect), as Mme. Mao Ning (Director of the Foreign Ministry Information Department of China) has said so many times.

As editor of Journal of Chinese History, Sarah Schneewind asked me if I would do a review of this book:  Documents géographiques de Dunhuang.  Having done over three hundred reviews during my career, I try to decline them as much as possible at this stage.  However, I succumbed to her offer because it was about Dunhuang and was by a French author, for both of which I have soft spots in my heart..

Jokingly, I wrote back:  "In honor of your surname in these arctic times, Sarah, I will do the review."

She replied, "Vielen Dank, Victor!  Ganz schön, dass meine Name etwas gilt!"  ("Thank you very much, Victor! It's really nice that my name means something!")

It's WOTY season, and The Economist's choice for 2025 is slop:

PICKING A WORD of the year is not easy. In the past the American Dialect Society has gone with “tender-age shelters” (2018) and “-ussy” (2022). The Oxford English Dictionary (oed) has caused conniptions by opting for things like “youthquake” (2017) and “goblin mode” (2022). If you cannot remember why those terms were big that year, that is the point: the exercise is not a straightforward one.

Sometimes a single suitable word is not at hand, so a phrase is chosen instead; other times the word simply seems jarring. Middle-aged lexicographers are often tempted to crown a bit of youth slang, but such terms are transient and sound out of date before the press release is published.

The Economist’s choice for 2025 is a single word. It is representative, if not of the whole year, at least of much of the feeling of living in it. It is not a new word, but it is being used in a new way. You may not like it, but you are living with it. And it is probably here to stay.

The Canadian English Dictionary

is a project being developed by the Society for Canadian English, a not-for-profit consortium including Editors Canada, the Canadian Word Centre at UBC and the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University.

And as of yesterday, they announced their first Word of the Year.

In case you've encountered this portmanteau, and wonder about its history, Merriam-Webster has you covered And NPR's Word of the Week featured it last week — Rachel Treisman, "Friendsgiving 101: A history of the made-up holiday and how to celebrate it", 11/19/2025:

Thanksgiving is always the fourth Thursday of November. But many Americans don't wait that long to share a fall feast with their loved ones — that is, if they celebrate Friendsgiving.

Friendsgiving is exactly what it sounds like: A gathering close to the date of Thanksgiving, starring many of its starchy staples, usually served potluck-style, with friends instead of relatives.

Think fewer dinner-table political debates, less travel time, turkey optional (more on that later).

As promised, here are a few fun words that I learned by skimming a 17th century slang dictionary.

The first English-language slang dictionary:
A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, in Its Several Tribes, of Gypsies, Beggers, Thieves, Cheats, &c, With an Addition of some Proverbs, Phrases, Figurative Speeches, &c Useful for all sorts of People (especially Foreigners) to secure their Money and preserve their Lives; besides very Diverting and Entertaining, being wholly New.

Most words have different senses and meanings depending upon the context in which they are used, hence the need for multiple definitions in dictionaries.  Philip Taylor has come across this article about:

8 Words That Are Only Used in One Weirdly Specific Context
Think about it: have you ever heard someone say they had “extenuating errands”?
By Sam Hindman, Mental Floss (11/23/25)