Language Log

The American Dialect Society's Word of the Year vote was last night, and the overall WotY winner was rawdog. You can read the whole list and voting tallies in the ADS press release.

I love potato chips, but am not a fan of french fries, so I'm all confused when I'm in Britain where "chips" are "crisps" and "fries" are "chips"!

One reason I like potato chips is because they are salty and savory to counteract all the sweets I consume, so I keep a big box of 18 small bags of chips and Doritos, Cheetos, and Fritos on hand to rescue me from hunger pangs whenever I feel them coming on.  But I dislike Pringles because they're not real.

The British take their crisps more seriously than any other nation
No other snack bridges the class divide in the same way
Economist (12/19/24)

This is a book review of Crunch: An Ode to Crisps. By Natalie Whittle. Faber; 256 pages; £18.99

Voting is now open for the New Zealand Bug of the Year competition, which is an activity of the Entomological Society of New Zealand. As far as I can tell, this is the world's only BotY event, and you don't need to be in or from New Zealand to vote.

The linguistic relevance, aside from the WotY resonance, is their choice of the word "bug" rather than "insect" in the event's name. The first of their FAQs explains it this way:

Most entomologists will correct you if you try to substitute the term “bug” when describing an insect or spider. In fact, a “bug” is technically only one type of insect (insects in the Order Hemiptera have the common name of “true bugs”. They include plant bugs, stink bugs, aphids, cicadas… a few of these are nominated for 2023 NZ Bug of the Year!).

So why did we call this “Bug” of the Year instead of “Insect” of the Year? We had two reasons. (1) We wanted to use an inclusive term so that spiders, worms, and other invertebrates could be nominated for this honorable distinction. (2) “Bug of the Year” just rolls off the tongue in a way that “Insect of the Year” or “Invertebrate of the Year” never could. We assure you – those of us on the 2023 Bug Of The Year committee spent hours discussing and arguing about this, but at the end of the day, “Insect of The Year” would have satisfied the Entomologists and excluded the Arachnologists, while “Bug of the Year” just *bugs* (pun intended) the Entomologists, satisfies the Arachnologists, and the non-invertebrate specialists just learned that “bug” is a technical term that causes debate among scientists.

From The Washington Post:

The Oxford English Dictionary blew it in The Oxford English Dictionary blew it in anointing “brain rot” as the word of the year.

First off, that’s two words. But the real miss was overlooking the rightful winner, “slop,” which was on the dictionary publisher’s short list for word of the year. That’s like Beyoncé losing the top Grammy award to Harry Styles.

From The Economist:

SOME YEARS it is hard to identify the main event, much less sum it up in a word. This is not the problem in 2024; the return of Donald Trump to the White House after a four-year absence is consequential not only for the world’s most powerful country but also for its neighbours and everywhere else. Which word can capture the mix of surprise, excitement and trepidation people feel as the MAGA movement returns to power?

Following up on yesterday's Macquarie announcement, here are some more 2024 Words Of The Year in Engish:

• Dictionary.com: demure (see also CNN's coverage, with more details and links)
• Collins Dictionary: brat (CNN's coverage)
• Cambridge Dictionary: manifest
• Oxford (voting — shortlist is slop, romantasy, lore, brain rot, demure, and dynamic pricing)
• Merriam-Webster — 2024 choice still pending

The Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year was announced yesterday, and it's enshittification.

Macquarie is catching up here, since enshittification was the American Dialect Society's WOTY in 2023.

The Macquarie announcement gives us a gloss ("the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking"), but not a citation or a quotation for the origin.  The ADS announcement explained the source, and gave a quote, but didn't give us a link:

The term enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse. “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification,” Doctorow wrote on his Pluralistic blog.

 So here's the source for that ADS quote: Cory Doctorow, "Tiktok's enshittification", pluralistic.net 1/12/2023.

La 9e édition du Dictionnaire de l’Académie française:

La 9e édition du Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, dont la publication a commencé dans les années 1980, s’est achevée en novembre 2024, avec la parution du tome 4 aux éditions Fayard.

The 9th edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy, whose publication began in the 1980s, was completed in November 2024, with the publication of volume 4 by éditions Fayard.

Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française est l’un des plus anciens dictionnaires de la langue française, dont la première édition date de 1694 et a été suivie de sept autres datant respectivement de 1718, 1740, 1762, 1798, 1835, 1878 et 1935. La 9e édition, dont les trois premiers tomes sont parus en 1992, 2000 et 2011, est désormais achevée ; elle constitue sans aucun doute la version la plus aboutie du projet académique, auquel elle reste fidèle et dont elle conserve les principes.

The Dictionary of the French Academy is one of the oldest dictionaries of the French language, the first edition of which dates from 1694 and was followed by seven others dating respectively from 1718, 1740, 1762, 1798, 1835, 1878 and 1935 The 9th edition, the first three volumes of which were published in 1992, 2000 and 2011, is now completed; it undoubtedly constitutes the most accomplished version of the academic project, to which it remains faithful and of which it preserves the principles.

"To what extent is science a strong-link problem?", Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, 10/30/2024 [emphasis added]:

Here’s a fascinating and worrying news story in Science: a top US researcher apparently falsified a lot of images (at least) in papers that helped get experimental drugs on the market — papers that were published in top journals for years, and whose problems have only recently become apparent because of amateur sleuthing through PubPeer.

I’m going to wane philosophical for a minute. In general I’m very sympathetic to Adam Mastroianni’s line “don’t worry about the flood of crap that will result if we let everyone publish, publishing is already a flood of crap, but science is a strong-link problem so the good stuff rises to the top”.

The author's discussion of crap publications in top science journals is worth reading and discussing, but this morning let's focus on waning (and waxing) adjectival.

Christine Oh, "Wolf Humanities Center hosts linguist, columnist Ben Zimmer for lecture on 'keywords'", The Daily Pennsylvanian 10/11/2024:

The Wolf Humanities Center hosted Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer at the ARCH building for a talk titled “Lexical Sleuthing in the Digital Age: On the Trail of Keywords and their Cultural Worlds” on Oct. 9.

Zimmer — who was a research associate at Penn’s former Institute for Research in Cognitive Science from 2005 to 2006 — gave a presentation on lexicology and linguistics followed by a question and answer session with roughly 40 attendees. The event drew a crowd of linguists and language enthusiasts from Penn's campus and the Philadelphia area.

A bluesky post linked to this reddit page showing a display of the "rack of consent badges at a furry convention":

Ben Yagoda's new book, Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English, is "A spot-on guide to how and why Americans have become so bloody keen on Britishisms—for good or ill". The publisher's blurb:

The British love to complain that words and phrases imported from America—from French fries to Awesome, man!—are destroying the English language. But what about the influence going the other way? Britishisms have been making their way into the American lexicon for more than 150 years, but the process has accelerated since the turn of the twenty-first century. From acclaimed writer and language commentator Ben Yagoda, Gobsmacked! is a witty, entertaining, and enlightening account of how and why scores of British words and phrases—such as one-off, go missing, curate, early days, kerfuffle, easy peasy, and cheeky—have been enthusiastically taken up by Yanks.

Following up on yesterday's "'Badass'" post, here's a recent and relevant article complaining that the word has been bleached into meaninglessness, especially as applied to women — Jackie Jennings, "We Need a Word Besides 'Badass' for Our Heroines", Jezebel 6/3/2024:

I am finished with the b-word. It’s been applied to every woman who has ever been publicly competent at anything. It’s been worked to death and rendered meaningless. Everyone from Courtney Love to Martha Stewart to Rosa Parks has been described as one and, at this point, it’s so overused that to call a woman this is a form of dada performance art. 

In short: We simply have to stop using the word “badass” to describe any/every woman on earth who has entered the cultural dialogue for something other than a federal crime. And, I’m not a language cop but just know that if you use “badass” and think it conveys anything at all, you simply must think again.

What was once patronizing and gendered is now maddeningly vague and borderline inscrutable. It’s a collection of AI-generated slay queen, #girlboss memes gathered into a single word. 

"Some German tongue-twisters", posted on 21/07/2024 by StephenJones.blog   

Whereas the mind-boggling “tapeworm words” in my post on Some German mouthfuls are of a practical nature, the realm of fantasy opens up whole new linguistic vistas. In a stimulating article, Deborah Cole introduces the work of the Berlin-based cabaret performer, playwright, and pianist Bodo Wartke.