Language Log

"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.

In "Peevable words and phrases: journey", 5/18/2024, Victor quoted Lisa Miller, "When Did Everything Become a ‘Journey’?", NYT 5/16/2024:

According to the linguistics professor Jesse Egbert at Northern Arizona University, the use of “journey” (the noun) has nearly doubled in American English since 1990, with the most frequent instances occurring online.

In PubMed, where we've been tracking other changes in word frequency lately, the change from 1990 to 2024 in the frequency of "journey" was 10.2 to 227.9 (per 100k articles), or a factor of 22.3 — which is a lot more than doubling:

And the rise has been going on long enough that we can't blame it on LLMs…

Lauren Jack ("Do you hurkle-durkle? What the Scottish word taking over social media means and where it came from", The Scotsman 1/24/2024) embeds a TikTok video from 7/18/2023:

@devriebrynnme my Scottish ancestors = just chillin’ as a culture♬ original sound – Devriebrynn

Kevin Drum, "Federal judge uses very strange words to overturn LNG pause", jabberwocking 7/2/2024:

Early this year the Department of Energy paused approvals of new LNG terminals. Several states sued, saying the decision was arbitrary and was costing them a lot of money.

Yesterday a Trump-appointed judge in Louisiana (of course) issued a preliminary injunction against the pause and told DOE to start issuing approvals again. […]

I want to highlight a couple of passages from judge James Cain's opinion:

The Defendants’ choice to halt permits to export natural gas to foreign companies is quite complexing to this Court…. [It] is completely without reason or logic and is perhaps the epiphany of ideocracy.

Simon Hradecky, "Accident: Southwest B38M enroute on May 25th 2024, Dutch Roll", The Aviation Herald 6/13/2024:

A Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-8 MAX, registration N8825Q performing flight WN-746 from Phoenix,AZ to Oakland,CA (USA) with 175 passengers and 6 crew, was enroute at FL320 when the aircraft experienced Dutch Roll. The crew was able to regain control and landed the aircraft on Oakland's runway 30 about 55 minutes later. The aircraft sustained substantial structural damage.

The FAA reported: "AIRCRAFT EXPERIENCED A DUTCH ROLL, REGAINED CONTROL AND POST FLIGHT INSPECTION REVEALED DAMAGE TO THE STANDBY PCU, OAKLAND, CA." and stated the aircraft sustained substantial damage, the occurrence was rated an accident.

The aircraft remained on the ground in Oakland until Jun 6th 2024, then positioned to Everett,WA (USA), ATS facilities, and is still on the ground in Everett 6 days later.

Dutch Roll is a coupled out of phase movement of the aircraft as result of weakened directional stability (provided by the vertical tail and rudder), in which the aircraft oscillates around its vertical as well as longitudinal axis (coupled yaw and roll).

The PCU is the power control unit, an actuator controlling the (vertical) rudder.

On Jun 13th 2024 The Aviation Herald learned that two ribs, that the stand by PCU is being mounted to, were damaged as well as the mounts of the stand by actuator. A temporary repair was done in Oakland replacing the damaged PCU, the aircraft was then ferried to Everett to replace the damaged ribs.

Avmeric Renou, "À VivaTech, la French Tech s’offre un nouveau coup de boost", Le Parisien 5/21/2024.

"la French Tech"? "un nouveau coup de boost"?

The obligatory screenshot:

There have been many LLOG posts on misuse of the term "passive voice", going back to 2003. As far as I can tell, the most recent post was "'Is it the passive voice you don't like?'", 8/11/2021.

In "'Passive Voice' — 1397-2009 — R.I.P", I wrote that

the traditional sense of passive voice has died after a long illness. It has ceased to be; it's expired and gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It's an ex-grammatical term.

Its ghost walks in the linguistics literature and in the usage of a few exceptionally old-fashioned intellectuals. For everyone else, what passive voice now means is "construction that is vague as to agency".

Today, Ambarish Sridharanarayanan sent me a link to a piece of writing that illustrates the issue perfectly:

The press release makes heroic use of the passive voice to obscure the actors: “an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.”

They mostly start out clever, cute, and catchy:  e.g., "curated".  The problem is that they soon go viral, and then just never go away, even after they have become banal and overused, as with "perfect storm":

I'm campaigning to have "perfect storm" added to peeve polls in the future. As in "at the end of the day it was a perfect storm." It's not unheard of for a book title to turn into a catch[22]phrase, and maybe perfect storm will become a permanent part of the language, but it smacks of fad to me. I feel like I hear it at least three times a week in NPR interviews.

[Comment by Dick Margulis to "'Annoying word' poll results: Whatever!" (10/9/09)]

That was 2009, but "perfect storm" is still with us, and so is "curated", which begins to appear with increasing frequency in the early 70s and really takes off in the 80s.

Now we're facing a veritable onslaught from "journey":