Language Log

"Mewing, Beta Maxing, Gigachad, Baddie: Parents Are Drowning in New Lingo", Katherine Bindley, WSJ (2/5/25)

Slang is sprouting at a dizzying speed, leaving adults constantly unsure if they’re being insulted; ‘Omega is like the lowest rate you can get’

The article includes many examples of parents from diverse backgrounds and various locations confronting this flood of juvenile jargon.  Here I give only one instance:

Cecilia Hermawan has text chains going with other parents to stay up to speed on the words and phrases catching on among their children. Still, the Boston-area resident was taken aback after hearing the word “mewing” come out of her 9-year-old’s mouth.

“I didn’t know what it meant so I had to Google it, and I had to ask my friend Emily to reference check,” said Hermawan, 41.

The startup founder was relieved her daughter and her friend were referring to a type of facial exercise and not something inappropriate. “You look at yourself in the mirror and you mew,” she said. “It’s supposed to enhance your jawline.”

Incidentally, out of the half a dozen or so cases of confused guardians cited by Bindley, two are identified as a "startup founder", a designation I had heard of before and had an idea of what it meant, but recognized it as representing a certain type of person who is full of aspiration and audacity.  Maybe the environment and mentality fostered by such individuals would be conducive to speedily mutating hip parlance on the part of their offspring.

When I write in Chinese, I generally use pinyin input.  Yesterday, having finished a message to someone, I entered the following:  meiweiheng.  I was both surprised and pleased that up popped my full name in Chinese characters:  Méi Wéihéng 梅维恒.  In the past, I would usually have to call up the characters one or two at a time and choose the right ones from a list.  The fact that they came up in one fell swoop from "meiweiheng" was exhilarating.  It meant that I must be becoming better known on the Chinese internet.

Curious, I wondered what would turn up if I did a web search in Chinese, and was overwhelmed by the huge number of ghits.  But what briefly puzzled me was why this photograph was included at the top of the very first page:

If you can't make up your mind what to do about something, then in French you would say "je suis partagé":  I'm torn or divided over it.  You can't decide what to do about it.  You can't make up your mind whether to be pleased or angry with something.  But the verb "partager" means "to share".  So how do we get from "share" to "torn"?

Etymology tells us that partager is from partage +‎ -er, i.e., Displaced partir in the sense of "to share, to divide", e.g.,
Nous allons partager les bénéfices ― We are going to share the benefits

(source)

My attention was drawn (see below) to this subject by the following editorial in today's The Yomiuri Shimbun:

Japanese Language Survey:

As Words Constantly Evolve, Let’s Share Them Across Generations

(9/30/23)

The Differences between Old English, Middle English and Modern English

By Danièle Cybulskie

When people study Shakespeare in high school, I often hear them refer to his language as “Old English.” As far as the language goes, Shakespeare’s English actually falls under the category of “Modern English.” This may be a little hard to believe, considering the conspicuous lack of “thee” and “thou” in modern writing, but the forms of English that came before are even more foreign.

As I have demonstrated here, communism is still very much a thing in North Korea, and apparently under the leadership of Kim Jung Un increasingly more so.

Now, the word for "communism" in the Korean of South Korea is gongsanjuui 공산주의 (共産主義), which simply adopts the Chinese gòngchǎn zhǔyì 共産主義. Since that usage goes against the regime's general principle of replacing words from Chinese characters with native morphemes, it caused me to wonder what the word for "communism" must be in the Korean of North Korea, inasmuch as gongsanjuui 공산주의 (共産主義) is a wholly Sino-Korean term.

Current big news around here is the collapse of an elevated section of Interstate 95 due to a tanker truck fire.

As Wikipedia explains, I-95 "is the main north–south Interstate Highway on the East Coast of the United States, running from U.S. Route 1 (US 1) in Miami, Florida, north to the Houlton–Woodstock Border Crossing between Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick". It's also an important connection between the Great Northeast and the rest of Philadelphia, which enables this linguistic joke:

By the time I-95 is repaired and contact can be re-established with Northeast Philadelphia, our respective languages are likely to have diverged so much as to be mutually unintelligible.

— Ryan Godfrey (@rgodfrey) June 11, 2023

But almost everybody does it.  You can barely avoid it.  Especially if you're an athlete.

"North Korea sentences 20 young athletes for ‘speaking like South Koreans’"

Skaters and skiers were caught on video using banned words while playing a game during training.

Jieun Kim, RFA (4/13/23)

The first two paragraphs of the article:

About 20 aspiring North Korean winter athletes were abruptly sentenced to three to five years of hard labor in prison camps after they were found to have used South Korean vocabulary and slang while playing a word game, sources in the country say.

It’s the latest example of authorities imposing draconian punishments to try to stamp out use of the “puppet language” and “capitalist” influences in daily life – despite the flood of illegal South Korean dramas and songs that many North Koreans secretly watch after obtaining them on thumb drives smuggled into the country.

An eloquent cri de coeur:

How Can China’s People Demand Freedom if We Can’t Even Say It?

Mengyin Lin, NYT (Feb. 10, 2023)

Notice that she speaks in the first person plural and has some very thought-provoking things to say about the recent Chinese protests in favor of freedom, such as:

The demonstrations are best remembered for the blank sheets of paper held by many protesters. It was a clever way to avoid trouble: making a statement without actually saying anything. But to me those empty sheets also visually, and literally, represented how my generation is losing its voice, perhaps even control of its own language.

The Communist Party’s monopoly on all channels of expression has helped prevent the development of any resistance language in Mandarin, especially since 1989, when the brutal military suppression of the Tiananmen Square student movement demonstrated what happens to those who speak out. If language shapes the way we think,* and most people think only in their own language, how can China’s youth conjure up an effective and lasting resistance movement with words that they don’t have?

*Please take a look at this and other links provided by the author.

The word rein, which the OED glosses as "A long narrow strap, frequently of leather, attached to the bridle or bit of a horse or other animal on either side of the head and used by a rider or driver to control and guide the animal", was apparently borrowed into English from French a millennium ago. The Wiktionary entry gives the etymology in detail:

From Middle English rein, reyne, borrowed from Anglo-Norman reyne, resne, from early Medieval Latin retina, ultimately from Classical Latin retineō (“hold back”), from re- + teneō (“keep, hold”). Compare modern French rêne.

Displaced native Old English ġewealdleþer (literally “control leather”).

But the OED entry makes an interesting (apparent) mistake in this case — the full etymology seems good, but the "Origin" line gives the French etymon as regne — and règne (in the modern spelling) is actually French for "kingdom", from Latin rēgnum, which is the origin of a different English word, namely reign.

Rein and reign have been pronounced the same way in English for some time — perhaps always? — and their meanings overlap in extended or figurative uses having to do with control. This led to some early eggcorns, even back in the days when most people had personal experience with physical reins. Thus the OED entry for free rein, glossed as "Freedom of action or expression. Chiefly in to give (a) free rein (to)", includes "free reign" citations going back to 1834:

1834 J. Eberle Treat. Dis. & Physical Educ. Children (ed. 2) i. i. 6 She, who giving a free reign [1833 (ed. 1) free rein] to her appetite, indulges it to excess.
1924 Times 26 Sept. 11/5 Others thought themselves above the law, and gave free reign to their passions.
1993 Outdoor Canada Mar. 33/3 So few pike survive to a large size that the ones who do have virtual free reign to raid the pantry.

For those who read Russian, with commentary for those who do not:

Грешный мой язык

«Прибалтика», «На Украине» и «Белоруссия»: теперь это моветон. А «санкционка», «рашист» и «путиноид» — новые слова. Как война изменила русский язык

13:03, 30 августа 2022 Максим Пушкарев , «Новая газета Балтия»

—–

Greshnyy moy yazyk

«Pribaltika», «Na Ukraine» i «Belorussiya»: teper' eto moveton. A «sanktsionka», «rashist» i «putinoid» — novyye slova. Kak voyna izmenila russkiy yazyk

13:03, 30 avgusta 2022 Maksim Pushkarev , «Novaya gazeta Baltiya»

—–

Sinful my tongue

"Baltic States", "In Ukraine" and "Belarus": now it's bad manners. And “sanction”, “rashist” and “putinoid” are new words. How the war changed the Russian language

13:03, August 30, 2022 Maxim Pushkarev, Novaya Gazeta Baltiya

Link to whole article in Russian

New article by Johnson in The Economist (4/23/22):

On the origin of languages
It is tempting to think that they have clear beginnings. They don’t

First two paragraphs:

IN A CHURCH hewn out of a mountainside, just over a thousand years or so ago, a monk was struggling with a passage in Latin. He did what others like him have done, writing the tricky bits in his own language between the lines of text and at the edges. What makes these marginalia more than marginal is that they are considered the first words ever written in Spanish.

The “Emilian glosses” were written at the monastery of Suso, which was founded by St Aemilianus (Millán, in Spanish) in the La Rioja region of Spain. Known as la cuna del castellano, “the cradle of Castilian”, it is a UNESCO world heritage site and a great tourist draw. In 1977 Spain celebrated 1,000 years of the Spanish language there.

New article in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America), "The rise and fall of rationality in language", Marten Scheffer, Ingrid van de Leemput, Els Weinans, and Johan Bollen (12/21/21)

118 (51) e2107848118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107848118

"Altaic: Rise and Fall of a Linguistic Hypothesis", NativLang (9/28/19) — video is 12:29; extensive discussion after the page break