Language Log

Babbel's April 2025 Semicolon Survey looked at students' reactions to the obvious secular decline in semicolon frequency:

The semicolon once stood as a symbol of thoughtful, elegant writing, a punctuation mark beloved by literary greats like Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. But today, the humble semicolon faces an uncertain future.

New analysis from Babbel uncovers a stark decline: semicolon usage in British English books has fallen by nearly 50% in the past two decades. In fact, historical data shows this decline stretches back centuries. In 1781, British literature featured a semicolon roughly every 90 words; by 2000, it had fallen to one every 205 words. Today, there’s just one semicolon for every 390 words.

And it’s not just in books. New survey data from Babbel reveals over half (54%) of UK students didn’t know when to replace a comma with a semicolon.

Babbel partnered with the London Student Network, a community of 500,000 students, to ask about their attitudes toward the semicolon and whether they actually knew how to use it. The quiz, co-written by Babbel’s linguistic experts and grammarian Lisa McLendon, tested students on real-world semicolon usage.

• • Based upon responses to the interactive quiz, 28% of young Britons don’t use the semicolon at all. 39% of students claim to rarely use semicolons; just 11% of respondents described themselves as frequent users of the semicolon.
  • Over half (54%) of young Britons don’t know the rules around semicolon usage (4 of the 5 most poorly-answered questions required respondents to identify when to replace a comma with a semicolon). UK students scored 49% on average on the semicolon quiz.
  • Although many don’t understand or use it, the Babbel survey revealed that 67% of young Britons still believe the semicolon has value.

The news has been full of the Musk-Trump feud. Among the linguistic aspects, there's an interesting amount of explicit or implied gender association — here's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a memic clip widely linked on social media:

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. 

Screenshot of a post on Threads:

The internet has been in an uproar over the sacking by Xi Jinping of two of China's topmost military men.

Exclusive | "Was fallen Chinese defence minister Wei Fenghe compromised by hostile force?  A rare form of words that the Communist Party normally only applies to those accused of betrayal was used in the indictment against him", by William Zheng, SCMP (7/10/24)

China’s fallen former defence minister Wei Fenghe may have been compromised by a hostile force as the peculiar wording of the official indictment hinted.

In an unprecedented move, Wei, along with his successor Li Shangfu, was officially impeached by the Politburo headed by President Xi Jinping on June 27. The duo were expelled from the party and could face further legal action.

[Since Wei and Li were in charge of the PLA Rocket Force, which gets into nuclear missiles and what not, the situation could not be more dire.  Maybe they did not accede to Xi's wishes regarding a launch.  Who knows?  No matter what, Xi was royally peeved.]

While Beijing has not revealed details of their offences, one particular phrase from the official impeachment against Wei caught the attention of seasoned Chinese experts.

Of the all top generals who fell in Xi’s war against corruption, Wei was the only one described as “zhongcheng shi jie” 忠诚失节 or “ being disloyal and losing one’s chastity”.

In case (like me) you haven't been following the murder trial of Karen Read, this article provides the background: Kim Stelloh, "Karen Read is accused of killing her Boston police officer boyfriend. Here's what we know about the murder trial", NBC News 6/7/2024. The current media fever focuses on the testimony of (Massachusetts State Police investigator) Michael Proctor, forced on the witness stand to read some text messages that hit a trifecta of gender, regional, and vocabulary biases:

Proctor spells c u n t and AJ objects, Auntie Bev said they are your words, so use them.

Friend – "Is she hot"

Proctor – "She's a whack job cunt, yes she's a babe, weird Fall River accent though, no ass" pic.twitter.com/Vdx3wY9uPW

— FreeKarenRead (@Free_Karen_Read) June 10, 2024

—for Valentine's Day (belatedly)

The cuneiform tablet pictured below may include the first textual description of a kiss.

The Barton Cylinder, excavated in the ancient Sumerian
city of Nippur in 1899 and dating to around 2400 B.C.
Credit: The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

The next event in the Salon Sanctuary concert series is "Victorious Secret: Love Gamed and Gender Untamed in the Sparkling Courts of the Baroque":

Before the bars of gender binaries caged the mainstream operatic imagination, a golden age of fluidity guided the vocal soundscape. Virility declared itself with the castrato’s clarion high notes, while femininity spoke in earthy tessiture that plunged to shimmering depths.

Texts of the period revel in ambiguity, unfurling genderless narratives of anonymous lovers and unnamed beloveds. Stories of active pursuit and passive reverie remain alike at loose ends, with neat resolutions many movements away.

Please join us for this special program in honor of Pride Month, as the music of the past reveals a golden underground of nonbinary riches, accompanying us in our witness to a new Renaissance.

When I first heard of this phenomenon about three years ago, I could scarcely believe my ears.  I was told in no uncertain terms that, by and large, Chinese women (especially in their 20s and 30s, but even in their teens) much more enjoy watching or reading about men making out than engaging in hetero- or homosexual love themselves.  I know of several Chinese women who write such literature and supplement their income with it.

The genre is explored in considerable depth by Helen Sullivan in this Guardian article (3/12/23):

China’s ‘rotten girls’ are escaping into erotic fiction about gay men

Danmei is by some measures the most popular genre of fiction for women in China, and its popularity hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Communist party

It's a bit unclear what exactly happened recently to prompt the article, but the general information it conveys is interesting.

"Korean deaf LGBT activists create new signs to express identities with pride", by Lee Hae-rin, The Korea Times (9/24/22)

Woo Ji-yang, 33, is a deaf gay man based in the southern city of Busan. For most of his life, he felt shame and humiliation when he introduced his sexual identity in Korean Sign Language (KSL). The manual sign for "gay" in KSL describes an act of anal intercourse between two men.

Gyeonggi-based CODA (Child of Deaf Adults) and gay man Kim Bo-seok, 34, confessed he has lived through a dilemma similar to that of Woo's. He has been a bridge between the hearing and deaf community as a child of deaf parents and a sign language researcher studying KSL for his Ph.D., but the sign language expressions that contain overly sexualized and degrading connotations of sexual minorities have made him hesitate to come out and live freely for a long time.

About six weeks from now, I'm scheduled to give a (virtual) talk with the (provisional) title "Historical trends in English sentence length and syntactic complexity". The (provisional) abstract:

It's easy to perceive clear historical trends in the length of sentences and the depth of clausal embedding in published English text. And those perceptions can easily be verified quantitatively. Or can they? Perhaps the title should be "Historical trends in English punctuation practices", or "Historical trends in English conjunctions and discourse markers." The answer depends on several prior questions: What is a sentence? What is the boundary between syntactic structure and discourse structure? How is message structure encoded in speech (spontaneous or rehearsed) versus in text? This presentation will survey the issues, look at some data, and suggest some answers — or at least some fruitful directions for future work.

So I've started the "look at some data" part, so far mostly by extending some of the many relevant earlier LLOG Breakfast Experiment™ explorations, such as "Inaugural embedding", 9/9/2005, or  "Real trends in word and sentence length", 10/31/2011, or "More Flesch-Kincaid grade-level nonsense", 10/23/2015. 

In most cases, the extensions just provide more data to support the ideas in the earlier posts. But sometimes, further investigation turns up some twists.

Tea is a Very Big Thing with me.  I am intensely interested in all manifestations and transformations of this celestial ichor.  For some references, see the "Selected readings" below.

All the tea in China is on my mind this morning as a result of reading this article:

"Defying China’s Censors to Urge Beijing to Denounce Russia’s War", by Chris Buckley (March 18, 2022)

In the midst of an account of numerous individuals who had signed a petition against Russia's war on Ukraine, I came upon this sentence:

“Every single one was taken for tea,” Mr. Lu said in a telephone interview, using a common euphemism referring to being questioned by the police.