Language Log

Alexandra Petri, "A Dispatch from the MAHA Future", The Atlantic 8/5/2025:

“Did you see the game last night?” I ask Greg.

The year is 2029 and we are taking the New, Improved Presidential Fitness Test. The Secretary put some special touches on it himself. My wearable (we all have to wear wearables now, since the Secretary’s mandate) says that I still have 5,000 more steps to go. If we don’t pass our Presidential Fitness Test, we’ll have to visit the Wellness Farm to pick turnips and be “reparented.”

“No,” Greg says. I can sense that Greg is flagging. “Ever since the Leeches First mandate, I’ve had to spend most of my time, you know.” He bends down to pluck a leech off his calf. It lolls about, engorged with blood. He deposits it carefully into his leech pack.

We both sigh. The leeches are the worst. Before taking what used to be called medicine (it is now, according to the CDC’s revised guidance, Just One More Supplement, No Better Or Worse Than Any Other Supplement), the Secretary insists that everyone “try leeches.” The papers at the time described this new mandate as a Huge Triumph for Big Leech. We walk past a billboard with a reminder from the CDC: Don’t Forget to Leech and Bleach! We feel pretty bad most of the time.

A PubMed search for the phrase "lived experience" finds 11,139 papers within the past year. And an esperr search shows that the relative frequency of this phrase has been increasing rapidly on PubMed:

It's not just in the fields covered by PubMed — the Social Science Research Network finds the phrase in 1,376 papers within the past year, including titles like "Distant Writing: Literary Production in the Age of Artificial Intelligence", "Civil V. Common Law: The Emperor Has No Clothes", and "The implementation of senior high school in the Philippines: An advantage or disadvantage to students' future opportunities".

A recent Jesse Welles song, inspired by the defunding of Public Broadcasting:

[This is a guest post by Elizabeth J. W. Barber]

A linguist friend specializing in Iranian linguistic reconstruction has a word that means weft, but also has something to do with a boat and weaving.  To me, that immediately meant the "boat shuttle"–Gm. Schiffchen, Fr. navette, etc.  Once the horizontal treadle loom was invented, the (flat, horizontal) shed could be opened wide enough that you could flick the weft bobbin all the way across the loom, catch it, change the shed, and shoot (shoot > shuttle) it back.  HUGE time-saver!!!

The treadle loom seems to have been invented in China during the Han dynasties (206 BC-220 AD) — I can find no more than that.  Don't know when some genius added the boat-shaped shuttle that floats the weft bobbin across the loom, riding atop the lower half of the warp.

This is an odd-looking word that I encounter fairly frequently, especially in my publishing ventures.  Since I don't understand how / why "queue" should be pronounced like "cue", which is also a variant spelling for the same word, I'm especially cautious about "queue" when I approach it.  Moreover, since I'm steeped in pinyin, I'm tempted to pronounce "queue" as "chyueyue" (!).  Consequently, I always have to slow down when I spell / type it:  "q-u-e-u-e", which I seldom have to do with other words except "Cincinnati", which I still haven't mastered.

Other than "its / it's", "queue" is probably the most frequently misspelled word I know of, even among educated persons.

I also am somewhat perplexed why "queue" means both "line" and "tail".

The word "queue" is used to mean a line, particularly in British English, because of its etymological origins. "Queue" comes from the French word "queue," meaning "tail," which in turn comes from the Latin word "cauda," also meaning "tail". This connection to "tail" makes sense when visualizing a line of people or objects, as they often form a linear arrangement reminiscent of a tail. The term "queue" is also used in computing to refer to a data structure where items are processed in a first-in, first-out (FIFO) manner, similar to how people are served in a line.

(AIO)

The Weird Way Language Affects Our Sense of Time and Space
The languages we speak can have a surprising impact on the way we think about the world and even how we move through it.
Matt Warren and Miriam Frankel
This post originally appeared on BBC Future and was published November 4, 2022. This article is republished here (getpocket, Solo) with permission.

When I first scanned this article, I thought it was so lackluster, especially on contentious waters that we had successfully navigated just a few weeks ago (see "Selected readings"), I decided not to write about it on Language Log.  However, several colleagues called the article to my attention and said that it raised interesting questions, so I have gone ahead and posted on it despite my reservations.

From Ada Palmer, "Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age":

The new scholastic method was so exciting! that when Peter Abelard got kicked out of his monastery (for proving its founding saint didn’t exist—that pissed off the abbot, who’d have guessed?) and went to live as a hermit in the wilderness of Champagne, 100,000 people flocked there to form a tent city and listen to him teach. Abelard’s crowd wasn’t bigger than Woodstock but it was twice the size of Paris at the time, ample to make France fear that crowd + superstar preacher => private army? Later, when Thomas Aquinas was up for sainthood, his advocates argued that every single chapter in his Summa Theologica should be considered an individual miracle, and the judges agreed. (It’s official folks, 3,000+ miracles in one compact paperback, only \$12.99! Unless you want to buy it in the period, in which case it’s \$650,000; you don’t get scholarship before the printing press unless wealthy elites believe it’s really, really worth the \$\$\$!)

Stephanie Farr, "The nonbinary Revolutionary leader who preached in Philly during the Revolution", The Philadelphia Inquirer 6/5/2025:

Sometimes when I walk the streets of Old City, I imagine the people of colonial times who walked those roads before me, before Philadelphia was Philly and before this nation secured its liberty and identity.

I mostly think about the smells folks had to endure before indoor plumbing, but I also wonder how those men and women traversed the cobblestone streets in their heeled shoes when I look like a wombat in flip-flips doing it in sneakers.

But the Revolutionary War was a revolutionary time, not just for this country, but for individuals who wanted to explore their own identity and the very concept of identity itself.

In celebration of Pride Month, the Museum of the American Revolution is debuting a new walking tour focused on one such individual, a nonbinary religious leader who called themself the Public Universal Friend and preached in Philadelphia during the 1780s.

Entertaining article in Wall Street Journal (WSJ) by Joe Pinsker (5/30/25):

‘Welcome In.’ The Two-Word Greeting That’s Taking Over and Driving Shoppers Nuts.
The phrase has spread to coffee shops and credit unions, and customers are wondering why; ‘like a slap to the ear’

The first thing I have to say is that I'm amazed this article doesn't mention the Japanese greeting "Irasshaimase いらっしゃいませ", a phrase meaning "welcome" or "please come in". It's a polite greeting used to welcome customers when they enter a shop or restaurant in Japan.

Last September, we had a lengthy, vigorous discussion about the "welcome in" greeting sweeping southwest United States, including a deep look at its Japanese "Irasshaimase" heritage which we examined in 2021 (see "Selected readings" below).

In "Linguistic relativity: snow and horses" (4/15/25), I summarized and assessed the following paper:

Temuulen Khishigsuren et al, "A computational analysis of lexical elaboration across languages", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2417304122

My post was picked up by Cody Cottier, who was doing a critique of the Khishigsuren et al. article for Scientific American.  Cottier interviewed me and incorporated some of what I said to him in this review:

Linguists Find Proof of Sweeping Language Pattern Once Deemed a ‘Hoax’
Inuit languages really do have many words for snow, linguists found—and other languages have conceptual specialties, too, potentially revealing what a culture values
Scientific American (5/9/25)

[Update — mistaken identity corrected…] Someone with the same name as Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, published a paper in 1985 evaluating the application of Bayes' Theorem to the question of God's existence.  The paper ("Swinburne, Mackie and Bayes' Theorem" ) was published in the International journal for philosophy of religion.

 Thomas Bayes (1701-1761) was a Presbyterian minister, but the theorem that bears his name was presented in a posthumously-published work on gambling, "An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances".  The Economist once called Bayes' Theorem "the most important equation in the history of mathematics", but Rev. Prevost's paper argued that "the Bayesian method of evaluating the adequacy of theistic explanation … [falls] short both in practice and in principle".

This morning, as is my wont, I stepped out on my stoop to test the weather.  Across the street, I saw children running around picking up eggs that had been hidden in the grass here and there and delightedly putting them in the baskets they held with one hand.  These eggs were colored, all right, but made of plastic, not the kind of natural eggs we used to spend a lot of time on boiling and dyeing and, if we were fancy and clever, making designs and even using multiple colors through a combination of melted wax and various tools and techniques.  I fondly recall the olfactory and tactile sensations of vinegar, melted wax used during the process, and smooth egg shells.

Really elaborately decorated Easter eggs are called pysanky (plural form of pysanka from the Ukrainian word pysaty meaning "to write" (source), cf. Russian письменность ("writing").  You don't have to be a pro and make pysanky like the ones shown here, but you can derive a lot of fun and satisfaction making your own colored Easter eggs that are dyed and decorated in a fashion that is commensurate with your time and talents.

The Japanese writing system consists of three major components — kanji (sinographs), hiragana (cursive syllabary), and katakana (block syllabary).  I would argue that rōmaji (roman letters) are a fourth component.  We have rehearsed and rehashed their different lexical, morphological, and grammatical functions so often that I don't want to waste time going over them again now.  Since we are focusing on katakana in this post, I will merely mention that their main roles are the following:

• transcription of foreign-language words into Japanese
• the writing of loan words (collectively gairaigo)
• emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia
• for technical and scientific terms
• for names of plants, animals, minerals
• often for the names of Japanese companies

(Wikipedia)