Language Log

Email from a reader:

In the last several years, when receiving instructive information from gen Z in places of business, I have noticed a regular use of the FUTURE tense, when the present would perfectly suffice. Sometimes, but not always, this is combined with telling me what I WILL WANT to do. To wit,

– "you WILL WANT TO ____"
– "the beverages WILL BE on the back of the menu"

There is nothing "wrong" grammatically or logically with any of this (as if there could be). It is perfectly accurate and cromulent. But these forms are relatively new, I conjecture. Even a little jarring.

I can posit my own hypotheses regarding how and why these usages increased in prevalence in recent tears. Is there a literature on it, perhaps already covered by Language Log?

That's the title of a brand new (3/13/25) book by Laura Spinney, author of Pale Rider, a noteworthy volume on the 1918 influenza pandemic.  Here she is interviewed (6/7/25) by Colin Gorrie (the interview is too long [58:14] to post directly on Language Log):

Proto-Indo-European Origins: A Conversation with Laura Spinney    

Follow along with the interview by using the transcript (available on the YouTube site; it shows up on the right side).

The whole title of Spinney's remarkable tome is Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. As Gorrie explains:

This book integrates linguistics, archaeology, and genetics to give us an up-to-date overview of Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancient language that English and many other languages ultimately descend from. Our conversation is wide-ranging, touching not only on the linguistics but also on what we can reconstruct of the culture of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and the light it sheds on later history and literature.

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.

A letter to the editor on the essential nature of LLMs from the Times Literary Supplement (5/30/25):

 Large language models

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.

Faizan Zaki overcomes a shocking, self-inflicted flub and wins the Scripps National Spelling Bee
Ben Nuckols, AP (5/30/25)

Not what you would expect when the stakes are so high:

The favorite entering the bee after his runner-up finish last year — during which he never misspelled a word in a conventional spelling round, only to lose a lightning-round tiebreaker that he didn’t practice for — the shaggy-haired Faizan wore the burden of expectations lightly, sauntering to the microphone in a black hoodie and spelling his words with casual glee.

As most readers of Language Log know, ABC means "American-born Chinese".  Depending upon how (in)sensitive their parents are, learning Chinese can be hell, and leave them scarred for life.

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 the issue of English spelling variation, this picture has been making the rounds on social media:

I thought of it when I was reminded that the New Jersey borough of Buena is pronounced /ˈbjuːnə/ — so that the first syllable is the same as the first syllable of beauty.

For English speakers, a mind-boggling letter to the editor on linguistic gender from the Times Literary Supplement (3/9/25):

Masculine and feminine

In Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, reviewed by Lucy Popescu (In Brief, April 18), a character points out that “in Spanish, the word victim, or victima, is always feminine”. This is evidently true, but it would be wrong to draw conclusions regarding any inherently gendered notions of victimhood from this fact; the Spanish word for person (la persona) is also feminine, but it does not therefore follow that persons are essentially female.

In Daniel Dennett's 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, the chapter titled "Chomsky contra Darwin, Four Episodes" ends with this provocative sentence:

The hostility to Artificial Intelligence and its evil twin, Darwinism, lies just beneath the surface of much of the most influential work in recent twentieth-century philosophy.

Elizabeth Ribbens, "How the use of a word in the Guardian has gotten some readers upset", The Guardian 6/4/2025:

‘Got’ was changed during the editing of an opinion piece, leading to correspondence lamenting a slide into American English. But language isn’t a fortress.

In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, a messenger breathlessly announces to the king that, “Jack Cade hath gotten London bridge”. Hold this late 16th-century text in mind as we fast forward to last week when Martin Kettle, associate editor and columnist at the Guardian in the UK, was seen to suggest in an opinion piece that, if King Charles has pushed the boundaries of neutrality, such as with his speech to open the new Canadian parliament, he has so far “gotten away with it”.

In a letter published the next day, a reader asked teasingly if this use of “gotten” – and another writer’s reference to a “faucet” – were signs the Guardian had fallen into line with Donald Trump’s demand that news agencies adopt current US terminology, such as referring to the “Gulf of America”.

Another, who wrote to me separately, had first seen the article in the print edition and expected subeditors (or copy editors, if you wish) would eventually catch up and remove “gotten”, which “is not a word in British English”. She was surprised to find the online version not only unchanged but with the phrase repeated in the headline.

More than 20 years ago, I posted about the explosion of -ome and -omic words in biology: "-ome is where the heart is", 10/27/2004. I listed more than 40 examples:

behaviourome, cellome, clinome, complexome, cryptome, crystallome, ctyome, degradome, enzymome,epigenome, epitome, expressome, fluxome, foldome, functome, glycome, immunome, ionome, interactome, kinome, ligandome, localizome, metallome, methylome, morphome, nucleome, ORFeome, parasitome, peptidome, phenome, phostatome, physiome, regulome, saccharome, secretome, signalome, systeome, toponome, toxicome, translatome, transportome, vaccinome, and variome.