Language Log

What are the most American and most British words?
Is American English really that different than its British ancestor? And if so, what words truly separate the American from the Brit? The Department of Data is on the case.
Washington Post (August 22, 2025), Column by Andrew Van Dam

Depending on the date and time when it appeared online, this article has a different title and format (e.g., fewer or more graphs / charts, but the textual content remains basically the same.  The published version is much longer than the extract I have given here, and provides much more data.

Back in the 1940s, Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann came up with the idea of "Cellular automata", which started with models of crystal growth and self-replicating systems, and continued over the decades with explorations in many areas, popularized in the 1970s by Conway's Game of Life. One strand of these explorations became known as Agent-based Models, applied to problems in ecology, sociology, and economics. One especially influential result was Robert Axelrod's work in the mid-1980s on the Evolution of Cooperation.  For a broader survey, see De Marchi and Page, "Agent-based models", Annual Review of Political Science, 2014.

A road sign at the Gwadar Free Zone, operated by China Overseas Ports
Holding Company, in Gwadar, Balochistan, Pakistan. This port is a crucial part
of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. (Photograph dated July 4, 2018)

If you're in museum administration, you will certainly know the meaning of "restitution".  But what do you do with a headline like this?

"Ethiopian Heritage Authority Intensifies Push to Restitute Looted Artifacts." ENA English.

Ted McClure asks:

Back-formation from "restitution"? Or verb origin of "restitution"? I would have thought the verb form was "restore".

Email from J.P.:

This word caught my attention on the news this morning.  It was said to be a gigantic dust/sandstorm that was passing through the central Arizona area.  As soon as I heard the sound of the word, with a probable triliteral Semitic root and the fact that it was some sort of sandstorm, I thought that it was most likely Arabic.  And indeed it is.

In "Reading Instruction in the mid 19th century" (8/16/2025), I underlined the old-fashioned focus on "elocution", in which readers were trained "to convey to the hearer, fully and clearly, the ideas and feelings of the writer". Much of today's reading instruction turns that into measures of "oral reading fluency", measured as words correct per minute ("wcpm"). This can result in high-scoring readers like those described in this passage from the Introductory Remarks in 1844 edition of McGuffey's Rhetorical Guide, which warns against the consequences of failure to teach "elocution" from the very start:

Adam Aleksic, "The insidious creep of Trump's speaking style", NYT 8/17/2025:

“Many such cases.” “Many people are saying this.”

You may recognize these phrases as “Trumpisms” — linguistic coinages of President Trump — but they’ve also become ingrained in our collective vocabulary. Since they became popular as memes during his first presidential campaign, we have begun using them, first sardonically, and then out of habit.

If you search for “many such cases” on X, you’ll see new posts of the phrase seemingly every minute, primarily applied to nonpolitical contexts like work anxiety or the real estate market. Google Trends shows both expressions increasing in usage since the mid-2010s.

[This is a guest post by Mok Ling]

Someone asked me why shìhé 適合 ("to suit") and héshì 合適 ("suitable") aren't exactly reversible.  [VHM added the romanizations and parenthetical definitions for those who do not know sinographs.  Ibid. below.]  A quick search online got me this explanation:  

"They [適合 and 合適] mean more or less the same thing, but the former is a verb, while the latter is an adjective." (Chinese Grammar Wiki)

I could not figure out why this is the difference they find. Both the Wiktionary and Baidu entries for 適合 give 合適 as a synonym and vice versa.

Giles' Chinese-English Dictionary has neither word, but does have héshì 合式 ("suitable") under both 合 (3947) and 式 9948. The spelling with 式 is also considered a variant form by DeFrancis. 

Thanks to the productive, enlightening discussion we had in the first part of this post, I could not help but think of "speed" as a category of modern life.  That led me to remember a book buried in my dungeon (downstairs study) that I had read about a quarter of a century ago.  It wasn't anything like William S. Burroughs Speed.  It was more on the order of a history of science work.

So I descended the stairs to my basement library.  It wasn't long before I found it:

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick 

• • Topic: This popular book explores the modern, tech-driven obsession with speed and how it affects nearly every aspect of life, from our work habits and communication to our personal time.
  • Summary: Gleick discusses the "hurry sickness" of modern life and the paradox that even with time-saving devices, we feel more rushed than ever. 

"Arabic Translations of the English Adjective 'Necessary': A Corpus-Driven Lexical Study." Alhedayani, Rukayah et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (August 18, 2025): 1345.

Abstract

Modal adjectives of non-epistemic necessity are very common in language corpora. However, such adjectives are expected to behave differently in context, and thus differences between them should be highlighted in dictionaries. Nevertheless, there are a few studies that have examined modal adjectives with respect to their associated constructions and meanings in English. More importantly, studies on equivalent Arabic modal adjectives are scarce. Hence, the present study is quantitative and corpus-driven utilizing monolingual (i.e., the arTenTen18 and the enTenTen18) and parallel (i.e., Open Parallel Corpus or OPUS for short) corpora. Further, it is based on construction grammar and frame semantics to explore Arabic and English words of necessity.

In "Chain of thought hallucination?" (8/8/2025), I illustrated some of the weird text representations that GPT-5 creates when its response is an image rather than a text string. I now have its recommendation for avoiding such problems — which sometimes works, so you can try it…

There's a big fuss and furor over the logo change at Cracker Barrel: