Language Log

In "Peevable words and phrases: journey", 5/18/2024, Victor quoted Lisa Miller, "When Did Everything Become a ‘Journey’?", NYT 5/16/2024:

According to the linguistics professor Jesse Egbert at Northern Arizona University, the use of “journey” (the noun) has nearly doubled in American English since 1990, with the most frequent instances occurring online.

In PubMed, where we've been tracking other changes in word frequency lately, the change from 1990 to 2024 in the frequency of "journey" was 10.2 to 227.9 (per 100k articles), or a factor of 22.3 — which is a lot more than doubling:

And the rise has been going on long enough that we can't blame it on LLMs…

"Let’s ‘Double-Click’ on the Latest Cringeworthy Corporate Buzzword:  You may want to examine or delve into the phrase, which has become pervasive in conference calls and grates on many; ‘It’s almost like a joke’", by Te-ping Chen and Nicholas G. Miller, WSJ (7/9/24)

One of the fastest-spreading corporate buzzwords in recent years, “double-click” is both polarizing and pervasive. Particularly on Wall Street, the figure of speech is now being used as a shorthand for examining something more fully, akin to double-clicking to see a computer folder’s contents. Some, like [Ruben] Roy, find the idiom obnoxious or twee. Double-click defenders say the phrase encourages deeper thinking.

"Siting Yao’s bilingual dictionary translates Chinese lesbian slang:  The London-based graphic designer illustrates unique language expressions and humorous anecdotes in her colourful, graphic guide to queer code."  By Ellis Tree, It's Nice That (4 July 2024)

Following up on "Are LLMs writing PubMed articles?", 7/7/2024, Cervantes suggested a factor, besides LLM availability, that has been influencing the distribution of word frequencies in PubMed's index:

As an investigator whose own papers are indexed in PubMed, and who has been watching the trends in scientific fashion for some decades, I can come up with other explanations. For one thing, it's easier to get exploratory and qualitative research published nowadays than it once was. Reviewers and editors are less inclined to insist that only hypothesis driven research is worthy of their journal — and, with open access, there are a lot more journals, including some with low standards and others that do insist on decent quality but will accept a wide range of papers. It's even possible now to publish protocols for work that hasn't been done yet. So it doesn't surprise me at all that words like "explore" and "delve" (which is a near synonym, BTW) are more likely to show up in abstracts, because that's more likely to be what the paper is doing.

I agree, although it remains unclear whether those changes have been strong enough to explain the effects documented in Dmitry Kobak et al., "Delving into ChatGPT usage in academic writing through excess vocabulary", arXiv.org 7/3/2024.

We have occasionally mentioned Sarmatians on Language Log, but usually in association with the Scythians, of whom we have often spoken (most recently here, with extensive bibliography).

These two peoples of ancient times both spoke languages in the Iranian language family and lived in the area north of the Black Sea. The languages and cultures of the Scythians and Sarmatians were related but distinct. In particular their styles of warfare were different. The Scythians were noted as mounted archers. They may have been the inventors or one of the inventors of the stirrup. The stirrup enabled mounted archers to fire (shoot) arrows reasonably accurately while riding. The Scythians attacked in a mass firing of arrows. If their adversaries were not overwhelmed by the hail of arrows then the Scythians turned and rode to a safe distance for regrouping to mount another mass attack.

Today's SMBC:

Lauren Jack ("Do you hurkle-durkle? What the Scottish word taking over social media means and where it came from", The Scotsman 1/24/2024) embeds a TikTok video from 7/18/2023:

@devriebrynnme my Scottish ancestors = just chillin’ as a culture♬ original sound – Devriebrynn

The article is in Japanese, but you should be able to get an idea of what's going on from the videos and stills.

iPad書道はいいぞ pic.twitter.com/P4hregIAl1

— 書きちらし (@kakichirashi) June 29, 2024

Kyle Orland, "The telltale words that could identify generative AI text", ars technica 7/1/2024

In a pre-print paper posted earlier this month, four researchers from Germany's University of Tubingen and Northwestern University said they were inspired by studies that measured the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by looking at excess deaths compared to the recent past. By taking a similar look at "excess word usage" after LLM writing tools became widely available in late 2022, the researchers found that "the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words" that was "unprecedented in both quality and quantity."

To measure these vocabulary changes, the researchers analyzed 14 million paper abstracts published on PubMed between 2010 and 2024, tracking the relative frequency of each word as it appeared across each year. They then compared the expected frequency of those words (based on the pre-2023 trendline) to the actual frequency of those words in abstracts from 2023 and 2024, when LLMs were in widespread use.

The results found a number of words that were extremely uncommon in these scientific abstracts before 2023 that suddenly surged in popularity after LLMs were introduced. The word "delves," for instance, shows up in 25 times as many 2024 papers as the pre-LLM trend would expect; words like "showcasing" and "underscores" increased in usage by nine times as well. Other previously common words became notably more common in post-LLM abstracts: the frequency of "potential" increased 4.1 percentage points; "findings" by 2.7 percentage points; and "crucial" by 2.6 percentage points, for instance.

On a visit to the British Museum last week, Zihan Guo spotted this captivating relief in the Assyrian collection.  You may not be able to see it upon first glance, but she was especially transfixed by the inscription running midriff on the eagle-head figure:

"Five common English words we don’t know the origins of – including ‘boy’ and ‘dog’", Francesco Perono Cacciafoco*, The Conversation (7/4/24)

[*See the author's extraordinary academic profile here.]

The author begins by describing the act of naming items in the world, the etymological study of words, the comparative method, the relationship of English to Germanic and thence to the Indo-European family, and how their vocabularies are all connected.

However, the process doesn’t always work. The English lexicon includes some terms known as “proper words”, which today apparently exist only in English. Cognates for them cannot be found in any other language.

These are very simple and common words but being unique, we cannot apply the comparative method to them and therefore cannot reconstruct their origins. These “proper words” represent an exciting puzzle of the English language. Here are five examples.

Philip Castle, "Quelles sont les expressions les plus utilisées dans la langue française courante?", Quora 6/20/2024:

On va commencer par voilà. O-bli-ga-toi-re ! Il faut parsemer votre discours de "voilà", sans trop vous préoccuper de leur place ni de leur utilité dans la phrase, bien au contraire. Exemple : "Je me suis dit que voilà ce serait bien de voilà faire des efforts pour voilà améliorer mon français". Il faut aussi garder à l'esprit que ce mot merveilleux peut tout remplacer, y compris une fin de phrase. Exemple entendu ce matin sur France Inter : "En fait, le SMIC à 1600 €, je suis patron alors voilà". Vous avez compris le principe, il n'est pas nécessaire de terminer votre phrase, votre interlocuteur la finira lui même en remplaçant le voilà par ce qu'il veut.

We'll start with "voilà". O-bli-ga-to-ry! You need to sprinkle your speech with (instances of) "voilà", without worrying much about their place or their use in the phrase, in fact the opposite. Example: "Je me suis dit que voilà ce serait bien de voilà faire des efforts pour voilà améliorer mon français". You also need to keep in mind that this marvelous word can replace anything, including the end of a phrase. An example heard this morning on France Inter: "En fait, le SMIC à 1600 €, je suis patron alors voilà". You've understood the principle, it's not necessary to end your phrase, your interlocutors will finish it for themselves, replacing the "voilà" with whatever they like.

[This is a guest post by Peter T. Daniels, to follow part 1 (7/1/24)]

That, then, is my account of the origin of writing. It might be supposed that my next topic must be the origin of the alphabet. But it is not; for me, the origin of the alphabet is accidental and practically inevitable, given the constellation of circumstances surrounding the event.

No; what must be celebrated, if not explained, is the origin of the abjad. Previously, writers wrote sounds; subsequently, writers wrote parts of sounds. All the evidence in favor of the syllable as the basic unit of speech is also evidence against the like­­­lihood of discovering the segment. The Egyptians didn’t discover the segment, even though they wrote only consonants and didn’t identify the vowels of the syllables of their language; as explained by Alfred Schmitt, Egyptian hieroglyphic signs never ceased to be word signs, even when used strictly for their phonetic value.