This article was amended on 3 January 2023. The original furniture said the fireworks display was on Christmas Eve. This was incorrect and has been removed.
We have been discussing the Yiddish word "glat", albeit with a lot of loose ends (see "Glat perch and medicare yam" (12/19/22). Having gained some additional information, it is worthwhile taking another look.
From a colleague:
I am very familiar with the word Glat, or Glatt. It is often used together with the word kosher. Glatt is Yiddish for "smooth". This word relates to meat and poultry and is never used with fish. Perhaps Chinese borrowed this word because Israel exports food items to China, including fish?
What Is Glatt Kosher?
For meat to be kosher, it must come from a kosher animal slaughtered in a kosher way. Glatt kosher takes it further; the meat must also come from an animal with adhesion-free or smooth lungs.
Let's revisit the best old stuff that made headlines this year.
Some of these are gruesome, e.g., the parasitic worms found in 2,700-year-old toilet, which reminds me of my experiences in Nepal. Many of them have implications for language and linguistics (see the references and links below). Most of them attest to cultural contacts across wide distances.
My favorite is King Tut's space dagger, made out of meteoritic iron, which is especially interesting, given that the Iron Age didn't begin until a century after King Tut's death.
The researchers did chemical analyses on the dagger and also turned to ancient Egyptian literature, where they found references to a special dagger gifted to King Tut’s grandfather by a foreign ruler.
Any attempt to remove my tweets that link to my other social media accounts, not violating any law, would actually make #twitter an editorial media, and no longer a social media platform, with civil and criminal liability for *any* illegal content therein. https://t.co/kwoFHVue43
But this is Language Log, not Defamation Law Log, so the topic here is the singular phrase "an editorial media". And as usual, the point is not to complain but to inquire.
Upon seeing that word for the first time, I had only the vaguest idea of what it meant, though I suspected that it was closely related to the dog breed name:
breed of terrier with a bearded muzzle, 1923, from German Schnauzer, literally "growler," from schnauzen "to snarl, growl," from Schnauze "snout, muzzle," which is related to Middle English snute, snoute "snout" (see snout).
Next, I thought that surely it must be the German cognate of Yiddish schnoz[z] ("nose"), and that was unmistakably clear from the nickname and protuberant proboscis of Jimmy Durante (1893-1980), who often jocularly referred to his own nose as the schnozzola (Italianization of the American Yiddish slang word schnoz.
People get confused about languages, dialects, registers, and scripts — and when journalists try to help, they often make things worse. For a good recent example, see Mujib Mashal, "Where Romantic Poetry in a Fading Language Draws Stadium Crowds", NYT 12/18/2022:
That more than 300,000 people came to celebrate Urdu poetry during the three-day festival this month in New Delhi was testament to the peculiar reality of the language in India.
For centuries, Urdu was a prominent language of culture and poetry in India, at times promoted by Mughal rulers. Its literature and journalism — often advanced by writers who rebelled against religious dogma — played important roles in the country’s independence struggle against British colonial rule and in the spread of socialist fervor across the subcontinent later in the 20th century.
In more recent decades, the language has faced dual threats from communal politics and the quest for economic prosperity. Urdu is now stigmatized as foreign, the language of India’s archrival, Pakistan. Families increasingly prefer to enroll children in schools that teach English and other Indian languages better suited for the job market.
Derived from the Chinese term da gong ren — a self-deprecating slang term meaning “laborers” or “working people” — “the chosen laborers” refers to those workers whose residential compounds have not been locked down, allowing or forcing them to go to work every day. Some use the term sarcastically to express envy about their coworkers who can stay home, while other “chosen laborers” are just happy they can go out for a walk.
Subhead: Brogues to be found in unexpected places as Hiberno-English on the rise since the departure of Britain from the EU
On his entry to Prague Castle to join a summit of European Union leaders, Latvian prime minister Krisjanis Karins was accosted by the bank of waiting journalists.
“What do you think about the price cap?” one reporter asked him, looking for a comment on the issue of the day.
In an unmistakably Irish accent, Karins replied: “A price cap on gas, if that could be achieved, would be grand.”
I shared a clip of the incident on social media and it quickly took off. “If you close your eyes, he could be a school principal in Tipperary,” one user marvelled.
I’ve been spending a LOT of time with ChatGPT. So naturally, I decided to have it create some haiku. [VHM: See the link to Bill's blogpost after the page break.] This post is about that, but also about a most remarkable woman, Margaret Masterman (1910-1986). She’d studied with Wittgenstein in the 1930s and then went on to create the Cambridge Research Unit in Linguistics in the 1950s. There she became one of the founders of computational linguistics and had a computer generate haiku in 1969. As far as I know, it’s the first time that’s been done.
Take at look at the very end. I’ve taken to closing my dialogs by thanking ChatGPT. I know it’s not conscious, nor sentient, but why not? It’s fun. This time I decided to thank it in Japanese. Except that I neither speak nor read Japanese. But I can use Google Translate. I thought ChatGPT would have no trouble, but I do think its reply was rather clever.
Best of the season to you, and the rest of the Log.