Language Log

It's WOTY season, and The Economist's choice for 2025 is slop:

PICKING A WORD of the year is not easy. In the past the American Dialect Society has gone with “tender-age shelters” (2018) and “-ussy” (2022). The Oxford English Dictionary (oed) has caused conniptions by opting for things like “youthquake” (2017) and “goblin mode” (2022). If you cannot remember why those terms were big that year, that is the point: the exercise is not a straightforward one.

Sometimes a single suitable word is not at hand, so a phrase is chosen instead; other times the word simply seems jarring. Middle-aged lexicographers are often tempted to crown a bit of youth slang, but such terms are transient and sound out of date before the press release is published.

The Economist’s choice for 2025 is a single word. It is representative, if not of the whole year, at least of much of the feeling of living in it. It is not a new word, but it is being used in a new way. You may not like it, but you are living with it. And it is probably here to stay.

The Canadian English Dictionary

is a project being developed by the Society for Canadian English, a not-for-profit consortium including Editors Canada, the Canadian Word Centre at UBC and the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University.

And as of yesterday, they announced their first Word of the Year.

[This is a guest post by J. Marshall Unger]

Well, first of all, the difficulty of learning a language can only be measured relative to the language(s) the learner already knows. Japanese is easier for Koreans than for Americans; I would guess Chinese is easier for English speakers than, say, Arabic speakers. Second, language isn't writing. Learning to write Japanese or Chinese is hardly a snap even for native speakers.

The start of today's SMBC:

At State Dept., a Typeface Falls Victim in the War Against Woke
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the Biden-era move to the sans serif typeface “wasteful,” casting the return to Times New Roman as part of a push to stamp out diversity efforts.
By Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz (Dec. 9, 2025)

I was intrigued by the surname of a very nice man whom I met at Home Depot.  His name was Steven Dreibelbis, and his position in the store was that of "Customer Experience Manager".

Steven'a surname, Dreibelbis, sounded very German to me.  I asked him about it and he told me that he was indeed of German descent on his father's side, but his mother was Colombian and his grandmother was Peruvian, so he looked more South American than German.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-seventieth issue:

“The Patriarch of Empty Lies,” by Wilt L. Idema. (free pdf)

"Against We", by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (11/28/25)

Quoting the author:

Yesterday I pointed out the trombonish glissando in Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet"; today, during my morning ablutions, on the radio I heard a jazz singer do a whole song sounding like a musical instrument.  I don't think there was any digital or electronic assistance, just his natually endowed voice.

Wolfgang Behr, "Towards a Conceptual Prehistory of 'Brainwashing' / xinao 洗腦".  (pdf here and here)

In Jessica Imbach, Justyna Jaguścik and Brigit Knüsel Adamec, eds., Re-Thinking Literary China, Essays in Honor of Andrea Riemenschnitter. [Welten Ostasiens / Worlds of East Asia / Mondes de l’Extrême Orient; 40] Berlin: DeGruyter-Brill, 2025, pp. 7-66.

The Koreans and Vietnamese got rid of them within the last century, even the Chinese — for more than a century — seriously considered abolishing the sinographs, and have simplified them until they are but a pale remnant of what they used to be.  Moreover, after WWI, when — with the help of the American occupation — Japan had a real chance to switch to an alphabet, the Japanese, on the whole, still clung to the kanji.  This is not to mention that the first great novel in an East Asian language, The Tale of Genji (before 1021 AD), which has a stature in Japan similar to that= of Shakespeare in the United Kingdom (Sonja Arntzen), was written by Lady Murasaki in the phonetic hiragana syllabary (aka "women's writing").  

The fact that the Japanese still have not abandoned the archaic morphosyllabic / logographic script is a conundrum that has puzzled me since I first learned Chinese and Japanese more than half a century ago.  Such a fundamental question about the history of East Asian writing is one that could scarcely escape the attention of rishika Julesy.  Here is her video about this thorny matter, "Why Kanji Survived in Japan (But Not in Korea or Vietnam)" (22:25).  I am confident that, as always, she will have something enlightening to say about this perplexing subject.

Just listened to the classic rendition of that song by Bobby Vinton. I was struck by the way he executed the long drawn-out glissando from the close back rounded vowel to the voiced labiodental fricative.

Following up on "Pets with Buttons", it's clearly time to return to "Dognitive Science" and catch up on the relevant literature.