Does slang "belong" to certain groups? 🔑 Is cockney dead? ⚰️ What is cakeism? 🎂
Welcome to English in Progress, the bi-weekly newsletter that keeps you updated on the English language. Fresh in your inbox every other Wednesday.
As you will see, I have started noting reading times and the media source. What do you think, is this helpful? Let me know in the comments, by filling in the questionnaire at the bottom, or by replying to this email.
Cultural and linguistic appropriation
Australian author speaks out about being accused of cultural appropriation
Hazel Edwards is an Australian author best known for her children’s literature series There’s a Hippopotamus on Our Roof Eating Cake. She is receiving messages on social media criticising her for utilizing characters with broad backgrounds, when she herself is not from those backgrounds.
Reading time: 4 minutes / Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
Slang should be used as it was by the originating community
Gen Z slang is disproportionately sourced from Black and LGBTQ communities. This writer argues that users of new terms should be aware of the usage of these terms in the communities where they come from.
Reading time: 4 minutes / Los Angeles Times (USA)
The word “woke” is an example of semantic bleaching happening right now
Semantic bleaching refers to a word’s strong, specific meaning being softened and expanded over time. Linguist Julia de Bres argues that this is happening for the word “woke”, which will soon disappear from the spotlight.
(Note: the article does not do well in explaining the term “woke blob”. For others who were as bemused as I was: do not follow the link in the article, it leads to a vague article behind a paywall. Instead, I found this article helpful in explaining that the term The Blob is a way the UK right refers to an amalgamation of organisations and policy that they don’t like.)
Reading time: 4 minutes / Stuff (New Zealand)
Are editors hurting linguistic variation?
This is an article from January that I missed at the time. Now that I have found it, it definitely belongs in my newsletter: one-time copy editor Helen Betya Rubinstein muses about the effects copy editing has on language diversity.
Reading time: 15 minutes / LitHub (USA)
Blogger takes aim at anti-violent language
Blogger John Proffitt makes the point that banning violent language such as “to take a stab at” or “kicking around an idea” can easily go too far. Also “we cannot take all perspectives, experiences, and sensitivities into account in every sentence and in every word choice. We’d end up saying nothing.”
Reading time: 5 minutes / Medium (USA)
Tech
The difference between AI and a human
If you take the time to read just one of the long reads in this newsletter, this one should be it. It does a good job at explaining the current debate on AI and Large Language Models by using analogies and introducing the humans behind the ideas. This is not a small feat, as the debate boils down to huge questions like “What is language and where does it come from?” and “What does it mean to be human?”
Reading time: 25 minutes / Intelligencer (USA)
AI can’t be conscious because it does not have a body
Professor of philosophy Stephen Asma explains that AI has no source of feeling states or emotions, and these somatic feelings are essential for animal consciousness, decision-making, understanding, and creativity.
Reading time: 4 minutes / Gizmodo (USA)
Makers of ChatGPT were taken by surprise by its success
An interview with 4 of the people who created ChatGPT. “What I came away with was the sense that OpenAI is still bemused by the success of its research preview, but has grabbed the opportunity to push this technology forward, watching how millions of people are using it and trying to fix the worst problems as they come up.”
Reading time: 10 minutes / MIT Technology Review (archived) (USA)
New AI platform for transcribing historical documents
Trankribus can transcribe pictures or scans of historical documents, apparently. I have not tried it out. I wonder if it would work for bad handwriting?
Reading time: n/a / transkribus.ai
A dictionary platform powered by Bitcoin
In what might be the worst idea in lexicographical history, financial expert Jack Pitts has founded a dictionary on blockchain technology. The platform includes a ‘celebrity auction’ that allows users to own and monetize word definitions.
Reading time: 3 minutes / Coingeek (USA)
World English
Spanglish is its own language. It is not badly spoken English
Linguist Monica Winkler is a speaker of Spanglish who goes through some arguments why she defines Spanglish as a language, and uses her own experience as evidence.
Reading time: 7 minutes / Languaging (USA) (This is a Substack newsletter, you can sign up, but you can also click through to the article by clicking “no thanks”)
Wordle solution “arbor” has people wondering what it means
An arbor, or arbour in UK English, is another word for a pergola, a pretty arch-like thing for in the garden. Always tricky when UK/US spelling differences enter the game. It was the solution on 24 February.
Reading time: 2 minutes / womanandhome (USA/UK)
India should allow its citizens to improve their English
There is a movement in India to educate people in the local language and marginalize English as an unwanted colonial legacy. Author Nitin Pai argues that this is unhelpful. Indian people want to learn English because it gives them better prospects. English will not displace local languages, but it should be allowed to exist alongside them.
Reading time: 4 minutes / Mint (India)
Bits and bobs
Unpacking the Kripke collection
Madeline Kripke was an American book collector who held one of the world's largest collections of dictionaries. After she died in 2020, her collection went to The Lilly Library, Indiana University's principal rare books, manuscripts, and special collections library. Resident lexicographer Michael Adams is working his way through the collection and putting one or two books in the spotlight each week.
Reading time: n/a / Indiana University Libraries Blogs (USA)
The cockney dialect is not dead – it’s just called ‘Essex’ now
Essex is an English county that borders on London on the north-east. In the UK, it is “simultaneously embraced as home to the real, authentic England and scorned as the crudest, stupidest symbol of Englishness”. Linguistics lecturer Amanda Cole grew up there, and through the story of her research, and her parents and grandparents, makes the point that the Essex accent is related to the famous London cockney accent.
Reading time: 5 minutes / The Conversation (Europe)
The rise of algospeak
This article discusses the rise of algospeak, a way of typing that allows people to get past content filters. Some good examples in the article.
Reading time: 6 minutes / RTE (Ireland)
Pollsters are asking questions about “woke” without defining it, and it’s a problem
Reading time: 8 minutes / Politifact (USA)
New words
Dictionary.com has published its new words
Dictionary.com publishes a few words from its updates twice a year. There’s a list in the article, here are a few that stood out to me:
abrosexual - noting or relating to a person whose sexual orientation is fluid or fluctuates over time
antifragile - becoming more robust when exposed to stressors, uncertainty, or risk.
cakeism - the false belief that one can enjoy the benefits of two choices that are in fact mutually exclusive, or have it both ways.
rage farming - the tactic of intentionally provoking political opponents, typically by posting inflammatory content on social media
queerbaiting - a marketing technique involving intentional homoeroticism or suggestions of LGBTQ+ themes intended to draw in an LGBTQ+ audience, without explicit inclusion of openly LGBTQ+ relationships, characters, or people.
Reading time: 12 minutes / Dictionary.com
Other new words
Here are words that I found online that were new to me. Clicking on the word will lead you to an article about that word in particular, or a list of “Gen Z words”, “new office jargon” etc.
🌽⭐ (corn emoji star emoji) - porn star, a way to get past content filters (in use since 2022, I think)
air mattress Ashley - a low-quality woman (hence the comparison to an air mattress) who offers herself up to married men on TikTok, saying that if his wife isn’t treating him right, he can come over. (in use since 2023)
Cap / no cap - a lie / not a lie (first entry Urban Dictionary: 2016)
circumboob - based on sideboob and underboob, for the circumboob look, both sidebook and underboob need to be visible (in use since 2023)
doughnut city - a city where most people live in the outskirts and the city centre does not have many amenities such as shops, restaurants etc (in use in this meaning since 2021?)
dry texting - texting one-word answers to chatty messages (first entry Urban Dictionary: 2010)
Indie sleaze - a fashion style that mixes grunge, vintage and hipster aesthetics (in use since 2021)
shoppable - something is shoppable when it is extremely easy to buy an item being promoted, eg by adding a shopping cart to on online advertisement (in use since 1996, new surge since 2021)
social omnivore - a person who never eats meat at home but sometimes eats it when in a restaurant or at someone else’s house (added to Urban dictionary in 2009, but boomed online in 2023)
World English
Fire hall - Canadian English for fire station
Toasty - British English for grilled sandwich
Bubbler - a water fountain in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and parts of Wisconsin
Meanwhile, on Twitter…
I couldn’t resist posting this wonderfully nerdy linguistics tweet! Linguists being linguists, even when they are off work :-)
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