Gen Z words 👶, Essays written by AI; threat or opportunity? 🤖, Words from other languages are gifts 🎁
Welcome to English in Progress, the bi-weekly newsletter that keeps you updated on the English language. Fresh in your inbox every other Wednesday.
First some personal news: I have launched a website to accompany this newsletter, which I plan to fill with lists of resources. My first list is already online, and it’s a long one: blogs and websites about the English language. It isn’t quite perfect yet, but I’m sure my lovely subscribers will be gentle with me.
New words
Cambridge has observed the following words (example sentences and more new words can be found here.)
“Sourfaux”: bread that is labelled “sourdough” by the shop that sells it but actually contains cheaper ingredients and is made in a way that takes less time.
“Regenerative tourism”: going on holiday to a particular destination and making a positive impact on the place and the people who live there.
“Trip stacking”: the activity of booking more than one holiday for the same time period in case one has to be cancelled, for example because of new travel restrictions.
I actually heard a new word myself, which I thought I’d add here. Or, better said, I heard a noun that had been verbed in a new way: “to listicle”. The speaker, who was being interviewed in this podcast, said something like “a person cannot just be listicled”, by which she meant that you cannot reduce a person to a list of traits.
Words of the Year
It’s the best time of year for people who like lexicography, as word-of-the-year season continues.
Dictionary.com chose “woman” as its word of the year. It was probably this news that sparked recent interest in the fact that Cambridge had amended its definitions for “man” and “woman” to include transgender people. It had done so in October, but the press only noticed recently. Other words on the Dictionary.com shortlist included the Ukraine flag emoji “🇺🇦”, “inflation” and “quiet quitting”.
Rather than just one word each year, Nancy Friedman provides a list. For 2022, some of her Words of the Year include “AI”, “bivalent” and “grooming”.
Paul Anthony Jones, a.k.a. Haggard Hawks, posts evocative, obscure terms on his Twitter feed. From all of these, the word “weltered” (exhausted by constant turmoil) has been picked as his Word of the Year. (If you want to know more about Haggard Hawks, he recently wrote a nice piece about his love for obscure words for The Guardian.)
The most googled word of the year is “wordle”, due to (I think) people using google to get to the game.
Young people and their words
This article in The Harvard Crimson, Harvard University’s daily news source, lists words and phrases that are peculiar to Harvard. For all of us non-Harvards (Harvardarians? Harvardites?) it is still fun to read, as many of the words convey a student life that is, happily or unhappily, universal.
There are words like “gem” (a low-stress course with little to no homework), “lamonster” (a bleary-eyed and smelly student pulling an all-nighter; named after library café Lamont) and referring to the Science and Engineering Complex as “the seck”.
A phrase peculiar to Harvard is “dropping the H-bomb”, which refers to the fact that mentioning you go to Harvard can land like a bomb in many conversations outside the university, so it is something to be carefully considered.
This Australian radio show took 15 minutes to discuss some Australian Gen Z words such as “ick” (a turnoff), “to slay” (to be really cool or successful), “lit” (awesome) and “eshay” (an Australian hypermasculine subculture). (Audio only)
This article in the Washington Post also discusses Gen Z (a.k.a. “zoomer”) English. It has clearly hit a nerve and has been doing the rounds on social media. It discusses communication difficulties between zoomers and older colleagues, and includes a quiz of American zoomer phrases (for the answers to the quiz, go to the first comment in the Language Log link below).
The aforementioned article led to a big discussion about the term “to be out of pocket” in the comments on Language Log. For Brits like me, “to be out of pocket” means you had to pay for something unexpected or unwanted, and now you’ve lost money. “To pay for something out of pocket” means you have to pay for something in cash, and it will (hopefully) be reimbursed to you later.
The second phrase and its meaning seems to be more prevalent in the US. In the southern states, however, “to be out of pocket” apparently means to be unreachable by phone. And for young Americans, it means to go wild or crazy.
I always thought “to table something” was the most confusing American/British difference, but this is also a contender!
Tech
ChatGPT, the chatrobot that is able to write a surprisingly good college essay, dystopian short story or recipe for apple pie in a matter of seconds, has everyone talking.
A big question that occupies people in the right now is: what does this mean for teachers? An essay generated by ChatGPT will not be flagged by plagiarism checks. John Warner thinks the death of the essay is a good thing, and pieces in The Atlantic and Slate also take positive views, giving tips and ideas on how teachers can use ChatGPT to their advantage.
A much bigger problem concerning ChatGPT and its siblings is that they make stuff up, and do so in such a way that it can be difficult to spot. Society already had a problem with spread of misinformation, and this could make it worse.
I thought this tweet put it very well:
And then there’s the further future. I liked this newsletter article, which tried to find a good historical analogy for the disruption this kind of AI might be about to cause. And this article, in which someone uploaded all the transcripts from his favourite podcast, so that he could ask questions to a robot version of the podcast’s host. It worked surprisingly well, apparently.
In other linguistic tech news (though still related to chatbots), I liked this Guardian Long Read: “I was a person pretending to be a computer pretending to be a person”.
New publications
Lynne Murphy, who compares American and British English, has started a newsletter. You can subscribe here. She wrote the brilliant book The Prodigal Tongue, and the newsletter is a treat.
There’s a new podcast called Radiolingo about linguistics. It’s partly produced by Duolingo, and before I started listening I thought perhaps it would be about language learning. But it isn’t. It’s a well-produced podcast about broad linguistics subjects aimed at laypeople. Because they look at the latest developments, there is also something there for more experienced linguists.
Speaking about podcasts, This American Life recently had an episode with a strong language theme. Chinese-American Jiayang Fan believes that when she hears other Chinese-Americans speak, she can tell how old they were when they immigrated to the U.S. The podcast puts her to the test. In the third act, the show plays a game of telephone.
The fifth edition of Garner's Modern English Usage is coming out in February, and available now for pre-order.
And of course *coughs* there is my own blog, which saw the light of day two weeks ago. Check it out, leave a comment, let me know if I should change anything. :-)
Bits and bobs
At 94 years old, Noam Chomsky just did a Zoom webinar about regenerative grammar. (I must admit, I did not watch it.)
A wonderful example of the madness of English spelling: linguist Gretchen McCulloch writes on how (not) to spell the shortened form of “usual”. Excerpt: “the clipped version of usual is a perfect storm: a u with an unwritten y sound followed by an s that’s been transformed into a zh by an unwritten y sound in front of a u that’s now deleted.”
This Guardian columnist is of the opinion that it is fine to swear in front of your children.
The term “code-switching”, which in linguistics usually refers to switching between languages, is increasingly being used to talk about switching between formal and informal speech registers. The most interesting part of this article was, I thought, the video in which young black Brits talk about changing their accent or manner of speech in order to conform.
Lots of articles from The Guardian this newsletter, and here’s another one: Oxford lexicographer Danica Salazar writes about world varieties of English. She points out that new words from other languages should be considered gifts.
This academic paper has excellent examples of covid-related rhyming slang. If you come down with the disease, you can be said to have a case of the “Miley” (Miley Cyrus; coronavirus) or the “Virgil” (Virgil and Ovid; Covid).
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