Goodbye Dame Edna 😢, Language of the manosphere 👨, And the winner is ... 🏆
Welcome to the latest instalment of English in Progress, the newsletter that keeps you updated on the English language. Fresh in your inbox every first Friday of the month. (Ish.)
My name is Heddwen Newton. I am specialised in Dutch English, and fascinated by English language change.
English innovation
English hasn’t changed this rapidly since the early 1600s
According to historian Steven Mintz the English language is changing before our eyes. This is due to technological innovations, business and professional jargon, but mostly due to politics and changes in societal norms.
Reading time: 7 minutes / Inside Higher Ed (USA)
Algospeak in historic context
Algospeak is using words such as “seggs” (=sex) or “to unalive” (to die/ commit suicide) in order to corcumvent the algorithms of e.g. TikTok. In this piece, psychology professor Roger J. Kreuz compares this use of language to historic linguistic subterfuge such as Polari (the secret language of the gay community in the early 1900s).
Reading time: 4 minutes / The Conversation (USA)
The language of the manosphere
Sociolinguist Robert Lawson discusses words like Chads and Stacys, awalt (all women are like that) and cuck from anti-women and anti-feminist groups online.
Reading time: 4 minutes / The Conversation (UK)
Therapy-speak is entering the English language
"I've treasured our season of friendship, but we're moving in different directions in life. I wish you all love and success." In the wake of a much-needed increase in accessibility to therapy and therapists in the digital age, a whole new communication system is beginning to form. We are encouraged to "set boundaries" and "hold space" and "reject toxicity." We are taught to look out for things such as "gaslighting," "narcissism," and "love bombing" in our relationships.
Reading time: 6 minutes / Refinery29 (USA)
World Englishes
Baggage and luggage
Lynne Murphy discusses baggage (historically more in use in the US) and luggage (historically more in use in the UK) and concludes that the US/UK distinction seems to be disappearing.
Reading time: 5 minutes / Separated by a common language (USA/ UK)
Barry Humphries and Australian English
Australian comedian Barry Humphries died on 22 April. As a Brit, I knew him for his persona of Dame Edna Everage. His Australian persona Bazza McKenzie used colourful Australian language to discuss vomiting (technicolour yawn, liquid laugh (down the great white telephone)), urinating (drain the dragon, point Percy at the Porcelain), masturbation (flog the lizard, jerking the gherkin), and much more. (Video in article)
Reading time: 5 minutes / The Conversation (Australia)
Italian ruling party proposes law to limit English use
Italy‘s ruling party has introduced a law that seeks to ban governments and corporations from using English in official communications under threat of fines up to 100,000 euros, or $150,000. The bill is not yet law, it still has to be discussed by parliament.
Reading time: 2 minutes / Global News (Canada)
An Anglophone in Berlin on Denglisch (German English)
Alexander Wells notes phrases like “ein STATEMENT für GIRLPOWER” and “das ist ein Gamechanger!”
Reading time: 2 minutes / European Review of Books (Europe)
Bits and bobs
The most loved and hated slang terms on Urban Dictionary
I have a love/hate relationship with Urban Dictionary. It is the best crowdsourced internet database of its kind in terms of quality, but it is frustratingly difficult to navigate for anyone wanting to do linguistic research, not even allowing anything as simple as filtering by date.
Lettersolver did a pretty good job anyway, which must have taken them a long time and lots of manual labour. They selected 205 slang terms on Urban Dictionary to find each entry’s share of upvotes and downvotes. The key findings were that DApp (decentralized application) is the most loved slang crypto term. Gen Z slang like sleeping on (to ignore) and yeet (to throw) are the most loved, while clapback (a witty comeback) and cheugy are among the most hated. Favorite British slang terms include chuffed (thrilled) and gutted (extremely disappointed); mug (a fool) is the most disliked. Crypto lingo NGMI (“not gonna make it”) is the most divisive slang term on the internet (6.6% difference between upvotes and downvotes).
Reading time: 9 minutes / Letter Solver (USA (I think))
Aptagrams in The Telegraph
Not really world English or language change, but still: a fun little article on aptagrams (apt anagrams): VOICES RANT ON can become CONVERSATION, DIRTY ROOM becomes DORMITORY; DEBIT CARD contains all the letters of BAD CREDIT; I'LL MAKE A WISE PHRASE jumbles to WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
Reading time: 2 minutes / The Telegraph (UK)
Why ChatGPT is bad at Wordle
This article explains that ChatGPT doesn’t actually see words as words, but as numerical codes. Because of this it is surprisingly bad at word games where it has to “see” individual letters.
Reading time: 4 minutes / The Conversation (Ireland)
New books
Like, Literally, Dude by Valerie Fridland
Dr. Valerie Fridland, professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada, has been doing the media rounds to promote her new book Like, literally, dude: arguing for the good in bad English. She has mostly been appearing in podcasts (so many podcasts!), but here is a written media piece in which Fridland explains what prescriptivism is and how language change can actually be a good thing.
I haven’t read the book yet, but it sounds great.
An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark! by Florence Hazrat
Hazrat thinks the exclamation mark (or point) will win out from emojis.
Free: The Future of English: Global Perspectives by The British Council
This extensive research report answers questions such as “Will English remain the world's most sought-after language?” and “What is the future of English as a medium of education?” It follows up from David Graddoll’s 2006 work English Next: Why global English may mean the end of ‘English as a Foreign Language’.
The book and a PDF summary can be downloaded for free via the link.
Neologisms
Click on the underlined words to see the article where I found the word - some are better than others.
AI bro - individual with a strong interest in Artificial Intelligence (on urban dictionary since 2023)
to bench - to put a potential partner on a mental maybe-list and date other people (on urban dictionary since 2017)
frictionless access - the ability to walk through building security/ a locked door without having to interact with e.g. a key or security card. OR the ability to unlock an electronic device without e.g. entering a password. In both cases this works with facial recognition. (Difficult to disentangle when it came into popular use in this sense, but a technology buzzword since about 2018.)
gendy nooch - gender neutral (Australian English neologism, 2023)
hipstoric - a way of decorating your home where old furniture, ornaments etc. are combined with a modern style (on urban dictionary since 2016)
mascara - a euphemism for sex, or penis, due to the action of inserting a mascara wand in and out of its container (on urban dictionary since 2023)
mentionitis - when a romantic partner mentions another person’s name too often (on urban dictionary since 2009)
psychobiotics - probiotics that confer mental health benefits to the host when ingested in a particular quantity through interaction with commensal gut bacteria. (In use since 2011 according to Google N-gram)
to stan something - to be a true fan of something, to idolise. Etymology either stalker + fan, or Eminem song “Stan” about an obsessed fan (oldest urban dictionary entry for this definition: 2017)
the orgasm gap - the discrepancy in the frequency that heterosexual men and women reach orgasm (first used in 1964 according to Google N-gram, on the rise since 2000)
to zombie - to come back to an online contact after a period of unresponsiveness. To “come back from the dead” after ghosting someone. (On Urban Dictionary since 2015)
World Englishes
Click on the word to read an article that usually has more examples of the English variant in question.
aish - the Korean equivalent of “Oh no!” or “Darn it”, said to be making its way into English due to Korean pop culture.
bampot / bam - Edinburgh (Scotland) English for an idiot
double-double - Canadian English for a coffee with two creams and two sugars
joe joes - Washington State slang for potatoe wedges
Go sling yer ‘ook - Yorkshire (UK) English for go away
runners - Irish (Hiberno) English for sneakers
the Target effect - leaving a store with much more than you were planning on purchasing (US English)
And the winner is…
Last month, I set up a survey with a list of six neologisms that had entered the English language in 2023 (by my reckoning). My question was “In your opinion, which of these neologisms is most likely to be "normal English" in three years?”
394 people filled in the survey, and 498 responses were given (meaning a fair few people chose more than one neologism).
The winner is de-influencing, with bare-minimum Monday a close second.
(Sorry about the ugly graphics and small letters, I’m going to use a different program next time.)
Academic texts
For this month I also had a look at academic texts on English language change and World Englishes. All articles and chapters can be read for free via their link, no evil expensive Elsevier here. (Should I continue linking to academic texts? Let me know in the comments!)
Book chapter: Power to the Englishes?–Reflections on the Notion of Equality in World Englishes
Alexander Onysko from Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt argues that the World Englishes paradigm has been around for decades, yet nothing much seems to have changed when it comes to the dominance of British and American English. He sees a leading role for university English departments.
Article: African Englishes in the Oxford English Dictionary
Danica Salazar provides a detailed discussion of the editorial work behind the recent updates for African varieties of English, whose distinctive vocabularies the OED is currently taking steps to cover more widely.
Study: Copy editors’ choices are unexpectedly diverse
“(…) What our study calls into question is the notion of uniformity altogether. Seeing that our survey examples belonged to the academic register, we expected to see consistent maintenance of the conservative tradition (plural data) among our group of respondents. Our findings show, however, that this was hardly the case.” (The link is to the author’s Twitter, where she has shared the PDF.)
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