New quiz: guess the World English 🐦This dank newsletter isn't cheugy, it's 🔥

Quiet quitting, rage applying, gentle parenting, intuitive eating, conscious uncoupling - adjective gerunding!

Jul 07, 2023

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 have degrees in language and psychology and am specialised in Dutch English as a World English. Yes, that’s a thing.

If you are not yet subscribed to this newsletter, you can do so right here:

No AI was used in the writing of this email newsletter. Every article was selected, read and summarised by a human being, namely me.

(We’ll be seeing these kinds of disclaimers increasingly often, I think!)

Best of the month

Adjective gerunding is the new trendy naming

Quiet quitting, rage applying, gentle parenting, intuitive eating, conscious uncoupling. Adjective-gerunding phrases describe long-term processes, usually with an emotional component, that often become trends.

Reading time: 5 minutes / Washington Post (USA)

Those who insist that unique cannot be modified by such adverbs as more, most, and very are clearly wrong

Ken Grace defends people who like to say something is “very unique”.

Reading time: 4 minutes / Substack (USA)

Explaining why African American English needs its own dictionary

My fellow Substack writer Rebecca Erickson-Hua does a great job at explaining the reasoning behind the AAE dictionary that is being written at the moment for people who do not yet know much about the subject.

Reading time: 6 minutes / Substack (USA)

A list of all newsletters on the English language

After my monster list of podcasts about English (55 and counting!) and websites and blogs (I didn’t even count those), I have now also made a list of newsletters. If you like the one you’re reading right now, perhaps you’ll like those, too. There are surprisingly few of them; let me know if you know of any others! (Did I just add my own content to “best of the month”? Why yes, yes I did.)

Reading time: 4 minutes / EnglishinProgress.net (UK)

Gen-Z slang of the month

Here are some of my favourite new-ish slang words. Slang is difficult to track. I currently make use of “the craziest Gen Z slang terms you ever heard” type lists on Buzzfeed-type platforms. If anyone knows of a better source, PLEASE let me know! (Click on the word to see where I got it from.)

bed rotting - the practice of lying in bed doing nothing all day, as self-care (oldest entry on Urban Dictionary: 2023)

cheugy - (pronounced chew-gee) out-dated and lame, often used to refer to styles as worn by millennials or from the 2010s (oldest entry on Urban Dictionary: 2018)

dank - a term used to describe something of premium or excellent quality. “This bag is so dank.” (oldest entry on Urban Dictionary: 2003)

to deep it - to think about something deeply, to overthink something “I’m not deeping it” (oldest entry on Urban Dictionary: 2017)

frogisation - when your crush starts appearing less attractive the moment they start fancying you back (not yet on Urban Dictionary (wow!))

the landlord special - a janky repair job made to a rental unit by a property owner or building super (oldest entry on Urban Dictionary: 2022)

micro-cheating - actions or behaviours by your partner that make you question their emotional or physical commitment to your relationship, like regularly texting someone they find attractive or obsessively liking their social media posts (oldest entry on Urban Dictionary: 2008)

salty - to be upset over something little, angry, in a bad mood (oldest entry on Urban Dictionary: 2005)

Great classroom reads

Expectations of ‘perfect’ English are elitist and unrealistic

In this award-winning essay, 17-year-old Megan Luong discusses unfair biases against people who speak non-standard English, using the experiences of her Vietnamese mother as an example.

Reading time: 2 minutes / New York Times (USA)

Native Speakerism – what is it and why does it matter?

Are the terms ‘native speaker’ and ‘non-native speaker’ appropriate, practical and useful to describe language identity, use and understanding? The authors’ three personal stories at the start of the piece might be good for a classroom discussion.

Reading time: 7 minutes / British Council (UK)

Code switching between Singapore and Australian English

Writer Simeon Neo shares her experience of moving to Australia. “When I moved to Perth, I quickly began elongating my vowels and speaking in slow, rhythmic tones like the people around me. It was a far cry from the quick, sharp, staccato way of speaking I was used to. But I was determined to build a new life, a new identity.”

Reading time: 5 minutes / SBS Voices (Australia)

World Englishes - vocab

The different varieties of English as spoken all around the world are known to academics as “World Englishes”. In this section, I highlight some words and terms from the richness of the English-speaking world that came to my attention in the past month. Click on the word to get to an article that will usually list more words from the English variety in question.

bagsy - British English. If you shout bagsy before somebody else, that means you’ve claimed the right to something. “Bagsy the front seat!”

chooch - Italian-American slang for “stupid person”. From Italian ciuccio.

dead (adverb) - very, as in “dead easy” or “dead lucky”. Used to be American English, then became British English, and is now making its way back to America

to do a lobby slide - Starbucks English for cleaning the customer area of a Starbucks

eve-teasing - Indian English for harassing women on the street

fye - Atlanta English (USA) for “fire”, ie “really cool”

sia suay moment - Singaporean English for “embarrassing moment”

skint - UK slang for having no money

to wave - Thai English for putting something in the microwave (warning: link is a TikTok video)

Quiz 1: Gaston Dorren’s League of the Lexicon Global Edition Card Deck

League of the Lexicon is a Trivial-Pursuit-style boardgame with questions about words and language. My friend and fellow Dutch-person-who-writes-about-language-in-English Gaston Dorren was recently asked to create an expansion pack that could cater to a global audience. He shared one of his cards with me, so you can quiz yourself!

Answers here.

(Note: I did not get any money for this promotion, and I do not own the game so I don’t know if it is any good.)

AI and language

When Large Language Models get trained on the output of Large Language Models

The people paid to train AI are outsourcing their work… to AI

AIs will become useless if they keep learning from other AIs (New Scientist)

In the EU, machines will now translate press releases without any human oversight

A good showcase for AI hallucinations

There is plenty of AI garbage out there, but this one crossed my radar because it “discusses” the difference between American and Canadian English. The website doesn’t lie about the source of its text, but reading it on my phone I first assumed I was reading a blog post by a language school, and it took me a while to realise this person wasn’t just uninformed, but in fact non-existent. It’s the fake studies that really give it away.

“2. American English is too informal and lacks proper grammar.

A survey by Grammarly found that American English speakers make 50% more grammar mistakes than Canadian English speakers, and that American English is more likely to use slang and colloquialisms.”

I thought it would make a good showcase for students to learn that if an article does not have easily traceable, verifiable sources, the content cannot be trusted.

(I wish the term for “AI hallucination” had been “AI confabulation”, but apparently that term isn’t well-known enough.)

Reading time: 21 minutes (it just goes on and on) / AtOnce (USA)

Quiz 2: Guess the World English

Go directly here for the answer, or find a hint at the end of this newsletter. (This newsletter will be cut off in many email programs because it is so long this month. You’ll have to open it in your browser to get to the hint and also the funny viral clip that I share at the end. Sorry about that!)

Linguistic entertainment

How our slips of the tongue help the English language evolve

Susie Dent discusses eggcorns and other slips of the tongue, and makes the case that these should be seen as language evolving rather than language mistakes. She gives a few new examples (behaving like a bowl in a china shop, chickens coming home to roast) but also discusses some language-mistakes-that-became-standard from the olden days (we should by rights be “fneezing” rather than “sneezing”, but someone in the 15th century mistook the “f” for the old-style “s”).

Reading time: 4 minutes / iNews (archived, UK)

Rob Kyff presents a collection of mixed metaphors

"This field of research is so virginal that no human eye has ever set foot in it." "The future is an uncharted sea full of potholes." "The audience are literally electrified and glued to their seats." And more from Rob Kyff.

Reading time: 3 minutes / Creators.com (USA)

McSweeney’s does GenZ slang for founding fathers

McSweeney’s is a daily humour website that presents high-brow (ish) satire. In this case a list of GenZ terms with 18th century definitions. “Streaming” [verb / strEEm-ing]: Crossing a medium-sized body of water in short trousers to rescue one’s horse and carriage from sudden peril.

Reading time: 2 minutes / McSweeney’s (USA)

Neologisms of the month

The neologisms below were sourced from the Cambridge Dictionary New Words blog, and “field X buzzwords”-type lists. (I used to also use the @NYT_first_said Twitter account, but the contextbot is down, nooooooo.)

AI-nxiety - feeling worried about how AI could affect your career, your privacy or your safety in the coming years

alpha-footing - the activity of choosing not to wear shoes in certain situations, such as in business meetings, said to be a sign of wealth and power

bidenomics - president Biden’s economic policy of government spending and investment in infrastructure and services in the hopes of creating jobs and growth

to cheese - to use tactics during video games that aren’t exactly cheating but are still considered unfair

climate quitting - the act of leaving your job because the organization where you work is not doing enough to fight climate change

drinkflation - the phenomenon where brewers cut alcohol levels in beers while selling them for the same price

Generation Beta - a way of referring to the group of people who will be born between 2025 and 2039

rich mom energy - the confident attitude and simple, elegant way of dressing that suggests a woman has a lot of money

World Englishes - articles

All about Miami English

Linguistics professor Phillip M. Carter describes the linguistic history of Miami, features of Miami English (such as such as “get down from the car” instead of “get out of the car.”) and his own research into the subject.

Reading time: 6 minutes / The Conversation (USA)

The revenge of Indian English

This column by C.Y. Gopinath taught me that Grammarly has an Indian English setting, that an American of Indian descent called Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy is running for president on a conservative agenda, and that a counter clerk in Bengal might ask if Vickram is spelt with a bee for bictory or a bee for Bengal.

Reading time: 4 minutes / Mid-day (India)

How Amazon taught Alexa to speak with an Irish accent

The background, and some fun phonemic examples, of last year’s rollout of Alexa’s Irish accent. “Voice disentanglement” involves working on pitch, timbre, accent and prosidy. AI is also used to make the voice more conversational.

Reading time: 7 minutes / New York Times (USA; archived - so no audio files, I’m afraid!)

English dialects make themselves heard in genes

Genetic research on UK populations show that people with different accents tended to intermarry less than those with similar ones. Border regions were looked at, so the effect was not only due to physical proximity.

Reading time: 7 minutes / The Conversation (Europe)

Linguistics and politics

Elon Musk Deems ‘Cis’ A Twitter Slur

I found this Forbes article to have the best take on the latest Elon Musk Twitter controversy. The term “cis” is short for cisgender, meaning someone whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Musk has deemed the words “cis” and “cisgender” slurs on Twitter. J.K. Rowling’s response is unintelligible.

Reading time: 3 minutes / Forbes (USA)

US citizenship test changes are coming, worrying those with low English skills

The U.S. citizenship test is being updated, and some immigrants and advocates worry the changes will hurt test-takers with lower levels of English proficiency. It was updated in 2020 under Trump, but the Biden administration rolled those changes back. Now new changes are coming, including requiring a verbal response to questions like “what is happening in this picture?”

Reading time: 4 minutes / Report for America (via NBC, USA)

Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong on Kenyan English

Kenyan writer Carey Baraka interviewed 85-year-old giant of African writing Ngũgĩ wa Thiong for The Guardian. English is a big theme. The interviewer struggles with the idea that he works in English, as do many others, while Ngũgĩ’s opinion is:

“It’s like the enslaved being happy that theirs is a local version of enslavement,” he said. “English is not an African language. French is not. Spanish is not. Kenyan or Nigerian English is nonsense. That’s an example of normalised abnormality. The colonised trying to claim the coloniser’s language is a sign of the success of enslavement. It’s very embarrassing.”

Reading time: 35 minutes / The Guardian (UK)

In Finland and in the Netherlands universities are being asked to use less English.

Welcome to more than 100 new subscribers!

It has been a joy to see the subscribership of this newsletter tick steadily up. I’m getting close to hitting the 500-subscribers mark, and a fifth of those joined just in the last month. Welcome! Here’s hoping this issue won’t be a huge disappointment to you ;-)

It’s also really fun seeing where my readers are from. Lots of support from my Dutch home base (due to my writings on Dutch English), but plenty of folks from the rest of the world, too. My next goal is filling up those greys in Africa and Asia!

New Books

The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World

Cognitive scientists Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater show that language isn’t about hardwired grammars but about near-total freedom, something like a game of charades, with the only requirement being a desire to understand and be understood. They find compelling solutions to major mysteries like the origins of languages and how language learning is possible.

The United States of English: The American Language from Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century

Rosemarie Ostler explains how American English came to be distinctly American.

Academia

Warning: many links lead directly to a PDF

Why the metaphor of language being alive can be misleading

English professor Mario Saraceni makes the point that language isn’t alive because it doesn’t have a point of birth and because it doesn’t “do” anything. It is people that shape it.

Reading time: 4 minutes / The Conversation (Europe)

Tanzanian students who struggle with English fear being bullied - a major barrier to learning

Young people in Tanzania experience an abrupt transition to English when they enter Form 1 of secondary school from 14 years old. Underlying student fear of poor expression in a new language – and being laughed at or mocked by teachers and fellow students – was a prevalent barrier to learning and participation.

Global Anglicism Database (GLAD)

The Dutch language institute Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal has made the Global Anglicism Database available for public use. You can use it to look up terms that other languages have taken from English and put to use in their own language.

AI model GPT-3 (dis)informs us better than humans

A study among 697 English-speaking participants, show that in comparison with humans, GPT-3 can produce accurate information that is easier to understand, but it can also produce more compelling disinformation. Humans cannot distinguish between tweets generated by GPT-3 and written by real Twitter users.

ChatGPT as a COBUILD lexicographer

Results indicate that AI-generated definitions are comparable to those created by human lexicographers, while AI-generated examples and overall entries receive lower ratings.

The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics

The paper argues that, in view of the current boom in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and related developments of globalisation, research on English as a World Language should pay more attention to economic factors. Establishing English as the global lingua franca for a multilingual world and for multilingual speakers makes economic and political sense for the 21st century world.

Implications of World Englishes for SLA pedagogy with psycholinguistic considerations

In this paper, we review current research on World Englishes and their implications for SLA (Second Language Acquisition) pedagogy. We argue that SLA pedagogy must embrace the diversity of English language learners, acknowledge the linguistic and cultural variability of English, and promote intercultural communicative competence.

‘Know know married’: playfulness of Manglish in social media platforms

In this article, we adopt a World Englishes perspective and unpack modern Manglish, comparing it with a number of other named colloquial varieties, particularly Chinglish, Singlish, and Taglish, and we argue that certain usages of Manglish may serve a positive function, so they are worth researching and analysing.

Afterthoughts and Right Dislocation in Colloquial Singapore English: An Experimental Approach

In colloquial Singapore English you can say “She can manage all the project, capable lah.” The “lah” means something like “capable she is”. Grammatically, this is called an “afterthought”. The author carried out acceptability studies with native Singlish speakers for this and other structures.

Spelling Variation in Inner-Circle Englishes

Analyses the distribution of the most distinctive spelling variants—i.e. -our/-or, -re/-er and -isation/-ization—in the varieties of the inner circle from a synchronic perspective by means of a corpus-based investigation of English online.

Neocolonial Englishes and Linguistic Inequality: Marshallese language and education in the diaspora

Although Marshallese children in the U.S. primarily use English, they are marked as English learners (EL) in school, at rates above and beyond other groups. An analysis of these children’s English reveals that they produce many non-standard orphosyntactic features, features that are consistent with Marshallese English (ME), a world English used in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). We call the children’s English neocolonial (…) because in schools their language is subject to the language policies of the U.S. federal government, the children’s former colonizers.

Sri Lankan English and linguistic hierarchies in the English language classroom

The language ideologies of eight in-service English teachers in Sri Lanka. The data suggest that the participating teachers, despite their shared MA program in teaching English as a second language, have a wide range of understandings of SLE which tend to be complex and unclear, often tangling together ideas of language variety, formality, and proficiency, echoing disagreement among language scholars.

English as a Lingua Franca among adolescents: Transcultural Pragmatics in a German-Tanzanian School Setting

The first book-length investigation into adolescents’ use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), it also explores ELF in an African-European context, which has received little attention in ELF research so far.

Manifestations of identity and alterity in english: Between semantic divergence and structural convergence

The different meanings ascribed to the same words or structures in e.g. British and American phrases, and their consequently tricky translation into Romanian.

Intra-ethnic variation in the English spoken by Iraqi Arabs in London and Glasgow: A sociophonetic study (PHD thesis)

44 first-generation Iraqi Arab speakers, aged 40-70 and stratified by migration experience, dialect and gender, were recorded reading target words in a carrier phrase. Iraqi speakers who reported integration attitudes and behaviour within and outwith the community showed monolingual-like production patterns.

And finally…

“Encanto” in English English slang

World English bird hint

Hint: English was first brought to this country in the late 12th century. Answer here.

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