The narwhal bacons at midnight 🐋, will writers become programmers? 🖊️, cute Americans are fit 🤵
Welcome to English in Progress, the bi-weekly newsletter that keeps you updated on the English language.
Linguistics and lexicology, yum! Fresh in your inbox every other Wednesday.
New words
flurona - infected by the flu and covid-19 at the same time
phubbing - snubbing someone by taking out and staring at your phone
vivovore - an organism that eats viruses
GOAT - greatest of all time
productivity theatre - a way someone behaves at work that makes them appear to be working very hard, even if this is not the case
boomerang employee - someone who goes back to work for a company they have already worked for in the past
energy-positive - An energy-positive building generates more energy than it uses.
(Those last three from Cambridge)
Words of the year
Lynn Murphy, who compares US and UK English, chooses two words of the year each year. One British English word that has seen more usage in the US, and one American English word that has been adopted by Brits.
The UK word that has crossed the pond most conspicuously according to Murphy in 2022 is fit, in the informal British usage that means 'attractive, sexy'. The American word she selected is not exactly a much-used word in the UK, but it is a much talked-about word: homer. I’ll leave you to read the article as to why.
The Guardian suggests a few terms that characterised 2022 yet slipped under the radar: extremely hardcore, wild, effective altruism, tripledemic and more.
Arianna Huffington picks positive words each year. For 2022 her choice is human energy.
The Economist discusses a few contenders: decoupling (of Western businesses from China’s), friendshoring (a kind of reverse offshoring in which supply chains are redirected to stable, ideally allied countries), eco-anxiety, meta-verse and others, before finally settling on hybrid work as its word of 2022.
The blog Strong Language has presentedt its annual award for best f*cking swearing, I will say no more and simply provide the link for my strong-language-loving readers.
Tech
There are a few language-y predictions in Forbes’ 10 AI predictions for 2023. GPT-4 will be a big deal, data to train large language models is going to start running out, Google search will change, the concept of “LLMOps” (Large Language Model Operations) will emerge as a trendy new version of MLOps (Machine Learning Operations). (Soft paywall, 4 free articles)
This article looks even further into the future and predicts that AI presence on social media will move people to move into smaller groups online or even log off completely.
MIT Technology Review explains how to spot an AI-generated text. Among other things, robots use the word “the” more often than humans do, and the texts don’t contain any typos.
Everybody and their dog is rushing into capitalise from the AI chatbot craze, with Quora launching Poe, authors using it to spit out plots, some tech guys developing a bot that generates things to say during a work meeting, and other ones developing a Chrome extension that uses ChatGPT to answer your emails.
Will the ability to speak natural language to AI in the right way be more important than programming with code in the future? Perhaps. There is already a course on prompting on GitHub. Perhaps it will be the new job for all those writers and translators who are about to lose their jobs…
Odds and ends
The Latvian prime minister has an Irish accent when he speaks English. A journalist conjectures the reason is that he sat beside, and was friends with, an Irishman in the European Parliament for 10 years.
Stan Carey teaches us 10 Irish-English words and phrases, among them culchie (someone from the Irish countryside), codding (joking or fooling) and bold (naughty, mischievous).
The Guardian has attempted to invent the next Wordle-like word puzzle craze and has come up with Wordiply, which challenges you to make the longest possible word out of a three-letter one. The description of how they came up with it is funny and self-effacing.
Jen Doll of The LA Times argues we should stop using language that promotes toxic productivity; the feeling of constantly needing to be productive and fast. Phrases like “grabbing a quick bite” instead of “having dinner” and “jumping into the shower” instead of just having one.
LGBTQNation notes that the Oxford Dictionary added 18 queer-related words and new definitions in 2022, most notably perhaps new definitions for “top” and “bottom”.
This piece from Vox discusses the evolution of humour on the Internet, and while doing so also gives a wonderful overview of Internet English past, from “the narwhal bacons at midnight.” and “epic bacon” to “gamergate” and “alt-right”.
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Photo: flickr.com/photos/wordridden