Vote for the Oxford word of the year 🗳️, AI allowing quadriplegics to speak 🎤, What is a nong? 🤔
Welcome to English in Progress, the bi-weekly newsletter that keeps you updated on the English language. Fresh in your inbox every other Wednesday.
Word of the Year
Word-of-the-year season, or WOTY season for insiders, is ramping up!
Cambridge has announced its word of the year: “homer”, informal American English for a home run in baseball. They chose this word to celebrate the word game “Wordle”. In May 2022, “homer” caused the biggest spike in lookups for all the Wordle solutions because non-Americans were so puzzled by the word. It cost many people their winning streaks ;-) Cambridge has made a really swanky webpage for this word of the year with cool graphics and moving graphs.
Australia’s word of the year is “teal”. This word references independent candidates who unseated mostly male Liberal MPs in the 2022 Australian federal election. Their campaign T-shirts were teal in colour. Other shortlisted words were “shrinkflation” (the reduction in the size, quantity or quality of a pre-packaged product while pricing remains the same or increases) and “eshay” (a teenager or young man who is part of a group associated with anti-social behaviour and characterised by the wearing of certain brand-label clothing).
Oxford Australian Children’s word of the year, meanwhile, is “privacy”. This word was chosen by language experts assessing more than 87,117 short stories written by students aged between seven and thirteen years for Storyathon, a national online story-writing event.
Oxford has put its word of the year up for a vote for the first time this year, you can vote here. The contenders are “metaverse”, “#Istandwith” and “goblin mode”.
Lynne Murphy, a linguist who compares American and British English, is looking for nominations for her Word of the Year. Either a British term that has recently been adopted by Americans, or an American term that has recently been adopted by Brits. Reading the comment section, where people are asked to make suggestions, can be quite fun.
British English
When Americans copy British English, one of the things they do is say “thank you veddy much”. This is, however, not how British people pronounce the word “very”.
Paper language magazine Babel shared a free link to an article in their November issue by British linguist Jane Setter about H-dropping (e.g. saying “‘er” instead of “her”). It’s one of those paper-magazine-online links, probably most comfortable to read on a big screen. (They also have a taster magazine that is free to read online: Best of Babel.)
Publishing network Steady has shortlisted 25 regional British words that it wants to revive by having podcast and radio hosts adopt them.
Lexicologist Susie Dent writes about Americanisms in British English for iNews.
Author and pronunciation coach Geoff Lindsey compares the English spoken by King Charles III to that of his sons William and Harry in this YouTube video. Why has the royal family’s accent changed so much, now, when Charles’ accent is so similar to his late mother’s?
Education
The UK is investing millions of pounds to improve language lessons.
In Canada, an English proficiency test for nurses was using such formal and outdated English, that even native English speakers were failing it.
In Australia, students are allowed to sit their finals while using language-advice tool Grammarly.
New words
Merriam-Webster has added 500 words to its official Scrabble dictionary, among them “bae”, “verbing”, “zonky” (=half zebra, half donkey) and “deepfake”. It has also taken 200 offensive words away.
Cambridge has observed “effective altruism” (a movement and area of research that aims to work out the best way of helping other people and solving the world’s problems) and “thriftifarian” (someone who is well off but pretends they have to spend less money and not buy certain things so that they appear to be in the same situation as most other people), among others.
Tech
From 2024, Apple will change its trigger phrase from “Hey, Siri” to just “Siri”.
As I noted in my first newsletter, conversational AI (the type of AI that runs customer service chatbots and assistants like the above-mentioned Siri) is booming and making huge improvements right now. Here is a list of companies that are making great leaps in the space. If you want to have fun chatting with a robot, character.ai is a cool website to visit. This is also a good website to recommend to non-native speakers wanting to practice their English.
Neuroprosthetics allow people suffering from locked-in syndrome to speak using only brainwaves. This article gives an in-depth look into the technology, and discusses how AI might be giving the last push to make it actually work in practice.
Germany-based machine translation company DeepL is now worth 1 billion dollars.
Meta’s latest large language model Galactica was supposed to help scientists. Instead, it mindlessly spat out biased and incorrect nonsense. It was only online for three days.
Writer Jean Trinh shares a sweet story in Wired about how translation apps have helped her bridge language-barrier gaps with her family.
Bits and bobs
EFNIL, the European Federation of National Institutions for Language, has set the deadline for submissions for its next Master’s Thesis Award for 15 January 2023. The award is an annual competition to find the best master’s theses in Europe within the area of language use, language policy and multilingualism.
Not very surprising, but still important: climate activists and politicians use different words when it comes to climate change.
Nerdy comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Serial has a good philology joke.
Why do we say “big dumb hat” but “dumb little dog”? (Note: this blog isn’t very readable on a small screen.)
Kate Burridge of Melbourne-based Monash university discusses the Australian slang word “nong” (= stupid person). People are using it less because they are worried it is racist, but its etymology suggests the meaning came about due to the sound of the word, rather than any actual meaning.
And finally, British newspaper The Guardian has published an article about the exclamation mark!
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