What is English without THE French? 🥖, fastest and slowest talkers in the US 🗽, what does "up lit" mean? 🕮
Welcome to English in Progress, the newsletter that keeps you updated on the English language. Written by me, Heddwen Newton. Fresh in your inbox every other Wednesday.
Heddwen’s news
I’ve updated my list of websites and blogs about the English language AND my list of podcasts.
(I remember naïve Heddwen in November last year thinking “well, I must have almost all of them by now”. Hahaha. How wrong I was!)
I am currently working on a list of English linguistics conferences, so if you know of any I should include, please do reply to this email and let me know.
Speaking of conferences, I will be present at the online conference LingComm23 which will be held online from 6 to 10 February. It is a conference for people who work in, or are interested in, linguistic communications. In other words, people who write or speak about language. The first one in 2021 was excellent. I’ll be volunteering, so you’ll probably be able to find me at the information desk.
New words
A list of words and terms that I encountered in the past two weeks that were new to me
AI influencer/ virtual influencer - an influencer who is not a real person, but an artificial intelligence. (I have, however, also seen the term used to refer to a human influencer who promotes AI)
digital removalist - someone whose job is to remove any content from a person’s social media posts that may harm their reputation
fafo - f*ck around and find out (the outcome is not necessarily positive)
good time of day! - substitute for “good evening” or “good morning” when you don’t know what time it is for your global audience (seen on social media, can’t remember where!)
Hinjew - a person of Hindu and Jewish descent
phygital - a combination of physical and digital, e.g. for a marketing campaign or a retailer concept. When I first heard it last week I thought it was so ugly that it surely wouldn’t take off, but it has been around since about 2013 and is rising in popularity according to google N-gram
shadow pandemic - the increase in violence towards women during the Covid-19 pandemic
strawberry generation - used to describe the generation born from 1990s onwards who "bruise easily" like strawberries. A term originally from Taiwan, has been popular in Asia for a while, and is now perhaps moving to the rest of the world (my conclusion from a quick google, not from in-depth corpus research!)
rentvestor - someone who rents where they live and own property elsewhere as an investment
rizz - chaRISma, swagger. TikTok slang, funny article here.
to rizz someone up - to seduce someone
up lit - genre of novels in which people are nice to each other (“lit” is literature, compare “chick lit”)
Revivalist English
This post from LanguageHat and its comments led me down into a pocket of English-language enthusiasm I had no idea existed: a movement to revive English as it would have been without the Norman invasion and all its (mostly French) loanwords. The language you end up with is called Anglish, and includes words like wordbook (dictionary) and nameknown (famous).
There’s also a much more realistic version called Alternese, which assumes that without Norman French, English would still (of course) have changed a lot, but would have had more Scandinavian influence. The language you end up with looks a lot like German to me ;-)
Fastest and slowest talkers in the US
An e-learning company made a top 5 of fastest and slowest talkers in the US by state. (Fastest: Minnesota. Slowest: Louisiana). USA Today wrote a surprisingly nuanced article on the subject, interviewing linguist Dennis Preston, who explained that (surprise!) American accents do not bide by state lines.
Bits and bobs
The Guardian about Australian terms for food
Gen Z slang in the Oxford Dictionary
Books and bookshops in the UK vs in the US
Translator kids, people who had to translate for their immigrant families when little, tell their stories
The Oxford English Dictionary has added Indian English pronunciation files for certain words
A logistics company used ChatGPT to generate an 84-page glossary of warehouse terms
Merriam-Webster has bought the word game Quordle
An interview with English-usage guru Bryan Garner
Confusion at The Guardian when a (correct!) correction read: “This article was amended on 3 January 2023. The original furniture said the fireworks display was on Christmas Eve.”
Excellent clips from Ben Yagoda to illustrate the UK-to-US English word “fit”, including an SNL skit with American comedians pretending to be UK Love Island contestants.
Vox explains why actors have become so hard to understand recently, prompting many (including myself) to always have the subtitles on. (Video)
Buzzwords for 2023
NPR listed their buzzwords for 2023, and they are super uplifting (not): polycrisis (a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such as the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part), poverty, traveler surveillance (testing and gathering Covid data rather than preventing people from entering a country), wasting (the most life-threatening form of malnutrition), zero-dose children (those who had never received any of even the most essential vaccinations), tarmac to arm (getting aid to the people who need it rather than just the airport tarmac), gender food gap (referring to more women living with hunger than men), aridification (the increasing mismatch between supply and demand of available water), climate impact resilience (strategies to prepare for and help blunt the impact of climate change.)
As if that wasn’t enough, readers responded with even more fun words for 2023: elite-directed growth (elites making decisions that benefit themselves but are maladaptive for the population and environment), microplastics, precariat (a portmanteau of precarious and proletariat; poor people living in precarious circumstances), solastalgia (emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change), and superabundance (an amount or supply more than sufficient to meet one's needs).
Jee, thanks, NPR.
In the same vein, the BBC Future Wise Words column featured a long article about “The Bureau of Linguistical Reality”. Artists Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott have spent the past decade collecting and creating new words to describe feelings and experiences stemming from living in a world overshadowed by climate change. Happily, after all that misery from NPR, the BBC journalist ends the article with some hopeful words from the bureau, like preuphoreau (the bodily intuition that refreshing rainfall may be coming).
Language on social media
Purple burglar alarm
“Can you say purple burglar alarm?” was a popular question on social media last week. People who have a rhotic accent (i.e. they say the “r” in purple, burglar and alarm) have trouble saying the phrase, whereas for non-rhotic speakers it is a doddle.
Changing mouth movements to fit dubbing
People have been impressed by new AI technology that changes the movements of actors mouths so that they fit the voice-over actors when the film is dubbed into another language – do click through and watch the clip, it’s quite impressive.
The French 🥖
But the big social media story of the past two weeks was the Associated Press Stylebook noting “The French” among examples of “dehumanising labels”. People have been having fun with it; The Guardian article has some funny responses. Mark Liberman discusses the issue in-depth, and the comments are also interesting.
And to end with, I’d like to share this little comic I found:
What did you think of this newsletter?
I hope you love lexicology as much as I do, otherwise the answer will probably be “bad” ;-) You can also reply to this email to give me any feedback you fancy!