28487
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
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the most iconic duo break down their latest single #Panera #FocusOnDemocracy #CreatorsForKamala
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➖ @EngSkills ➖
Language Log
Body wash
The bottle of body wash affixed to the wall of the shower in the Cheyenne hotel where I'm staying is labeled in French as "Savon Liquide pour le Corps".
English "body wash" is two words consisting of eight letters. "Savon Liquide pour le Corps" is five words consisting of twenty-three letters.
We've discussed the phenomenon of French verbosity versus English brevity before. See "The genius and logic of French and English" 4/11/23) and "French vs. English" (8/2/15) — also about "soap".
Surely, I thought, the French do not have to be that loquacious just to say something so simple as "body wash".
So I looked up "body wash" on Google Translate, and what did it give me but "gel douche". Ahem! Whenever I see "douche", it always makes me think of something else. Bing yields "nettoyant pour le corps". "Nettoyant" doesn't seem right, because — at least to me — it sounds more like some sort of cleaner.
So far as I can tell, "gel douche" is the French equivalent of English "body wash". Both are two words, though French is one letter longer.
Selected readings
* "'Tis the Season: blooming in translation and in art" (4/11/17)
* "Blooming, embellishment, and bombs" (8/17/15)
* "The rise of douche" (11/15/09)
* "'Douchey uses of AI'" (8/16/19)
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you’ve been served #FocusOnDemocracy #CreatorsForKamala #SecretService
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
tight (3)
fairly drunk, moderately inebriated
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Idiom of the Day
l'esprit de l'escalier
A French phrase meaning "the wit of the staircase"; a perfect witty remark, retort, or rejoinder that occurs to one after the fact or too late to be used. (Also written as "l'esprit d'escalier.") Watch the video
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Language Log
Australian government assessment of AI vs. human performance
"AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information, government trial finds:
A test of AI for Australia's corporate regulator found that the technology might actually make more work for people, not less." Cam Wilson, Crikey (Sep 03, 2024)
Artificial intelligence is worse than humans in every way at summarising documents and might actually create additional work for people, a government trial of the technology has found.
Amazon conducted the test earlier this year for Australia’s corporate regulator the Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) using submissions made to an inquiry. The outcome of the trial was revealed in an answer to a questions on notice at the Senate select committee on adopting artificial intelligence.
The test involved testing generative AI models before selecting one to ingest five submissions from a parliamentary inquiry into audit and consultancy firms. The most promising model, Meta’s open source model Llama2-70B, was prompted to summarise the submissions with a focus on ASIC mentions, recommendations, references to more regulation, and to include the page references and context.
For the full government report, click on the link embedded on "answer" in the second paragraph of the Crikey article above. The remainder of the Crikey summary article itself may be found in its sister publication, Mandarin, here:
Ten ASIC staff, of varying levels of seniority, were also given the same task with similar prompts. Then, a group of reviewers blindly assessed the summaries produced by both humans and AI for coherency, length, ASIC references, regulation references and for identifying recommendations. They were unaware that this exercise involved AI at all.
These reviewers overwhelmingly found that the human summaries beat out their AI competitors on every criteria and on every submission, scoring an 81% on an internal rubric compared with the machine’s 47%.
Human summaries ran up the score by significantly outperforming on identifying references to ASIC documents in the long document, a type of task that the report notes is a “notoriously hard task” for this type of AI. But humans still beat the technology across the board.
Reviewers told the report’s authors that AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information. Three of the five reviewers said they guessed that they were reviewing AI content.
The reviewers’ overall feedback was that they felt AI summaries may be counterproductive and create further work because of the need to fact-check and refer to original submissions which communicated the message better and more concisely.
The report mentions some limitations and context to this study: the model used has already been superseded by one with further capabilities that may improve its ability to summarise information, and that Amazon increased the model’s performance by refining its prompts and inputs, suggesting that there are further improvements that are possible. It includes optimism that this task may one day be competently undertaken by machines.
But until then, the trial showed that a human’s ability to parse and critically analyse information is unparalleled by AI, the report said.
“This finding also supports the view that GenAI should be positioned as a tool to augment and not replace human tasks,” the report concluded.
AI is not going away, but through careful appraisals such as this one from the Australian government, we are gaining a better perspective on its pluses and minuses. Selected readings
* "The AI threat: keep calm and carry on" (6/29/23)
* "ChatGPT has a sense of humor (sort of)" (6/10/23)
* "InternLM (6/10/23)" — with a long bibliography
[h.t. Kent McKeever]
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Maxwell Frost Talks ON THE RECORD About His Experience as the First Gen Z Member of Congress & More
Oh, to be young and in congress...
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t Expert: President Donald Trump Sounds Like Your Beer-Swilling Uncle".
FWIW, here's the passage from the 8/30/2024 Johnstown rally where Trump praises his "weave", along with some prior context:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
But to show you how bad the fake news is
some of the gold star families
you probably read this over the last couple of days
you know a lot of people say
"sir don't hit down, don't hit down on them the fake news"
"don't hit down sir, don't even mention-"
I said "should I mention it?"
"Don't hit down"
Well when it became sort of a story so I always like to mention it
cause it you don't mention it, our supporters
don't really know what to believe and they sort of believe this stuff
So the gold star families and uh
incredible people
and I got to know them because uh
thirteen families who were-
as you know lost a loved one
in Afghanistan
so needlessly
because we have incompetent-
we have an incompetent president
and vice president
grossly incompetent, and we had Milley and these incompetent generals
that should have been fired immediately not one person was fired over Afghanistan.
And by the way Russia saw that,
they went into Ukraine
because they said I had no idea that the United States was so stupid.
So-
and you know when I was running that I spoke to the leader
of the Taliban, he run- they run the whole deal
and I said "Abdul don't even think- don't do it Abdul don't do it"
because they were shooting- they were killing our people
and they were really killing them previous to me-
Obama- they were
killing them in the Obama administration and with Biden.
Biden.
But uh how did he do in the debate?
Friend of mine said
"Sir what did you do you ch-"
I said "How good was I tonight?" "Sir,"
"you probably got him thrown out"
"now you're going to have to run against somebody new."
I said "I don't care, I have to do what I have to do
we have to do what we have to do, right?".
And I look forward to the debate with her.
But what happened so with Afghanistan-
you know I do the weave.
You know what the weave is?
I'll talk about like nine different things and they all come back brilliantly together.
And it's like-
and friends of mine that are like English professors they say
"It's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen."
And- but the fake news, you know what they say?
"He rambled."
It's not rambling.
When you have- what you do is you get off a subject to
mention another little tidbit
and you get back onto the subject
and you go through this and you do it for two hours
and you don't even mispronounce one word.
And they say he had a hundred thousand people-
you know New Jersey we had a hundred and seven thousand people
they never like to report it so I say it but
in Wildwood New Jersey they announced a hundred and seven thousand people
and then they say-
well look at this, I mean if you gave me a big arena I would have-
we would've said {audio breakup}
But it is rather- you know but they say
as he rambled but in Afghanistan-
so what happens is you
take the wonderful families
[…]
I don't think that the Greeks (or later theorists of rhetoric) had a word for this kind of "weave". The technique is hardly Donald Trump's invention, but maybe we should adopt his term.
At least I think his use of the term is original, though the metaphor is is Out There…
Update — more mass-media commentary, mostly (too?) negative, as are the comments on social media…
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: benign
This word has appeared in 181 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
cut up
to cut something into small pieces
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Word of the Day
biennial
Definition: (adjective) Happening every second year.
Synonyms: biyearly.
Usage: They met at the biennial convention and lamented the fact that they would not see each other until the next meeting two years later.
Discuss
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
dirt
information used to damage someone's reputation
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Language Log
Crab raccoon
From the menu of a Chinese restaurant in Eden Prairie, MN:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/crabracoon.jpg
Because they are printed in black against a dark background, it is difficult to read the Chinese characters for the name of the dish, which are right below the English name:
sūzhà xièjiǎo
蘇炸蟹腳
"crispy fried crab legs"
It's actually worse than you thought.
First of all, the literal name of the dish is
sūzhà xièjiǎo
蘇炸蟹角
"crispy fried crab horns"
The confusion between "legs" and "horns" is due to the perfect homophony between jiǎo 角 ("horn"), the shape of the appetizer, and jiǎo 腳 ("leg"), its most distinctive ingredient. Other ingredients are wonton wrapper, cream cheese, scallions, and garlic. The "crab legs" may come by way of genuine crab meat or imitation crab meat.
You can't see the whole name of the dish more clearly as printed in white to the left on the menu, but the last character is unmistakably jiǎo 腳 ("leg"), which is technically wrong, because it should be jiǎo 角 ("horn").
More remarkable still is the fact that the last six letters of the white printing of the English name to the left indicates the correct spelling: Rangoons, though the singular "Rangoon" would be even more idiomatically correct.
Crab Rangoon, sometimes called crab puffs, crab rangoon puffs, cheese wontons, or cream cheese rangoons, are filled crisp dumpling appetizers served primarily in American Chinese restaurants.
The filling is made with a combination of cream cheese, crab meat or imitation crab meat, scallions or onion, garlic, and other flavorings. A small amount of the filling is wrapped in each wonton wrapper. The dumpling is then shaped by either folding the wrapper over into a triangle, by creating a four-pointed star, by gathering it up into a flower or purse shape, or by twisting it into the traditional wonton shape.
The appetizers are cooked to crispness by deep-frying in vegetable oil or by baking. They can be served hot or cold. In North America, crab rangoon is often served with a sauce for dipping such as soy sauce, plum sauce, duck sauce, sweet and sour sauce, or a hot mustard sauce.
So Crab Rangoon is as Chinese American as chop suey, Chun King or La Choy Chow Mein crispy noodles in a can, General Tso's chicken, and, of course, fortune cookies!! Whoever heard of true Chinese cooking with (Philadelphia!) cream cheese.
But where did it get its odd name, Crab Rangoon?
Crab rangoon was on the menu of the "Polynesian-style" restaurant Trader Vic's in Beverly Hills in 1955 and in San Francisco since at least 1956. Although the appetizer has the name of the Burmese city of Rangoon, now known by Burmese as 'Yangon', the dish was probably invented in the United States by Chinese-American chef Joe Young working under Victor Bergeron, founder of Trader Vic's. A "Rangoon crab a la Jack" was mentioned as a dish at a Hawaiian-style party in 1952 but without further detail and so may or may not be the same thing.
Although cream cheese was a staple of 1940s and 1950s American cuisine, it is not found in Chinese or Burmese cuisine.
They may be referred to as crab puffs, crab pillows, crab cheese wontons, or cheese wontons.
(source — also for the above quotation)
I think the "rangoon" part of the name is an attempt to make the appetizer seem Asian-exotic, and that it perhaps morphed away from "wonton". Just a guess, as wild as the dish itself. Selected readings
* "Wonton in Zanthoxylum schinifolium etzucc sauce" (5/6/15) — Sichuan peppercorn, in extenso
* "Wanton soup" (1/5/15)
* "Wantan soup for überman hubby" (3/15/14)
* "Not post-colonial enough?" (4/14/08)
* "Fun with pronunciation guides" (6/5/08)
[Thanks to Victor Steinbok]
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Word of the Day
digressive
Definition: (adjective) Tending to depart from the main point or cover a wide range of subjects.
Synonyms: excursive, rambling, discursive.
Usage: His speech was digressive and rambling, and we soon tired of the pointless tangents.
Discuss
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
Interestingly, there is another lesser-known interpretation of the same kotowaza claiming concern for the bride’s health and the family’s future progeny. Since Japanese eggplants are nearly seedless, there is the (symbolic) suggestion that the bride who indulges in the pleasures of eggplant might become “without seed” — in other words, childless. And even should the marriage be fruitful, eggplant’s cooling effect on bodily functions was thought to raise the odds of miscarriage. In this interpretation, a thoughtful but worried mother-in-law who avoids serving autumn eggplants to her daughter-in-law does so not out of greed but concern.
One of my favorite ways to prepare eggplant is stuffed with a miso-seasoned ground chicken mixture. The classic version of this dish is called “nasu no hasami age,” and the eggplant is traditionally deep-fried, though many home cooks (myself included) prefer to avoid this, especially in hot weather. Therefore, my rendition calls for a pan-seared adaptation.
A final note: After you’ve bought your eggplant from your local market, don’t toss them directly into the refrigerator, which will often cause the flesh to go spongy and flabby. Ideally, eggplants should be stored, wrapped in newspaper or paper towels, at room temperature in a cool location until you’re ready to cook.
[recipe and cooking method portion of article is omitted] Selected readings
* "aborigine / aubergine" (12/2/08)
* "Ajvar and caviar" (8/1/22)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Thigh Clapping, JD Vance and Panera: Grant and Ash (A Twink and a Red Head) Tell All At The DNC
Name a more iconic duo to speak to at the Democratic National Convention! Grant & Ash (@ATwinkandaRedhead) are breaking down their songwriting inspirations and shocking revelations in the Windy City. America's favorite couple are serving fun & games in the United Center.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
we are SO on the record with Maxwell Frost #CreatorsForKamala #FocusOnDemocracy #DNC2024
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: ensemble
This word has appeared in 609 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
muck up
If you muck something up, you do it badly and fail to achieve your goal.
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Word of the Day
ingenuous
Definition: (adjective) Lacking in cunning, guile, or worldliness.
Synonyms: artless.
Usage: His ingenuous delight in it was a delight to her, and a new and mutual love-thrill was theirs—because of a flower.
Discuss
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Maxwell shattered the living bejesus out of that glass ceiling #GenZ #FocusOnDemocracy #DNC2024
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Journalism & content creation king @TheKalenAllen ! #CreatorsForKamala #DNC2024
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Language Log
Trump's rhetorical "weave"
Shawn McCreesh, "Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius." NYT 9/1/2024:
For weeks, former President Donald J. Trump’s advisers have urged him to be more disciplined and to stop straying off-message.
But on Friday, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Trump insisted that his oratory is not a campaign distraction but rather a rhetorical triumph.
“You know, I do the weave,” he said. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”
This is (a version of) one of the points that I've made over the years in (too many) posts about Trump's speaking style. Back in 2015, Geoff Pullum posted about "Trump's aphasia", and I responded:
Geoff Pullum uses terms like "aphasia", and phrases like "I don't think there's any structure in there", in describing a quoted passage from Donald Trump's 7/21/2015 speech in Sun City SC. But in my opinion, he's been misled by a notorious problem: the apparent incoherence of much transcribed extemporized speech, even when the same material is completely comprehensible and even eloquent in audio or audio-visual form.
This apparent incoherence has two main causes: false starts and parentheticals. Both are effectively signaled in speaking — by prosody along with gesture, posture, and gaze — and therefore largely factored out by listeners. But in textual form, the cues are gone, and we lose the thread.
And in some of these posts, I've been tempted to use the term "weave" to describe the result, since the repeated layers of false starts and parentheticals are a bit like the patterns of overlaid and intersecting threads in woven fabric. "Thread" is a standard metaphor for connected topics in discourse, and for connected processes in computing — as in my phrase "we lose the thread".
I've always rejected the "weave" metaphor for Trump's rhetorical style, because his tissue of "threads" is so chaotic and irregular — though as I wrote in 2015,
Overall, I think the passage is entirely comprehensible, and in the context of the speech as a whole, even eloquent. The false starts and parentheticals may actually make the speech better, at least for people who are open to liking Trump and endorsing his ideas, by giving an impression of enthusiasm and genuineness.
As I've noted before, there are some better metaphors for this discourse style in a 19th-century poem by Arthur Hugh Clough:
Spare me, O mistress of Song! nor bid me remember minutely
All that was said and done o'er the well-mixed tempting toddy;
How were healths proposed and drunk 'with all the honours,'
Glasses and bonnets waving, and three-times-three thrice over,
Queen, and Prince, and Army, and Landlords all, and Keepers;
Bid me not, grammar defying, repeat from grammar-defiers
Long constructions strange and plusquam-Thucydidean;
Tell how, as sudden torrent in time of speat in the mountain
Hurries six ways at once, and takes at last to the roughest,
Or as the practised rider at Astley's or Franconi's
Skilfully, boldly bestrides many steeds at once in the gallop,
Crossing from this to that, with one leg here, one yonder,
So, less skilful, but equally bold, and wild as the torrent,
All through sentences six at a time, unsuspecting of syntax,
Hurried the lively good-will and garrulous tale of Sir Hector.
Trump is a teetotaler, but many others over the years have associated Trump's speeches with "the well-mixed tempting toddy" — see the many skits from 2015 linked here, where comedians lip-sync his recordings in the persona of "your drunk neighbor", "some wasted guy", "your drunk frat bro", etc. And there's an MSNBC news interview with John McWhorter in 2019, "Linguis[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
twerp | twirp
a silly, immature person
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Idiom of the Day
lemon law
A law requiring an automobile manufacturer or dealer to replace, repair, or refund the cost of an automobile that proves to be defective after purchase. Watch the video
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Language Log
Crab raccoon, part 2
[This is a guest post by Meme Master Mark (MMM), who says he's honored that I call him that: "3M is also from Minnesota" (see the first sentence).]
Having spent many of my formative years in Minnesota, "crab raccoon" makes perfect sense. This was a pretty disturbing tattoo: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/crabrac1.jpg And this one is sure to give you the heebie-jeebies: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/crabrac2.jpg [end of guest post; more than any other person I know, MMM is capable of speaking in memes, just as some people are highly proficient in emojis and emoticons]
pángxiè huànxióng / wǎnxióng / huǎnxióng
螃蟹浣熊
"crab raccoon"
For those who are curious about the etymology of the Chinese name for "raccoon", the two constituent morphemes mean "wash" ( from its custom of washing food before eating it) and "bear" (the zoologists and taxonomists can wrangle over that designation).
The Japanese follows the same logic, but not the same derivation:
araiguma
あらひぐま / アライグマ / 洗熊
"raccoon" (lit., "wash bear")
Cf. German Waschbär ("washing bear") and French raton laveur ("washing rat")
As for the English word "raccoon", it has a quite different source and meaning:
Names for the species include the common raccoon, North American raccoon, and northern raccoon. In various North American native languages, the reference to the animal's manual dexterity, or use of its hands is the source for the names. The word raccoon was adopted into English from the native Powhatan term meaning 'animal that scratches with its hands', as used in the Colony of Virginia. It was recorded on John Smith's list of Powhatan words as aroughcun, and on that of William Strachey as arathkone. It has also been identified as a reflex of a Proto-Algonquian root *ahrah-koon-em, meaning '[the] one who rubs, scrubs and scratches with its hands'. The word is sometimes spelled as racoon.
In Spanish, the raccoon is called mapache, derived from the Nahuatl mapachtli of the Aztecs, meaning '[the] one who takes everything in its hands'.
Its Latin name literally means 'before-dog washer'.[15] The genus Procyon was named by Gottlieb Conrad Christian Storr.[
(Wikipedia)
I must confess that I consider the raccoon to be one of the most captivating animals on earth. Although many of its attributes are attractive, two that are most beguiling and bewitching for me are its delicate (yet powerful) hands and its bandit mask, even more so than its banded tail. Selected readings
* "Neoguri: raccoon or raccoon dog?" (7/11/14)
* "The pig(s) and the raccoon" (8/30/18
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
move on
If you move on, you stop doing one activity and start doing another, or stop discussing one topic and start discussing another.
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Idiom of the Day
a legend in (one's) own mind
A person who affects or believes him- or herself to be of greater importance or notoriety than is actually the case. A humorous, ironic twist on the phrase "a legend in one's own lifetime." Watch the video
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