28487
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Word of the Day
unexampled
Definition: (adjective) Without precedent; unparalleled.
Synonyms: new.
Usage: It was a time of unexampled prosperity, and the once poor family was able to move to a lovely mansion in an affluent neighborhood.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
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Language Log
Linear algebra and wine
A recent email from Jean Gallier to the members of Penn's Department of Computer and Information Sciences included this picture
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/GallierLinearA_Wine.jpg
…under the comment "Apparently the Greeks had already figured that there was a connection between wine and linear algebra." The connection to Linear A(lgebra) is provided by Jean's two-volume 2020 book Linear Algebra and Optimization with Applications to Machine Learning.
A glimpse of Jean's personal connections with wine is suggested by this page…
As for the Linear A symbol for wine, it's covered in Ester Salgarella 2020 article "A Note on the Linear A & B Ideogram AB 131/VIN (um)‘Wine’and Its Variants: References to Time Notation?", which includes Figure 1:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SalgarellaFigure1.png
The Cretan version is in Figure 2:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SalgarellaFigure2.png
And the Egyptian one is in Figure 3:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SalgarellaFigure3.png
For the "Time Notation" part, I invite you to read the paper.
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Language Log
"She stopped every single one of them"
A couple of months ago ("A new Trump speaking style?", 8/10/2024), I gave an example to support my subjective impression that Donald Trump's speaech is becoming less fluent. The clip included some cases of word-finding difficulties, as in this characterization of vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
She picked a
radical left
uh
man
that is uh
he's got things done that he's-
he has positions that are just not-
it's not even possible to believe
that they exist.
In a more recent 9/28/2024 rally speech, after another spate of re-starts and pauses, Trump produces a phrase that seems to be the opposite of what he means:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Putting it in context:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Earlier this year, while Rachel was out on a run
she was brutally raped and murdered by this
disgusting
illegal alien,
who was let into the United States
by Kamala
and her
lax law. She-
they- they-
every one of my killer-
we had the great-
she would have-
he would have never been able to get in.
She stopped every single one of them.
She was the border czar,
now she doesn't admit that.
In earlier years (see e.g. "Presidential fluency", 10/31/2017), I was struck by the fact that Trump rarely used filled pauses like "uh" and "um", or silent pauses ("dead air"), or rapidly-repeated initial function words like "she- they- they-".
I don't have systematic counts to show that things have changed — maybe later — but I'll register again my subjective impression of a difference.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
meathead
a stupid person
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Idiom of the Day
liquid courage
slang The decrease in timidity or inhibition that comes from imbibing alcoholic beverages. Watch the video
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Language Log
Silent Suiters
A bluesky post linked to this reddit page showing a display of the "rack of consent badges at a furry convention":
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/FurryConsentBadges.png
Being ignorant of furry lingo, my first thought was that "silent suiter" was an idiosyncratic spelling for "silent suitor", but Google's AI Overview set me straight:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/AI_OverviewFursuiter.png
For more on the etiquette involved, there's the page "Do's and Don'ts of interacting with fursuiters" from 2024 Anthrocon.
And it turns out that there's a whole wikifur, whose Fursuit page seems even better than Wikipedia's. It also includes links to Furry Dictionaries and Furspeech.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
known as
to be called a certain name, even though it mightn't be a real or official name
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Word of the Day
uncongenial
Definition: (adjective) Not suitable to your tastes or needs.
Synonyms: incompatible.
Usage: I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition not uncongenial with my own.
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Language Log
Gyro, part 2
There's a chain of about half-a-dozen fast food restaurants called Gyro Shack in Boise, Idaho, where I find myself now. They're cool little shops, just as Boise is a cool (big-)little city spread across a broad, flat plain (nearly three thousand feet in elevation) that lies at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
Several things about gyros perplex me. One is how the cones of meat on the vertical, rotating spit cohere and do not fall to pieces, but docilely hanging in place oozing their mouthwatering juices waiting to be sliced off, layer after layer. One traditional gyro meat recipe states: "Processing the meat in the food processor and overworking it ensures that the proteins in the meat stick together, like sausage." (source) I still don't get it, since sausage has a casing to hold it together.
Never mind about that physical matter for now, What really bothers me (and lots of other people), is how to pronounce that four-letter word.
Some people say "hero", others pronounce it as in "gyroscope", one person told me to pronounce it like the name of the official currency of the European Union, and so on.
Here are some phonetic transcriptions: /ˈjiː.ɹoʊ/, /ˈjɪɹoʊ/, /ˈʒɪɹoʊ/, /ˈd͡ʒaɪɹoʊ/
Audio recordings here.
Another puzzlement: like so many classical, canonical foods of the Mediterranean (baklava, kebab, kofta, meze, taramasalata, etc., etc.), is gyro a Greek food or a Turkish food — or ultimately Arabic or Persian (and which way?), with a bit of Italian tossed (!) in?
Here's the etymology for gyro: Back-formation from the plural gyros, from Greek γύρος (gýros); from the turning of the meat on a spit (as a calque of Turkish döner into Greek). Doublet of gyre and gyrus.
(Wiktionary)
sandwich made from roasted lamb, 1971, originally in reference to the meat itself, as roasted on a rotating spit, from Modern Greek gyros "a circle" (see gyre (n.)). Mistaken in English for a plural and shorn of its -s.
(Etymonline)
Once Gyro Shack breaks out of Boise, it may become part of the giant fast food industry, or maybe, like Nebraskan-Eastern European runza, it will remain an ethnic, regional specialty — except that gyros are already everywhere as street food. Somehow, they seem to resist industrialization and business models. They are the niche food of niche foods. Selected readings
* "Gyro" (6/26/20)
* "Nontrivial script fail" (5/18/11) — 7th comment
* "'Ingenious herd of charcoal fire'" (4/5/11)
* "Why Do Canadians Eat Donair?" (4/13/07)
* "If you're uneducated you say it right" (2/2/09) — in the comments
* "Ajvar and caviar" (8/1/22)
* "Respect the local pronunciation: runza and Henri" (6/13/24)
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Language Log
Is English a "creole language"?
The first two panels of today's SMBC: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_KingArthur0.png The rest of the strip: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_KingArthur1.png The AfterComic:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_KingArthurAfter.png
The mouseover title: "Hoping the Welsh isn't lol."
The premise seems to be that King Arthur has arisen again, to deal with socio-economic crises in today's Britain. I'll leave interpretation of the Arthur legend to others, and focus on the description of English as "this weird French-German creole language".
We can discard the "weird" part as a humorous invocation of what all 6th-century inhabitants of the British Isles might have thought about its now-dominant language.
The introduction of French into the English stew was of course several centuries after Arthur's (fictional) time — but the question of whether English should be described as a "French-German creole language" is a small part of a larger controversy over what a "creole language" is, whether it is a category with sharp boundaries, which languages belong in the category (or belong where on a spectrum of creole-ness), and even whether the whole category is problematic.
The Wikipedia article starts with this definition:
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form (often a pidgin), and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period.
For a carefully-reasoned argument against Middle English (the French-German hybrid) belonging in the creole-language category, we can cite Manfred Görlach's 1986 chapter "Middle English – a creole?":
Among various new approaches creolistics, the investigation and description of pidgin and Creole languages, has proved to be a most stimulating, if to many scholars controversial, discipline. […]
The attraction that pidgin and Creole languages have held for many scholars has prompted historical linguists to look for earlier language states or situations comparable to those that led to the formation of pidgins and Creoles in post-Renaissance societies. Most Romance languages, Yiddish, Middle English, Bulgarian, or even the Germanic languages as a group within the Indo-European family of languages, have all been compared with, or even claimed to be, creole languages. […]
Unless simplification and language mixture are thought to be sufficient criteria for the definition of a Creole or creoloid (and I do not think they are, since this would make most languages of the world Creoles, and the term would consequently lose its distinctiveness), then Middle English does not appear to be a creole.
The Wikipedia article's section on Controversy offers a useful sketch of the issues. A sketch of the sketch:
Creoleness is at the heart of the controversy with John McWhorter and Mikael Parkvall opposing Henri Wittmann and Michel DeGraff. In McWhorter's definition, creoleness is a matter of degree, in that prototypical creoles exhibit all of the three traits he proposes to diagnose creoleness: little or no inflection, little or no tone, and transparent derivation. In McWhorter's view, less prototypical creoles depart somewhat from this prototype. […] Objections to the McWhorter-Parkvall hypotheses point out that these typological parameters of creoleness can be found in languages such as Manding, Sooninke, and Magoua French which are not considered creoles. Wittmann and DeGraff come to the conclusion that efforts to conceive a yardstick for measuring creoleness in any scientifically meaningful way have failed so far. […] Mufwene (2000) and Wittmann (2001) have argued further that Creole languages are structurally no different from any other lang[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
kisser
the mouth
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Idiom of the Day
a line in the sand
A figurative boundary that someone or some group refuses to cross or beyond which no further advance or compromise is accepted. (Used especially in the phrase "draw a line in the sand.") Watch the video
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Everything is Samuel L. Jackson's Fault (2013) Pt. 2 #samuelljackson #sketchcomedy
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Language Log
The languages of refugees fleeing to Bosnia
"A path towards freedom: the new route to Europe for desperate Chinese migrants
Revealed: a small but growing number of Chinese people are travelling to the Balkans with the hope of getting into the EU" Amy Hawkins," The Guardian (9/24/24)
In a sleepy Bosnian town, barely five miles from the border with the European Union, a crumbling old water tower is falling into ruin. Inside, piles of rubbish, used cigarette butts and a portable wood-fired stove offer glimpses into the daily life of the people who briefly called the building home. Glued on to the walls is another clue: on pieces of A4 paper, the same message is printed out, again and again: “If you would like to travel to Europe (Italy, Germany, France, etc) we can help you. Please add this number on WhatsApp”. The message is printed in the languages of often desperate people: Somali, Nepali, Turkish, the list goes on. The last translation on the list indicates a newcomer to this unlucky club. It is written in Chinese.
“Staying here is not a very good option,” one of the Chinese refugees says, but “if I go back to China, what awaits me is either being sent to a mental hospital or a prison.”
Fleeing from China to Bosnia is dangerous and expensive. So why do Chinese do it?
Part of the reason that Bosnia is an attractive staging post for Chinese migrants, is that like its neighbour Serbia, it offers visa-free travel. Aleksandra Kovačević, spokesperson for Bosnia’s Service for Foreigner’s Affairs, a government department, said that Chinese people were “gaining statistical significance as persons who increasingly violate migration regulations of Bosnia and Herzegovina”. She said that along with Turkish citizens, Chinese people were trying to use legal entry into Bosnia as a way to “illegally continue their journey to the countries of western Europe”.Part of the reason that Bosnia is an attractive staging post for Chinese migrants, is that like its neighbour Serbia, it offers visa-free travel. Aleksandra Kovačević, spokesperson for Bosnia’s Service for Foreigner’s Affairs, a government department, said that Chinese people were “gaining statistical significance as persons who increasingly violate migration regulations of Bosnia and Herzegovina”. She said that along with Turkish citizens, Chinese people were trying to use legal entry into Bosnia as a way to “illegally continue their journey to the countries of western Europe”.
Everybody who wants to escape from China has their own reasons for taking such a huge risk. Often it is a burning desire for freedom of speech or craving for access to information that is severely limited by the Great Firewall. From private and public sources, it is clear that these restrictions are growing increasingly harsh as time passes, so don't expect the volume of Chinese refugees fleeing to Bosnia to diminish during the coming months and years.
Since (as shown by a UNHCR graphic in The Guardian article), the numbers of Chinese seeking asylum in Europe rose dramatically in the years following 2012, you can put 2 and 2 together and figure out what the probable main cause is. Selected readings
* "RUN = wrong" (9/29/22)
* "RUNning away from Shanghai" (5/13/22)
* "Epochal Shanghai drone quote: 'Control your soul’s desire for freedom.'" (5/8/22)
* "Fissures in the Great Firewall caused by X" (6/10/24) — with a very long bibliography on censorship in China
[h.t.: many Language Log readers called this article to my attention]
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: seismic
This word has appeared in 308 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
get out of (2)
to take off clothes because they're uncomfortable or inappropriate
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Word of the Day
overabundance
Definition: (noun) A going or being beyond what is needed, desired, or appropriate.
Synonyms: overmuch, overmuchness, superabundance.
Usage: Four-year-olds have an overabundance of energy and quickly exhaust even the most active, fit adults.
Discuss
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
itch
a strong desire to do something (n.) | to have a strong desire to do something (v.)
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Idiom of the Day
the lion's den
A particularly dangerous, hostile, or oppressive place or situation, especially due to an angry or sinister person or group of people within it. Watch the video
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Language Log
Gobsmacked!
Ben Yagoda's new book, Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English, is "A spot-on guide to how and why Americans have become so bloody keen on Britishisms—for good or ill". The publisher's blurb:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/gobsmacked.jpg
The British love to complain that words and phrases imported from America—from French fries to Awesome, man!—are destroying the English language. But what about the influence going the other way? Britishisms have been making their way into the American lexicon for more than 150 years, but the process has accelerated since the turn of the twenty-first century. From acclaimed writer and language commentator Ben Yagoda, Gobsmacked! is a witty, entertaining, and enlightening account of how and why scores of British words and phrases—such as one-off, go missing, curate, early days, kerfuffle, easy peasy, and cheeky—have been enthusiastically taken up by Yanks.
FWIW, Amazon now ranks this book as the #1 New Release in Lexicography.
For a preview, see Ben's 9/26/2024 Guardian article "The other British invasion: how UK lingo conquered the US", which starts like this:
I am an American, New York-born, but I started to spend time in London in the 1990s, teaching classes to international students. Being interested in language, and reading a lot of newspapers there – one of the courses I taught was on the British press – I naturally started picking up on the many previously unfamiliar (to me) British words and expressions, and differences between British and American terminology.
Then a strange thing happened. Back home in the United States, I noticed writers, journalists and ordinary people starting to use British terms I had encountered. I’ll give one example that sticks in my mind because it is tied to a specific news event, and hence easily dated.
In 2003, it became clear that the US would invade Iraq. Months passed; we did not invade. Then we did. Journalists faced a question: what should we call that preliminary period? In September 2003, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman chose a Britishism, referring to “how France behaved in the run-up to the Iraq war”.
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uage, and that Creole is in fact a sociohistoric concept (and not a linguistic one), encompassing displaced population and slavery. DeGraff & Walicek (2005) discuss creolistics in relation to colonialist ideologies, rejecting the notion that Creoles can be responsibly defined in terms of specific grammatical characteristics. […]
On the other hand, McWhorter points out that in languages such as Bambara, essentially a dialect of Manding, there is ample non-transparent derivation, and that there is no reason to suppose that this would be absent in close relatives such as Mandinka itself. Moreover, he also observes that Soninke has what all linguists would analyze as inflections, and that current lexicography of Soninke is too elementary for it to be stated with authority that it does not have non-transparent derivation.
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2024-25: Dark Arts
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
get back (2)
If you get something back, it is returned to you after you've lent it, lost it, or had it stolen.
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Word of the Day
thence
Definition: (adverb) From that place; from there.
Synonyms: therefrom.
Usage: The train went south into Switzerland and thence on to Italy
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Language Log
Freudian slip of the week
That'll be tough to explain… [image or embed]
— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) September 25, 2024 at 6:00 PM
The material below is taken from my lecture notes for my undergraduate Introduction to Linguistics course at Penn:
In figuring out how the brain works, one standard line of inquiry is to look at how it fails. This approach was first taken to the problem of speech generation by Sigmund Freud, in his 1901 work The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
Freud focused on the substitution of words either in speech (lapsus linguae, slips of the tongue) or in writing (lapsus calami, slips of the pen). The substitution is contrary to the conscious wishes of the person speaking or writing, and in fact sometimes is subversive of these wishes. The speaker or writer may be unaware of the error, and may be embarrassed when the error is pointed out. Freud believed that such "slips" come from repressed, unconscious desires.
Freud's general term for such errors was "faulty action (Fehleistung)," which has been translated as the pseudo-Greek scientism parapraxis. The colloquial label is "Freudian slip."
In Freud's analysis, a slip of the tongue is a form of self-betrayal. Here are a few of the examples he cited.
The President of the Austrian Parliament said " I take notice that a full quorum of members is present and herewith declare the sitting closed!"
The hotel boy who, knocking at the bishop's door, nervously replied to the question "Who is it?" "The Lord, my boy!"
A member of the House of Commons referred to another as the honourable member for "Central Hell," instead of "Hull."
Another professor says, "In the case of the female genital, in spite of the tempting … I mean, the attempted ….. "
When a lady, appearing to compliment another, says "I am sure you must have thrown this delightful hat together" instead of "sewn it together", no scientific theories in the world can prevent us from seeing in her slip the thought that the hat is an amateur production. Or when a lady who is well known for her determined character says: "My husband asked his doctor what sort of diet ought to be provided for him. But the doctor said he needed no special diet, he could eat and drink whatever I choose," the slip appears clearly as the unmistakable expression of a consistent scheme."
Slips of the tongue often give this impression of abbreviation; for instance, when a professor of anatomy at the end of his lecture on the nasal cavities asks whether his class has thoroughly understood it and, after a general reply in the affirmative, goes on to say: "I can hardly believe that this is so, since persons who can thoroughly understand the nasal cavities can be counted, even in a city of millions, on one finger … I mean, on the fingers of one hand." The abbreviated sentence has its own meaning: it says that there is only one person who understands the subject.
There has been quite a bit of research on slips of the tongue since 1901, and (to the extent that Freud's theory is susceptible of empirical test) this research tends to undermine Freud's conception, and to substitute another one. The characteristics of slips are the result of the information-processing requirements of producing language. If this theory is correct, then slips tell us much less than Freud thought about unconscious intentions, and much more about language structure and use.
Linguistic theory tells us that there is a hierarchy of units below the level of the sentence: phrase, word, morpheme, syllable, syllable-part (such as onset or rhyme), phoneme, phonological feature. Slips can occur at each of these levels. In addition, slips can be of several types: substitution (of one element for another of the same type), exchange (of two elements of the same type within [...]
Language Log
Our supersubstantial rice
"Some idioms and terms pertaining to Japan's favorite grain", by Yuko Tamura, The Japan Times (9/25/24)
Rice is an essential part of the Japanese diet, so naturally it's also a part of the language. In fact, the word for "meal," ご飯 (gohan), also means "cooked rice." Before it's cooked, however, you'll see it referred to as 米 (kome). Below are a few terms and idioms that either use the kanji for rice or refer to it in some form.
* 朝飯前 (Asameshi mae): No sweat, a piece of cake. Something that can be done before breakfast. Ex., それくらい朝飯前だよ (Sore kurai asameshi mae da yo, That’s no trouble at all).
* 日常茶飯事 (Nichijō sahanji): Common, everyday things such as drinking tea or eating food that are a part of daily life. Ex., 彼の遅刻は日常茶飯事だ (Kare no chikoku wa nichijō sahanji da, His being late is a usual thing).
* 同じ釜の飯を食う (Onaji kama no meshi o kuu): A strong friendship forged through thick and thin, typically by sharing meals out of the same pot. The casual verb 食う (kuu) is often replaced by 食べる (taberu, to eat). Ex., 同僚とは同じ釜の飯を食べた仲だ (Dōryō towa onaji kama no meshi o tabeta naka da, My colleague and I have gone through many ups and downs together).
* 冷や飯を食う (Hiyameshi o kuu): Literally meaning, “eat cold rice,” implying receiving poor treatment. Ex., あの人は失言して以来、冷や飯を食わされている (Ano hito wa shitsugen shite irai, hiyameshi o kuwasarete-iru, Since the slip-up, that person has been hung out to dry).
* 実るほど頭を垂れる稲穂かな (Minoru hodo kōbe o tareru inaho kana): People who hold wisdom and virtue become more humble because empty rice stalks are likely to stand upright and full ones bend from the weight of their grains. Ex., 私の座右の銘は「実るほど頭を垂れる稲穂かな」です (Watashi no zayū no mei wa “minoru hodo kōbe o tareru inaho kana” desu, My motto is, “The boughs that bear most hang lowest”).
* 青田買い (Aota-gai): Buying a rice field before the harvest for future yields; investing in something expected to grow. Ex., いい立地の物件は青田買いするべきだ (Ii ritchi no bukken wa aota-gai suru beki da, It’s better to secure a well-located property ahead of time).
Rice, for Japanese, is as quintessential as bread is for us.
Our daily bread — the central pillar of the Lord's Prayer
Matthew 6:11 Give us this day our daily bread. (King James Version) Original Greek text and Syriac and Latin translations
τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον (tòn árton hēmôn tòn epioúsion dòs hēmîn sḗmeron)
ܗܒ݂ ܠܢ ܠܚܡܐ ܕ݂ܣܘܢܩܢܢ ܝܘܡܢܐ (haḇ lan laḥmā ḏ-sūnqānan yawmānā)
panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie
From the time I learned the Lord's Prayer as a child, I always felt that "daily" was either redundant or stylistically poor for its usage in combination with "day" earlier in the verse. When we look at the Greek, we find that it is problematic, since the word on which "daily" is ultimately based, ἐπιούσιον epioúsion is a dis legomenon (a word that occurs only twice within a given context), not quite a hapax legomenon (a word of which only one instance of use is recorded). Its meaning is poorly understood and contested among scholars of diverse backgrounds. All things considered, I take "supersubstantial", based upon morphological analysis, as closest to the original intended meaning. If you want to see how mind crunchingly challenging the translation of a single word from the Bible can be, take a gander at this Wikipedia article on ἐπιούσιον epioúsion. Selected readings
* "The rice is prosperous" (7/15/14)
* "A revolutionary, new translation of the gospels" (5/4/21) — "tomorrow's loaf" (Sarah Ruden)
* "'Pain Quotidien' and 'Raid the Larder'" (8/27/12)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
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