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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: varnish
This word has appeared in 20 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Idiom of the Day
(something) won't get (someone) anywhere
Something, typically a certain behavior, will not help someone progress or succeed in any way. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
mo
moment
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Institute, extracted and analyzed the samples for the study.
“This is not like testing the DNA of someone alive,” Silva told The BBC. “The DNA is very fragmented and damaged. However, we were able to [decode] enough of it. The first thing we saw was that genetically he was very different” from the Romano-British individuals they’d previously studied.
…
That still didn’t connect the dots, though. How could the scientists prove that he was born in Eurasia and immigrated to the place of his death?
For this, they examined his teeth. Even two millennia after his death, the tissue harbored chemicals in varying amounts at different layers. Offord Cluny underwent pronounced dietary changes at ages 5 and 9 and began to level out around 13.
…
The changes, the team found, followed chemical trends you could expect from a person adapting to available food sources while traveling west across Europe.
Millets and sorghum grains, scientifically called C4 crops, are plentiful in the region where Sarmatians lived. These dissipated in his diet as he matured. Wheat — more common in Western Europe — replaced them.
“The [analysis] tells us that he, and not his ancestors, made the journey to Britain. As he grew up, he migrated west, and these plants disappeared from his diet,” said Janet Montgomery of Durham University.
These results are extremely interesting and important because they show that Offord Cluny made this long trip from the Pontic-Caspian steppes to Britain, not just in one lifetime, but within the period of a few years.
The Iranian-speaking peoples who were present in Britain during the Roman period had a profound impact on many aspects of culture, e.g., the Arthurian story cycles and their associated images. Some of these men participated in the defense of Hadrian's Wall (begun in AD 122).
"The Sarmatians in Europe: Gravestone of a Sarmatian Horseman"
The term "Sarmatians" is believed to refer to various horse-riding peoples from the territory of present-day Iran. From the 3rd century BC, they settled in present-day southern Russia and Ukraine, where they displaced the Scythians. From the 3rd century onward, Sarmatian tribes also settled in the Roman Empire, often adopted Roman citizenship and served in Roman legions, having been hired as auxiliary troops. In Britain, for example, the Sarmatians defended Hadrian's Wall against the attacks of the Scottish Picts. The photograph shows the gravestone of a Sarmatian horseman from the Roman settlement of Deva Victrix (in present-day Chester in northern England).
images/cc363e14-292a-4ba9-a5be-a45ab712361d.jpeg" rel="nofollow">https://www.ieg-ego.eu/illustrationen/der-noerdliche-schwarzmeerraum/die-sarmaten-in-europa-grabstein-eines-sarmatischen-reiters/@@images/cc363e14-292a-4ba9-a5be-a45ab712361d.jpeg
Gravestone of a Sarmatian horseman who fought for the Romans in Britain, Grosvenor Museum, Chester, England, colour photograph, 2011, photographer: Wolfgang Sauber; image source: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Some Rights Reserved Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
For a masterful treatment of the impact of Romano-Iranian forces on English tradition, see:
C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor, From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail (New York and London: Garland, 1994; rev. pb. 2000). In the British journal, Religion, 28.3 (July, 1998), 294-300, I [VHM] wrote a review in which I pointed out that the celebrated motif of a mighty arm rising up out of the water holding aloft the hero's sword can also be found in a medieval Chinese tale from Dunhuang. That review is available electronically from ScienceDirect, if your library subscribes to it. Otherwise, I think this version on the Web is a fairly faithful copy. Selected readings
* "A medieval Dunhuang man" (7/17/23)
* "The Ossetes" (7/25/21)
* "Ashkenazi and Scythians" (7/13/21)
* "Research reveals man born thousands of miles to the east traveled to Cambridgeshire 2,000 years ag[...]
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Language Log
Meme collision of the week
Lauren Jack ("Do you hurkle-durkle? What the Scottish word taking over social media means and where it came from", The Scotsman 1/24/2024) embeds a TikTok video from 7/18/2023:
devriebrynn?refer=embed">@devriebrynnme my Scottish ancestors = just chillin’ as a culture♬ original sound – Devriebrynn
Ben Zimmer quickly picked it up lexicographically — "To ‘Hurkle-Durkle,’ or Lounge in Bed, Is a TikTok Trend That’s 200 Years Old: A 19th-century Scottish rhyming phrase has resurfaced and gone viral", WSJ 3/1/2024. And a Google News search for the term turns up dozens of recent articles.
So I should have been ready for 6,272 words from Lance Eliot at forbes.com on how the "Trend Of ‘Hurkle-Durkling’ In Bed Gets Boosted To High Form Via Modern Generative AI" (7/7/2-24). The article starts with a lot of standard thoughts about hurkle-durkling, morality, electronic media, mental health, and so on. But it does bring in generative AI, starting with this framing question:
"Modern-day generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are readily used while lounging around in bed. Does this then change the proposition underlying the considered negative perceptions of doing a hurkle-durkle? Should we reconsider the nature of hurkling-durkling?"
It continues with "a quickie backgrounder" on generative AI, for those who've been meditating in a cave for the past few years, and a list of "significant approaches that intertwine generative AI and hurkle-durkling". And it ends with "a series of dialogues with ChatGPT" about the topic, based on the prompts
* “What is hurkle-durkling?”
* “Is hurkle-durkle good or bad?”
* “Give an example of a person lying in bed that opts to do a hurkle-durkle and what is possibly going on in their mind as they do so.”
* “If a person was doing a hurkle-durkle, how might generative AI be of use to them during that time?”
I'm tempted to write a program that uses the same template to generate a long article about an arbitrary topic, but I have a feeling that Mr. Eliot has been there already.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
sit up (2)
to not go to bed until later than usual
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day
dicker
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for July 8, 2024 is:
dicker \DIK-er\ verb
To dicker is to talk or argue with someone about the conditions of a purchase, agreement, or contract.
// My favorite thing about flea markets is dickering over prices.
See the entry >
Examples:
“They haggled and dickered and bargained through a good number of dealerships.” — Terry Woster, Tri-State Neighbor (Sioux Falls, South Dakota), 7 Dec. 2023
Did you know?
The origins of the verb dicker likely lie in an older dicker, the noun referring to a quantity of ten animal hides or skins. The idea is that the verb arose from the bartering of, and haggling over, animal hides on the American frontier. The noun dicker comes from decuria, the Latin word for a bundle of ten hides, and ultimately from the Latin word decem, meaning "ten." The word entered Middle English as dyker and by the 14th century had evolved to dicker.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
XYZ
"code" said to alert someone that their zipper, or fly, is open
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e.g. [delve]. And PubMed returns the number of citations (abstracts or available texts) per year containing the lemmas in question — for the relative frequency results, normalizing for the number of available citations per year, you can use Ed Sperr's github page. I haven't tried to separate the alternative forms, but that should not matter for the points I'm making below.)
My first observation is that decades-long trends in relative PubMed word usage are common, and not just because of real-world references like ebola, covid, and chatgpt. For example, [explore] has been gaining on [investigate] for 25 years or so, with acceleration over the past decade: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PubMed1.png http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PubMed2.png It's also worth noting that trends of similar size (and often similar direction) can be found in more general sources than PubMed, e.g. Corpus of Historical American English: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/COHAdelve2a.png http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/COHAdelve3.png And the next thing to notice is that the changes in [delve], though extremely large in proportional terms, are small in terms of actual citation frequency, e.g. 5,526 in 2024 for [delve] compared to 108,616 for [explore]: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PubMed3.png The proportional change for [delve] from 2022 to 2024 is indeed impressive (numbers below are from Ed Sperr's github page — the 2024 data is only for part of the year, obviously…)
* citations 629 to 5,526, factor of 8.8; citations per 100k 35.37 to 591.33, factor of 16.7
But if every PubMed citation containing a form of [delve] were written (or edited) by ChatGPT, those 591.33 citations per 100k would amount to just 0.59% of the year's citations. That's lot less than the "at least 10%" claimed by the article, which would throw us back into the evaluation of the overall statistical model.
And the proportional changes from 2022 to 2024 for their other chosen words are substantially smaller, e.g.
* [showcase]: citations 1,900 to 4,470, factor of 2.4; per 100k 106.85 to 478.74, factor of 4.48
* [surpass]: citations 1,984 to 4,348, factor of 2.2; per 100k 111.57 to 465.67, factor of 4.17
* [emphasize]: citations 17,945 to 22,151, for a factor of 1.2; 1009.13 to 2372.36, factor of 2.35
And [delve] has been gaining in relative frequency on (for example) [explore] since 2009, long before ChatGPT was available to researchers, even though [explore] has been gaining in popularity during that time: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PubMed4.png In the broader COHA collection, [delve] has been increasing in popularity since the 1940s: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/COHAdelve1.png None of this explains [delve]'s proportional change factor of 16.7 from 2022 to 2024 in citations per 100k, but it does show that there are cultural trends (even fads) in word usage. And it's also not clear why ChatGPT should promote [delve] and not e.g. [probe] or [seek] or [sift] — though maybe it's because of who they hired for RLHF?
[See also "Bing gets weird — and (maybe) why" (2/16/2023); "Annals of AI bias" (9/23/2023) ]
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Learn English Through Football
Euro 2024 Football Phrase day 23: Come from Behind
Euro 24 Football Language Phrase Day 23: Come from Behind Our day 23 football phrase from Euro 2024 is to come from behind: a phrase that can be used to describe both games played on the day. Don’t forget we have hundreds more explanations of football language in our football glossary and we also have […]
The post Euro 2024 Football Phrase day 23: Come from Behind appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Idiom of the Day
junkyard dog
An especially nasty, vicious, or savage person or animal (especially a dog). Of a person, often used in the phrase "meaner than a junkyard dog." Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
juice
energy, power
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Language Log
Text trumps art
On a visit to the British Museum last week, Zihan Guo spotted this captivating relief in the Assyrian collection. You may not be able to see it upon first glance, but she was especially transfixed by the inscription running midriff on the eagle-head figure:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/nimrud.jpg
The inscription is easier to see in this Flickr image.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/nimrud crop1.jpg
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/nimrud crop2.jpg
I asked Hiroshi Kumamoto what's up with writing all over the artwork?
He replied:
The picture seems to be one of the panels in the NW palace of Nimrud. The inscription must be the so-called "Standard Inscription" which is repeated with little variation.
For more information on the inscriptions, see this work (pdf for download) on them.
And here's the accompanying explanation:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/nimrud2.jpg
Hiroshi further explained:
If it is correct that the reliefs and inscriptions are from the NW Palace of Nimrud, it comes from the reign of Ashurnasirpal II in the 9th C BCE and not from that of Ashurbanipal in the 7th C BCE.
Chinese officials, scholars, artists, and emperors did the same thing to the most famous art of their land:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/nimrud3.jpg
Presumably, their imprimaturs (!) enhanced the value of the work.
So far as I know, the most (in)famous emperor for adding his writing to art was Qianlong (1711-1799; r. 1735-1796; emperor emeritus 1796-1799), of whom Hajni Elias has said:
Yes, without a doubt it was Qianlong.
Not only his seals but he had no qualms having his poems (much of which, according to the late Prof. Frederick Mote, were substandard and I cannot agree with him more) inscribed on beautiful objects such as the Song Guan vase in the British Museum (photos and description, including reference to Qianlong's poem inscribed on the bottom, may be found here).
In fact, I often challenge my students, offering them a reward, if they can find a piece from the Imperial collection that does not bear Qianlong's signature.
What an insufferable egotist!
Selected readings
* "Language nudges Art"
* "Mandarin translation issues impeding the courts in New York" (6/20/24) — see the comments for the meaning of "chop", i.e., "seal"
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t's also normal for many words and phrases to undergo analogous changes in a given language at the same time, although the endpoints are typically different in both discourse-structural and social dimensions. For some observations on the social dimension, see e.g. Charlyn Laserna et al., "Um . . . Who Like Says You Know: Filler Word Use as a Function of Age, Gender, and Personality", 2014. And for some examples of varied function, see e.g. Kerry Mullan, "Et pis bon, ben alors voila quoi! Teaching those pesky discourse markers." International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning 2106:
Discourse markers have been described as “nervous tics, fillers, or signs of hesitation”, and are frequently dismissed as features of lazy or inarticulate speech. Yet in fact they have a number of crucial functions in spoken interaction, such as buying time, managing turn taking, linking utterances, introducing a new topic and indicating the degree of speaker involvement. Discourse markers are said to be used more in conversational speech than in any other form of communication. For this reason, it is essential that we teach our language students how to recognise, understand and use these markers in spoken interaction. […]
The ubiquity of discourse markers in spoken discourse cannot be overestimated. French is no exception. As seen in this title of this paper (borrowed from Auchlin, 1981), French speakers can create a meaningful utterance with nothing more than a string of discourse markers. And yet, while often dismissed as semantically empty, discourse markers are essential to language and culture, and so to intercultural competence. As Wierzbicka says (1991, p. 341):
There are few aspects of any language which reflect the culture of a given speech community better than its particles. Particles are very often highly idiosyncratic: “untranslatable” in the sense that no exact equivalent can be found in other languages. They are ubiquitous, and their frequency in ordinary speech is particularly high. Their meaning is crucial to the interaction mediated by speech; they express the speaker’s attitude towards the addressee or towards the situation spoken about, his assumptions, his intentions, his emotions. If learners of a language failed to master the meaning of its particles, their communicative competence would be drastically impaired.
For the phrase in the title of Auchlin 1981, Mullan suggests the approximate translation:
Mais heu, pis bon, ben alors voilà quoi!
But er, then, well there you have it!
The interpolations most often featured here have been UM and UH:
"Young men talk like old women", 11/6/2005
"Fillers: Autism, gender, age", 7/30/2014
"More on UM and UH", 8/3/2014
"UM UH 3", 8/4/2014
"Male and female word usage", 8/7/2014
"UM / UH geography", 8/13/2014
"Educational UM / UH", 8/13/2014
"UM / UH: Lifecycle effects vs. language change", 8/15/2014
"Filled pauses in Glasgow", 8/17/2014
"ER and ERM in the spoken BNC", 8/18/2014
"Um and uh in Dutch", 9/16/2014
"UM / UH in German", 9/28/2014
"Um, there's timing information in Switchboard?", 10/5/2014
"Trending in the Media: Um, not exactly…", 10/7/2014
"UH / UM in Norwegian", 10/8/2014
"On thee-yuh fillers uh and um", 11/11/2014
"Labiality and feminity", 12/16/2014
"UM/UH accommodation", 11/24/2015
"UM/UH update", 12/13/2015
Some UM /UH comparisons across (varieties of) languages can be found in "Variation and change in the use of hesitation markers in Germanic languages", 2016.
See also "I mean, you know" (8/19/2007) and "You know, I mean" (8/14/2016).
Even in English, there are many un- or under-studied "interpolations" — and the situation in other languages and cultures is even more open.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
appeal to
If something appeals to you, you like it.
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Word of the Day
lidless
Definition: (adjective) Watchful; vigilant.
Synonyms: sleepless.
Usage: He was vigilant—a lidless watcher of the public weal—and took great care to make sure that all was well with his neighbors.
Discuss
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o", Phys.org, by The Francis Crick Institute (more information available here)
[Thanks to Sunny Jhutti]
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Language Log
A Romano-Sarmatian soldier in circa 2nd c. AD Britain
We have occasionally mentioned Sarmatians on Language Log, but usually in association with the Scythians, of whom we have often spoken (most recently here, with extensive bibliography).
These two peoples of ancient times both spoke languages in the Iranian language family and lived in the area north of the Black Sea. The languages and cultures of the Scythians and Sarmatians were related but distinct. In particular their styles of warfare were different. The Scythians were noted as mounted archers. They may have been the inventors or one of the inventors of the stirrup. The stirrup enabled mounted archers to fire (shoot) arrows reasonably accurately while riding. The Scythians attacked in a mass firing of arrows. If their adversaries were not overwhelmed by the hail of arrows then the Scythians turned and rode to a safe distance for regrouping to mount another mass attack.
Most adversaries were overwhelmed by the Scythian battle tactics. It was only the Sarmatians who found a successful counter-strategy to withstand the Scythians. The Sarmatian warriors and their mounts were protected with armor. Usually the armor consisted of metal plates of bronze or iron sewn onto leather garments. This armor enabled the Sarmatians to withstand a Scythian attack. After a Scythian onslaught the Sarmatians would attack the Scythians with fifteen-foot-long lances. The Sarmatians were probably the originator of the armored knights of medieval Europe.
(source)
Before focusing on the single ca. 2nd c. AD Sarmatian who is the main subject of this post, we would do well to learn more about the Sarmatians themselves.
The Sarmatians (/sɑːrˈmeɪʃiənz/; Ancient Greek: Σαρμάται, romanized: Sarmatai; Latin: Sarmatae [ˈsarmatae̯]) were a large confederation of ancient Iranian equestrian nomadic peoples who dominated the Pontic steppe from about the 3rd century BC to the 4th century AD.
The earliest reference to the Sarmatians is in the Avesta, Sairima-, which is in the later Iranian sources recorded as *Sarm and Salm. Originating in the central parts of the Eurasian Steppe, the Sarmatians were part of the wider Scythian cultures.[3] They started migrating westward around the fourth and third centuries BC, coming to dominate the closely related Scythians by 200 BC. At their greatest reported extent, around 100 BC, these tribes ranged from the Vistula River to the mouth of the Danube and eastward to the Volga, bordering the shores of the Black and Caspian seas as well as the Caucasus to the south.
(Wikipedia)
Now we have a detailed scientific report about one of those Sarmatian soldiers who made the roughly 1,500 mile trek to Romano-Britain during the early part of the first millennium AD. Ancient Skeleton From Southern Russia Surprises UK Scientists, by Sam Anderson, ExplorersWeb (December 27, 2023)
Offord Cluny 203645 was a complete, well-preserved male skeleton, buried without any personal effects in a Cambridgeshire ditch. A team led by the Francis Crick Institute could tell the remains were clearly ancient. But with no contextual clues to go on, they might have hit a dead end.
Updated forensic technology intervened, and provided the first biological proof of a certain, far-flung immigration pattern during the Roman Empire.
The man was a Sarmatian, and the team’s tests proved he made it from his homeland in what is now the southern Russia/Ukraine area to his final destination in the United Kingdom.
The article explains how the archeologists found where the man came from:
First, they extracted DNA from a tiny bone in his inner ear. This turned out to be his best-preserved body part containing the most complete DNA samples. Dr. Marina Silva, of the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at the Francis Crick[...]
Language Log
Another meme collision
Today's SMBC:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_SiliconValleyBaptists.png
The mouseover text: "Wishing I had just taken this job instead of joking about it."
The aftercomic:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_SiliconValleyBaptistsAfter.png
For more, check out anything by Ray Kurzweil…
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: parched
This word has appeared in 83 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Idiom of the Day
be not just another pretty face
To have distinguishing achievements, intelligence, skills, or abilities beyond what was or may have been assumed. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
extralegal
Definition: (adjective) Not permitted or governed by law.
Synonyms: nonlegal.
Usage: The vigilantes believed they were simply dispensing an extralegal form of frontier justice.
Discuss
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Language Log
Kanji brush writing on an iPad
The article is in Japanese, but you should be able to get an idea of what's going on from the videos and stills.
iPad書道はいいぞ pic.twitter.com/P4hregIAl1
— 書きちらし (@kakichirashi) June 29, 2024
As we would say in Japanese: 珍しい【めずらしい】 (mezurashii) ("amazing!)!
The app used is this. It is called Zen Brush 3.
Selected readings
* "Writing characters and writing letters" (11/7/18)
* "Swype and Voice Recognition for mobile device inputting" (1/22/14)
* "The esthetics of East Asian writing" (4/7/12)
[thanks to Hiroshi Kumamoto]
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Language Log
Are LLMs writing PubMed articles?
Kyle Orland, "The telltale words that could identify generative AI text", ars technica 7/1/2024
In a pre-print paper posted earlier this month, four researchers from Germany's University of Tubingen and Northwestern University said they were inspired by studies that measured the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by looking at excess deaths compared to the recent past. By taking a similar look at "excess word usage" after LLM writing tools became widely available in late 2022, the researchers found that "the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words" that was "unprecedented in both quality and quantity."
To measure these vocabulary changes, the researchers analyzed 14 million paper abstracts published on PubMed between 2010 and 2024, tracking the relative frequency of each word as it appeared across each year. They then compared the expected frequency of those words (based on the pre-2023 trendline) to the actual frequency of those words in abstracts from 2023 and 2024, when LLMs were in widespread use.
The results found a number of words that were extremely uncommon in these scientific abstracts before 2023 that suddenly surged in popularity after LLMs were introduced. The word "delves," for instance, shows up in 25 times as many 2024 papers as the pre-LLM trend would expect; words like "showcasing" and "underscores" increased in usage by nine times as well. Other previously common words became notably more common in post-LLM abstracts: the frequency of "potential" increased 4.1 percentage points; "findings" by 2.7 percentage points; and "crucial" by 2.6 percentage points, for instance.
The cited paper is Dmitry Kobak et al., "Delving into ChatGPT usage in academic writing through excess vocabulary", arXiv.org 7/3/2024:
Recent large language models (LLMs) can generate and revise text with human-level performance, and have been widely commercialized in systems like ChatGPT. These models come with clear limitations: they can produce inaccurate information, reinforce existing biases, and be easily misused. Yet, many scientists have been using them to assist their scholarly writing. How wide-spread is LLM usage in the academic literature currently? To answer this question, we use an unbiased, large-scale approach, free from any assumptions on academic LLM usage. We study vocabulary changes in 14 million PubMed abstracts from 2010-2024, and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words. Our analysis based on excess words usage suggests that at least 10% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs. This lower bound differed across disciplines, countries, and journals, and was as high as 30% for some PubMed sub-corpora. We show that the appearance of LLM-based writing assistants has had an unprecedented impact in the scientific literature, surpassing the effect of major world events such as the Covid pandemic.
This claim may very well be right — I haven't evaluated their statistical model — but there are some things about the argument that leave me skeptical.
The first thing to note is that some of the cited increases are much more "abrupt" than others, with forms of the verb delve leading the list, as shown in their Figure 1: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/AllegedLLMwords.png And their Figure 2(a), captioned "Frequencies in 2024 and frequency ratios (r). Both axes are on log-scale": http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/AllegedLLMwords2.png (I believe that the paper's authors downloaded the PubMed data and did their own searches and counts, but if you do your own exploration on the PubMed site, keep in mind that PubMed apparently searches by lemma, so that a search for "delves" also hits on "delve", "delving", "delved" — which I'll signal in the usual way with square brackets,[...]
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
empty out
to remove everything from inside something
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Word of the Day
haggle
Definition: (verb) To bargain, as over the price of something; dicker.
Synonyms: chaffer, higgle, huckster.
Usage: He preferred to be overcharged than to haggle over such a trivial item.
Discuss
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rder”, which meant to relate, repeat or recall, which in turn comes from the Latin recordārī.
https://images.theconversation.com/files/604594/original/file-20240703-18-xukath.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip
A Spanish medieval flute (early 14th century). Manessische Liederhandschrift 848, fol. 423v.
However, the recorder I am referring to is not the device used to record but the “straight flute”, a musical instrument. Despite its very recognisable origins, no one knows why in English, the “straight flute” – flauto dolce, in Italian, flûte à bec in French, and blockflöte in German – is called a “recorder”. It certainly doesn’t record anything.
Historical sources have been confused since its first attestations. The earliest appearance of the word is from 1388, in a list (in Latin) of musical instruments owned by the future King Henry IV. There, it’s documented as “i. fistula nomine Recordour” (“a pipe called Recordour”). This makes it look like a proper noun, with the initial character capitalised. In 15th-century England, the word “recordour”, with a lowercase initial, meant a chief legal officer of a city.
There are some theories. The sound of the recorder was compared with that produced by birds’ songs, which are repetitive and, therefore, would develop a “recording” loop – but that feels far-fetched.
In the past, I have worked on the etymologies of the words “ocarina” and “gemshorn”, and my focus is now on “recorder”. The reconstruction of the origin stories of these “proper words” could tell us a lot about our ancestors, their mindsets, and their cognitive strategies in naming what was surrounding them.
Even neologisms are typically formed from a combination of existing words or the shortening or distortion of an existing word. They do not arise ex nihilo. Selected readings
* "Etymologizing and fantasizing: economy and relish" (2/26/22) — with a helpful bibliography
* "Words with no etymology?" (6 years ago)
[h.t. Chips Mackinolty]
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Language Log
Bird, boy, girl, dog, recorder: etymology unknown
"Five common English words we don’t know the origins of – including ‘boy’ and ‘dog’", Francesco Perono Cacciafoco*, The Conversation (7/4/24)
[*See the author's extraordinary academic profile here.]
The author begins by describing the act of naming items in the world, the etymological study of words, the comparative method, the relationship of English to Germanic and thence to the Indo-European family, and how their vocabularies are all connected.
However, the process doesn’t always work. The English lexicon includes some terms known as “proper words”, which today apparently exist only in English. Cognates for them cannot be found in any other language.
These are very simple and common words but being unique, we cannot apply the comparative method to them and therefore cannot reconstruct their origins. These “proper words” represent an exciting puzzle of the English language. Here are five examples. 1. Bird
“Bird” sounds Germanic, but doesn’t have cognates in any other Germanic language. It can be found in Old English as a rare variant of bridd, indicating a “young bird”.
Old English speakers used fugel, as in “fowl”, as a standard term for bird. Up to the 15th century, “bird” was used not only to describe a young bird, but also a young animal in general – even a fish or a child. 2. Boy
Who (or what) was, originally, a “boy”? No one knows. In the 13th century, a boie was a servant, but already in that time the provenance of the word was obscure. A century later, the term started being used to indicate a male child. The word doesn’t sound Germanic, but it’s not clear whether it was imported to England by the Normans either. One interpretation traces back the term to an unattested vulgar Latin verb, *imboiare (in etymological notation, the asterisk indicates a word that has been reconstructed on the basis of the comparative method, rather than found in source material), possibly connected with the Latin boia, meaning yoke or collar, and with the concept of slavery. 3. Girl
Since the 14th century, gyrle was a word used to indicate a child, with no gender distinction. Despite the apparent simplicity of the term, so far nobody has been able to reconstruct its origins. Some scholars have connected it with the Old English word gierela, meaning garment, with a semantic transition presumed from “child’s apron (garment)” to, simply, “child”. Others think that “girl” belongs to a set of words that also includes “boy”, “lass” and “lad”, which could have derived from other terms that cannot be directly linked to them any more. Whatever the truth is, the mystery of “girl” persists. 4. Dog
“Dog” comes from Old English docga, a very rare word later used in Middle English to depict a specific, strong breed – the mastiff.
In Old English, hund was the general Germanic word until the term docga replaced it almost completely in the 16th century. Now, “hound” is semantically specialised and indicates a hunting dog. So far, nobody has been able to reconstruct the etymological root of docga, and no ancient English word appears to be related to it.
“Dog” is therefore a true lexicological mystery of the English vocabulary. Probably the breed it was originally indicating became popular enough to be identified with the notion of “dog” in itself, but this doesn’t explain the provenance of the word.
The same puzzling origins are shared by other zoological terms in the English lexicon, like “pig, "stag” and “hog”, which are all etymologically unclear. Interestingly, the widespread word for “dog” in Spanish, perro, is also completely obscure in its origins. 5. Recorder
“Recorder” is something of an intruder in this list of etymological oddities, because we know its origins. It comes from the Middle French verb “reco[...]
Language Log
The evolution of verbal interpolations
Philip Castle, "Quelles sont les expressions les plus utilisées dans la langue française courante?", Quora 6/20/2024:
On va commencer par voilà. O-bli-ga-toi-re ! Il faut parsemer votre discours de "voilà", sans trop vous préoccuper de leur place ni de leur utilité dans la phrase, bien au contraire. Exemple : "Je me suis dit que voilà ce serait bien de voilà faire des efforts pour voilà améliorer mon français". Il faut aussi garder à l'esprit que ce mot merveilleux peut tout remplacer, y compris une fin de phrase. Exemple entendu ce matin sur France Inter : "En fait, le SMIC à 1600 €, je suis patron alors voilà". Vous avez compris le principe, il n'est pas nécessaire de terminer votre phrase, votre interlocuteur la finira lui même en remplaçant le voilà par ce qu'il veut.
We'll start with "voilà". O-bli-ga-to-ry! You need to sprinkle your speech with (instances of) "voilà", without worrying much about their place or their use in the phrase, in fact the opposite. Example: "Je me suis dit que voilà ce serait bien de voilà faire des efforts pour voilà améliorer mon français". You also need to keep in mind that this marvelous word can replace anything, including the end of a phrase. An example heard this morning on France Inter: "En fait, le SMIC à 1600 €, je suis patron alors voilà". You've understood the principle, it's not necessary to end your phrase, your interlocutors will finish it for themselves, replacing the "voilà" with whatever they like. Voilà is etymologically "look there", long since generalized to a wider range of uses, so that "voilà X" can be translated into English as something like
(here|there|this|that|these|those is|are X)
and plain "voilà" as something like "that's it" or "there you have it".
The entry in Wiktionnaire notes that
Ce mot est de plus en plus employé de manière holophrastique à l’oral aujourd’hui et prend une fonction cognitive de regroupement.
In spontaneous speech today, this word is increasingly used holophrastically and takes on a cognitive function of grouping.
…with a link to G. Col et al., "Eléments de cartographie des emplois de voilà en vue d'une analyse instructionnelle", Revue de Sémantique et de Pragmatique 2015:
Voilà est une unité dont l’usage se répand rapidement en français oral aujourd’hui. […] Voilà se caractérise par deux comportements essentiels ([VOILÀ + pause] et [VOILÀ + entités/procès]) et deux groupes de valeurs /statuts associés : valeur de balisage + statut d’interjection ; valeur prédicative + statut de pivot.
Voilà is an element whose usage is expanding rapidly in today's oral French. […] Voilà is characterized by two essential structures ([VOILÀ + pause] and [VOILÀ + entities/processes]) and two groups of associated values/functions: boundary marking + interjection; predication + pivot.
(Commenters will probably be able to suggest a better translation for the last sentence…)
Similar English words and phrases (look, look here) can also be used as filler words or discourse markers or interpolations or punctors or whatever term you prefer for such things. And it's common across languages for words and phrases to gradually lose their original syntactic function and semantic interpretation, evolving in the way described for voilà in the Quora post. We described such an evolution for like in "Divine ambiguity" (1/4/2004) and “‘Like’ youth and sex” (6/28/2011), quoting some analogous sprinklings of like from Muffy Siegel's 2002 paper "Like: The Discourse Particle and Semantics":
She isn't, like, really crazy or anything, but her and her, like, five buddies did, like, paint their hair a really fake-looking, like, purple color.
They're, like, representatives of their whole, like, clan, but they don't take it, like, really seriously, especially, like, during planting season.
I[...]
