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#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Idiom of the Day
Jill of all trades(, master of none)
A woman who is skilled in or adept at a wide variety of tasks or abilities (i.e., the female equivalent of "Jack of all trades"). If used with "master of none," it implies that while competent in a variety of things, she is not highly skilled in a particular one. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
prostration
Definition: (noun) An abrupt failure of function or complete physical exhaustion.
Synonyms: collapse.
Usage: The weakness of the young missionary became so extreme that they had to lay him again on the bed, where a prostration, lasting for several hours, held him like a dead man.
Discuss
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Language Log
Good news for Tangutologists
Tangutologists and Old Chinese aficionados take note: the whole 2024 Festschrift for M.V. Sofronov, produced on the occasion of his 90th birthday in 2019, is now available via C. Harbsmeier's academia page: https://t.co/hGUhgrgauE pic.twitter.com/zH7zxY0YjG
— Wolfgang Behr (@behrwolf) June 27, 2024
Click on the illustration to embiggen, then follow the arrows to scroll horizontally through the pages of the table of contents.
Many thanks to Wolfgang Behr for calling this publication to our attention via X and to Christoph Harbsmeier for making it readily available on academia.edu.
I personally am particularly delighted to learn of this rich tribute to M. V. Sofronov because it constitutes an affirmation and validation for the hard work of my student, Nikita Kuzmin, who recently earned his Ph.D. in Tangut Studies and who has begun teaching it.
Selected reading
* "Polyglot Manchu emperor" (4/6/23) — especially in the comments
* "Tangut beer" (10/13/18)
* "Tangut workshop at Yale" (2/2/18)
* M. V. Sofronov, "Chinese Philology and the Scripts of Central Asia", Sino-Platonic Papers, 30 (October, 1991), 1-10.
[h.t. Geoff Wade]
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
A look back on alternative facts, a cabinet made up of idiots, and more in this #BestPresidencyEver
At tonight's debate Trump is going to tell you how great things were when he was President. Check out our series #BestPresidencyEver for a reminder of what it was actually like.
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Learn English Through Football
Euro 24 Football Phrase Day 14: Rank Outsider
Euro 24 Football Language Phrase (Day 14): Day 14, and in this football language post for Euro 24 we look at the phrase, ‘rank outsider‘ as the last games of the group stage were played. Don’t forget we have hundreds more explanations of football language in our football glossary and we also have a page […]
The post Euro 24 Football Phrase Day 14: Rank Outsider appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: expressly
This word has appeared in 112 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Word of the Day
motley
Definition: (adjective) Consisting of a haphazard assortment of different kinds.
Synonyms: assorted, miscellaneous, mixed, sundry.
Usage: The other occupants of the room, five in number, were all females, and they were still sleeping, piled high with a motley array of silks and furs.
Discuss
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
cut out (2)
to stop doing something, such as eating fatty foods or gambling or taking drugs, usually in order to improve one's health or one's life
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
The Long Haired Businessmen are forced to let go of Jay (Mascis)
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Why Sophia Benoit Almost Got Kicked Out Of Preschool (Bless These Braces) #shorts
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Ron Funches Makes Parenting Sound Simple (Bless These Braces) #shorts
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Learn English Through Football
Euro 24 Football Language Phrase (Day 12): Disciplinary Record
Euro 24 Football Language Phrase (Day 12): In this football language post we look at the phrase, ‘disciplinary record‘ as the 2024 Euros reach day 12 and the end of the group stages. Don’t forget we have hundreds more explanations of football language in our football glossary and we also have a page full of […]
The post Euro 24 Football Language Phrase (Day 12): Disciplinary Record appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Idiom of the Day
the jet set
A group of wealthy individuals who travel globally, especially by private jet, to frequent fashionable resorts, social events, and the like. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
Mickey Finn | Mickey | mickey
a drink to which a drug has been added to make the drinker sleepy or unconscious
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Learn English Through Football
Euro 24 Football Language Phrase (Day 11): Best third-placed sides
In this football language post we look at the phrase, 'best third-placed sides' as the 2024 Euros reach the end of the group stages
The post Euro 24 Football Language Phrase (Day 11): Best third-placed sides appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day
deference
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 28, 2024 is:
deference \DEF-uh-runss\ noun
Deference refers to respect and esteem that is appropriate to show to someone, such as a superior or elder. Something done in deference to, or out of deference to, someone or something is done in order to show respect for the opinions or influence of that person or thing.
// The children were taught to show proper deference to their elders.
// In deference to those who voted against the change, we'll be having another meeting to discuss how we can mitigate people's concerns.
See the entry >
Examples:
"The new bridge over the Colorado River linking Bullhead City and Laughlin officially has a name. It will be called Silver Copper Crossing.... The formal name was chosen in deference to the two states the bridge connects: Nevada is the Silver State and Arizona is the Copper State." — Bill McMillen, Mohave Valley Daily News (Bullhead City, Arizona), 21 May 2024
Did you know?
As you might have guessed, deference is related to the verb defer, meaning "to delegate" or "to submit to another's wishes." But we need to be specific when we tell you that both these words come from the Medieval Latin verb dēferre, which means "to convey, show respect, or submit to a decision," because there are two defers in the English language. The defer related to deference is typically used with to in contexts having to do either with allowing someone else to decide or choose something, as in "I'll defer to the dictionary," or with agreeing to follow someone else's decision, wish, etc., as when a court defers to precedent. The other defer traces to the Latin verb differre, meaning "to carry away in varying directions, spread abroad, postpone, delay, be unlike or distinct." That defer is typically used in contexts having to do with delaying or postponing something, as in "a willingness to defer the decision until next month."
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
ear candy
pleasant-sounding music
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Language Log
Stochastic parrots extended
Philip Resnick, "Large Language Models are Biased Because They Are Large Language Models", arXiv.org 6/19/2024:
This paper's primary goal is to provoke thoughtful discussion about the relationship between bias and fundamental properties of large language models. We do this by seeking to convince the reader that harmful biases are an inevitable consequence arising from the design of any large language model as LLMs are currently formulated. To the extent that this is true, it suggests that the problem of harmful bias cannot be properly addressed without a serious reconsideration of AI driven by LLMs, going back to the foundational assumptions underlying their design.
Phil offer this example:
A simple example demonstrates that this is not just an inconsequential observation about LLMs, but rather a fundamental property inherent in their design. Consider the word nurse, in its typical sense in English. Here are three statements that are statistically true about the concept that nurse denotes at this point in time and history.
*
* A nurse is a kind of healthcare worker.
* A nurse is likely to wear blue clothing at work.
* A nurse is likely to wear a dress to a formal occasion.
The first of these is a fact about the meaning of the word and does not vary with context. To assert that someone is a nurse and that they do not work in healthcare is a contradiction. And for people, or AI, to make use of the fact that nurses are healthcare workers is normatively fine.
The second statement is contingently true: it is true at the present time, but nothing about nurses makes it necessary. The statement is also normatively acceptable; for example, a person or an AI system classifying someone as nurse versus nonnurse is not engaging in harmful bias if it pays attention to the color of someone’s work clothes.
The third statement is also contingently true in the same sense. However, it would be normatively unacceptable, in many contexts, to use that statistical fact in making inferences or decisions. For example, in speaking with well-dressed people at a party, it would be considered inappropriate to simply assume that a woman in a dress was more likely to be a nurse than a man in a suit, even if the assumption is statistically justifiable.
Crucially, LLMs, as they are currently constituted and trained, have no basis for distinguishing among these three distinct statements about nurses. The representation of nurse in an LLM’s embedding space, and the contribution of nurse to contextual representations and inferences, makes no distinction between definitions versus contingent facts, nor between normatively acceptable versus unacceptable representations and inferences. It is distributionally observable, at the present time, that in large training samples the word nurse occurs far more frequently in the context of hospital than of theater, an observation grounded in its meaning. It is just as observable that the word nurse occurs far more frequently in sentences where the pronouns are she or her, but this observation is grounded only by contingencies in today’s society — a society that retains gender biases about the presumed role of women, about which kinds of jobs pay well or poorly, etc. (Cookson et al., 2023). LLMs create their representations entirely on the basis of observed distributions in language (Lenci, 2018), and they have no basis for distinguishing among these distributional observables.
This extends idea implicit in Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 610-623. 2021.
Some relevant past posts:
"Stochastic parrots", 6/10/2021
"Copyrightsafe AI training", 7/23/2023
"Annals of AI bias", 9/23/2023
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Dad boner #shorts
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Language Log
Pronunciation guides fail spectacularly
ICYMI:
Jonathan Edwards, "Mispronunciations spoil graduation at Ta-mul-may Jefferson University", WaPo 5/13/2024:
The school is apologizing after viral footage showed a graduating Sarah announced as “Sigh-eer” while a Molly Elizabeth was pronounced “Mah-lee-nuh Zo-beth.”
Sarah Virginia Brennan had never heard her first name mispronounced before. Then she walked across the commencement stage after graduating from Thomas Jefferson University.
“Sigh-eer Oo-voon-jean-june Bree-nun,” a university official announced to friends and family of the graduates who had earned Bachelor of Science degrees from the university’s school of nursing.
Brennan hesitated at first, unsure whether it was her turn to walk or someone else’s, she told The Washington Post. “I didn’t process how poorly she could do mine,” Brennan said.
Then came Molly Elizabeth Camp.
“Mah-lee-nuh Zo-beth Cahmp,” the official said.
And finally there was Thomas Michael Canevari Jr.
“Ta-mul-may,” the official started before Canevari cut her off.
“Thomas,” he corrected her.
It was the end of a painful six minutes at the commencement ceremony at the Philadelphia university on Thursday. Clips of the ceremony went viral over the weekend, racking up more than 20 million views and comparisons to Key and Peele’s 2012 skit “Substitute Teacher.”
Anyone who's taught recently in U.S. post-secondary education will understand the reasons for adding pronunciation fields of some kind to the conventional spelling of student names. I could give dozens of examples from recent classes, where I had to ask how the name should be pronounced, and would have guessed wrong without asking.
But it's clear that Jefferson University managed to screw up seriously in this case, though it's not clear to me exactly how. Apparently there were no regular spellings, and either the pronunciations were incompetently rendered, or the reader had no training in interpreting them, or both.
The Tonight Show segment:
Update — here's an image of one of the student name cards, showing that the problem was mainly announcer incompetence, and partly the failure of U.S. culture to create and teach a standard phonologically-transparent orthography:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/JeffersonPronunciationCard.avif
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Idiom of the Day
jet-setter
A wealthy individual who travels globally, especially by private jet, to frequent fashionable resorts, social events, and the like. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
rock
to be great, excellent
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Language Log
Internet as Russian dialect enabler
"Internet Not Killing Off Dialects within Russian as Many Suppose but Increasing Their Diversity, Moscow Scholar Says", Paul Goble, Window on Eurasia (6/7/24)
It is widely assumed that the Internet is contributing to the homogenization of languages and killing off both dialects and local variants; but in fact, a Moscow scholar says, a new survey of Russian as spoken in the cities of that country finds that in many places, dialects are unexpectedly expanding.
Ivan Levan, a specialist at the Moscow Institute of the Russian Language at the Russian Academy of Sciences, says that he and his colleagues have recently found “about 2,000” new words that vary from city to city and were not recorded in V.I. Belikov and V.P. Selegey’s 2005 work on Languages of Russian Cities (yandex.ru/company/researches/2021/local-words).
Such increases in the number of dialect words have occurred even though the Internet has played an increasing role in Russian life over the last two decade, and Levan suggests that it is time to acknowledge this by preparing an updated version of the 2005 book in order to track the development of city-based urban dialects in Russia.
Levan is far from alone among Russian scholars who insist that Russian as spoken in Russia and elsewhere is one of the most diverse languages in the world – even though the Kremlin continues to speak as if Russian were a unified language and Moscow its definer (journal.tinkoff.ru/list/dialect-russia/).
Such fissiparousness in how Russian is spoken is even more pronounced among Russian speakers in other countries, and scholars there are now pushing for recognition that there are hyphenated Russian languages in many of them and the establishment of national institutes of the Russian language rather than having speakers continue to follow Moscow rules.
(For a discussion of that broader trend, one that affects people living in all former empires, see the remarks of Tallinn philologist Roman Essen, reposted here.)
In the PRC, still a communist country, the internet is both an enabler and a destroyer of topolects. As deployed and controlled by the CCP, it is ruthlessly utilized to root out all forms of language other than Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM). As wielded by clever netizens, the internet allows them to sneak bits and pieces of their topolects into online discourse.
Selected readings
* "'Little Russian'" (3/17/22)
* "Speaking Slavic and Turkic across Eurasia" (8/3/16)
* "Ukrainian at the edge" (10/30/22)
* "The Complexities of Eastern Slavic" (11/1/22)
* "Ukrainian is not Russian" (7/26/21)
* "Rusyn" (3/22/22)
* "From Rusyn / Ruthenian and Ukrainian, and on to Russian" (3/25/22)
* "Two notes on Three Sisters" (5/29/10)
* "Regional accents in Russian" (5/29/10)
* "Russian spies' accents puzzles" (7/8/10)
* "Russian Loans in Northeast and Northwest Mandarin: The Power of Script to Influence Pronunciation" (1/23/11)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Long Haired Businessmen - Firing Jay (Feat. J Mascis)
The team leaders are forced to let go of Jay (J. Mascis from Dinosaur Jr.), a valued employee who overstepped his bounds.
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: dignified
This word has appeared in 143 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Word of the Day
dissociate
Definition: (verb) To remove from association; separate.
Synonyms: disjoint, disunite, divorce.
Usage: The senator dissociated herself from the organization when she found out that its president had been involved in an embezzlement scheme.
Discuss
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
get out of (1)
If you get out of doing something that you don't want to do, you find a way to avoid doing it, such as by making up an excuse.
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xboABPf8b953/3N5O//PO/mHz9xeeTfYzvEfoVHMC/4yw+HkfoWXCQf8/RZvI17ym4FhTYzvwVbF76kuS5j4BHh7sBZJwjGpYZEWsMlZp8wLdzpqhy1ip/r0i1QYFzPaAAYFGgoJiT0NumxwZIblBgOs1nZ8XKD4ECt097A7xcKVCgQ6OgYCbiYMSP5PU1M5oGBbZo3PgXQMEMGqFaR4N9bXp+x64AxQekwW7Bpiq+ViegcLZAQbliynYGFPBM9u0HOBGEvd2oniumW4oNHbbrjtGrAqtv9CvhHmyOFlBgFG16he8vM45pe836jbGU5X8ABUsBlxadowVIU/q4CQr0vyHY+RdAwXb21pQ0h0ERmBYokL3wWZg6cT8SFJyCWfv0088CCjyvHIe7lOD+v4ACxc6+r2zfHwQK2Ae6CsFzoQ/0CMS3pA/+f4GC/wsqPpaVbOHaJQAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==
It is surprising how widespread this error is online, not merely in Chinglish.
This one is even funnier than just "harsh brown(s)" by itself, because what they're serving is not hash browns but something like tater tots.
The label says:
tǔdòu lì 土豆粒 ("diced potatoes; potato cubes")
An interesting aspect of the potato in China is how many different names it has, which is especially noteworthy considering that it is a recent import (early Qing / Manchu dynasty [1644-1912, i.e., by the 17th century]) from the New World. (See the Chinese Wikipedia article here for a listing of more than two dozen terms for potato in various topolects.) The two most popular are:
mǎlíngshǔ 馬鈴薯 — 13,500,000 ghits
tǔdòu 土豆 (lit., "earth bean"; in Taiwan it can also mean "peanut"), primarily of northern currency — 57,700,000
Etymological note on mǎlíngshǔ 馬鈴薯
The earliest known attestation in Chinese is found in the Kangxi edition of the Gazetteer of Songxi County (《松溪縣志》), published in 1700, but based on its description, it is improbable that it referred to the potato but, instead, referred to the air potato (Dioscorea bulbifera) (Xiang, 2018). The name probably originally made reference to the way air potatoes look like bells used in the tack for horses.
Alternatively, considering this word is mainly distributed in the South, and that other forms in the area, such as 荷蘭薯／荷兰薯 and 番仔番薯, usually include a modifier meaning “foreign”, Suzuki (2013) suggests that 馬鈴／马铃 (mǎlíng) may be a variant of 馬來／马来 (Mǎlái, “Malay”).
Japanese bareisho
Origin unclear. Attributed to noted Edo-period botanist and scholar of Chinese medicine Ono Ranzan (see 小野蘭山) in the late 1700s. May be from Sinitic 馬鈴薯／马铃薯 (mǎlíngshǔ), or may be a Japanese coinage later borrowed into Chinese.
According to one theory, this word is a compound of 馬鈴 (barei, “horse bell”) + 薯 (sho, “potato”), from the way the potato looks a bit like the bells used in the tack for stage horses. In another theory, 馬鈴 (barei) is an example of ateji for Malay, since potatoes were introduced to Japan via the Dutch East Indies.
(Wiktionary)
The potato, which is highly adaptable to a wide variety of climates, terrains, and soils, is one of the main reasons (along with two other New World crops, crops and peanuts) for the population explosion that occurred in China during the approximately three centuries of the Qing dynasty (from around 100,000,000 to 300,000,000). The sweet potato was introduced to China during the mid- to late Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) which preceded the Qing / Manchu dynasty.
Incidentally, my search for "harsh brown(s)" yielded a lot of Indian fellows with the given name "Harsh", which means "happiness" in Hindi. Selected readings
* "Potatoes Torch" (6/8/14) — includes a discussion of potato terminology in Sinitic languages
* "Indigenous languages and medicinal knowledge" (9/24/21)
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