28487
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Language Log
Passed
There are many euphemisms for saying that someone died, two of the most common being "passed away" and "passed on". Lately, I've been hearing more and more people announce that so-and-so simply "passed". The first few times that I heard it spoken that way, I thought it sounded strange. Now, however, I'm so accustomed to this usage that it almost sounds normal, though I'm still barely to the point of being comfortable in saying it myself.
Substituting "passed" for "passed away" or "passed on" strikes me as being a euphemism for a euphemism.
Selected readings
* "Kim Jong Il: did he 'die' or 'pass away'?" (12/20/11)
* AIO:
Here are some words related to dying:
Synonyms: Perishing, succumbing, departing, expiring, disappearing, ending, fading, passing, deceasing, failing, dropping, kicking the bucket, biting the dust, conking out, consuming, drying up
Other words: Declining, disintegrating, ebbing, fated, final, mortal, sinking, vanishing, withering
Formal words: Fatality, casualty
Moribund: A word that means dying or in the process of passing from life
Different words can evoke different reactions in people. For example, "at peace" might sound more comforting than "He is dead". End of life workers should be aware that others may take offense at the choice of words.
In a western context, some people habitually say "passed away" or "passed" and are reluctant to say "died".
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
keep out
If you keep something out, you make sure it stays outside and doesn't come inside.
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Word of the Day
cogitation
Definition: (noun) Thoughtful consideration; meditation.
Synonyms: study.
Usage: After much cogitation he rejected the offer, deciding instead to pursue his dream of becoming an artist.
Discuss
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Language Log
Southeast Asians learning Mandarin
Anh Yeo is a Chinese from Vietnam. Currently she is studying in a graduate program of Chinese language and literature at Tsinghua University. To earn pocket money, she has taken up a job teaching Southeast Asia office workers Mandarin online. In response to this post "Aborted character simplification in the mid-1930s" (10/5/24), which had much to do with character simplification (or not) in Singapore, she wrote to me as follows:
I had two lessons tonight teaching Pinyin. Southeast Asians learn Pinyin fast (similar alphabet + existence of tones in Thai and Vietnamese), but because of that students are reliant on Pinyin and cannot remember characters! I have students learning for 3-4 months and still have to read off Pinyin (recognizing fewer than 50 characters). I always thought the coexistence of characters and Latin alphabet in Mandarin interesting!
What Anh said struck my fancy, and I wanted to learn more about her teaching experience, so I asked her these questions:
1. Are your students supposed to learn characters?
2. Do they try to learn characters? Just slow and difficult for them to do so?
3. Is their oral proficiency in Mandarin pretty good?
4. Do they do any reading and writing in Pinyin?
5. What is their ultimate goal in learning Mandarin? To use it in their office work?
Anh replied:
1/ The students are supposed to learn characters. The textbook I use to teach them is from the Princeton Language Program (which I also learned from 10 years ago), so the curriculum does stress learning characters (for all skillsets — reading, writing, listening, speaking). I do teach them characters, but given that the classes are online, it is hard to handwrite the characters for them to see, so I mostly type the characters using Pinyin. I feel like the biggest bottleneck is the way I input the characters so the students can see what they look like. Because all my classes are online, I cannot handwrite, so the students cannot remember the order of the strokes and prefer using pinyin to input characters for homework.
2/ My beginner students are mostly office workers (21 yo – 40 yo): busy and hardly have the time to handwrite the characters after class to practice/memorise. All of them asked for "quick tips" but most of them cannot commit the time and effort. Progress is very slow since it takes ~30 minutes every lesson for students to get familiar with the characters from the previous lesson again. Because the textbook has pinyin, they would read the pinyin instead of characters, so after 3 months, most of them are familiar with the "sound" but not the character.
3/ Their oral proficiency in Mandarin is very good. Because they are familiar with the concept of tones in their mother tongue, they can differentiate tones very well (and the pinyin alphabet is also very similar with the Vietnamese alphabet, most students only need 2-3 lessons to be able to pronounce Pinyin and tones).
4/ I feel like they do all of their reading and writing in Pinyin. Because the slides used in class have pinyin, they will mostly read the pinyin instead of the characters. I have tried to not include pinyin, but got complaints that without pinyin, group classes waste too much time in reading because students cannot recognise characters just yet. The slides I teach from have pinyin above all the characters (rearranged by WordPress to be in parentheses following each character), thus:
A：我(wǒ)今天(jīntiān)没有(méiyǒu)课(kè)，不(bù)忙(máng)。你(nǐ)现在(xiànzài)有(yǒu)空(kōng)吗(ma)？我(wǒ)请(qǐng)你(nǐ)喝(hē)咖啡(kāfēi)。
B：我(wǒ)不(bù)喝(hē)咖啡(kāfēi)，只(zhī)喝(hē)茶(chá)。
A：我(wǒ)有(yǒu)中国(zhōngguó)绿(lǜ)茶(chá)，也(yě)有(yǒu)英国(yīngguó)红(hóng)茶(chá)，你(nǐ)喝(hē)什么(shénme)茶(chá)？
B：红(hóng)茶(chá)、绿(lǜ)茶(chá)，我(wǒ)都(dōu)喝(hē)。
English translation added by VHM:
I don't have any classes today. I'm not busy. [...]
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
hold down
to stop something from rising by pressing down on it or putting a heavy object on it
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Word of the Day
ostensible
Definition: (adjective) Appearing as such but not necessarily so.
Synonyms: seeming, apparent.
Usage: The ostensible reason of his appearance was the discovery, the very night before, of a "perfect little house."
Discuss
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Language Log
"Deppenapostrophe": Is English guilty after all?
Andreas Stolcke responds to "English is innocent" (10/10/2024):
The historical facts cited are correct, but they don't explain why the frequency of 's rose in the post-WW2 period, and again after about 2005 (= the internet), as indicated by the Google Ngram plot below.
The bump in the post-war era (after 1957) could be an effect of the Allied occupation (delayed by the book publishing process), which was reversed by the mid-1990s, and then encouraged again by the internet half a century later.
So my bet is still on an English (language) influence.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/GoogleDeppen1.png
However, it is true that use of genitive apostrophes was once much more pervasive, and dropped precipitously after around 1890, which is when Duden published his dictionary, which attained prescriptive (official) status in 1902. The mid-20th-century recovery was small in comparison to the earlier levels. All of this is nicely illustrated by Google Ngrams over the full time period:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/GoogleDeppen2.png
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
intro
introduction
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Idiom of the Day
hit a brick wall
To come up against an immovable or insurmountable difficulty or obstacle. Watch the video
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2024-25: Spursy
Читать полностью…
ommercial giant. For example, I was familiar with the original logo, which some squeamish folks were scandalized by: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSi5DTaydtXhHlUAVgUpMHTpsmKTYZI6dmCBQ&s Miriam Robbins Dexter and I did a deep dive into the history and prehistory of this figure in Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia (Cambria, 2010).
One thing I did not know about Starbucks was the origin of its name. Maybe, just maybe, the young Washington entrepreneurs picked up their tantalizing, quaint name from that remote, little town in the southeastern corner of their state. Let's see what Google (and its doppelganger AIO) have to say on this matter.
The name Starbucks comes from a man's fondness for watching deer and the way the larger males moved around, which he called his "star bucks". His wife suggested the name for the coffee chain when he opened his first store, and he thought it was a good fit for a place where people could relax.
The name Starbuck may also refer to:
*
* An Old English name that means "from the river where stakes were got"
* A variant of the name Tarbuck with a prosthetic "S-"
* A founding family of Nantucket who became a whaling dynasty
The first Starbucks store opened in 1971 near Pike Place Market in Seattle, and was founded by Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker, and Zev Siegl.
The Washington town, by the way, was named after railroad official W. H. Starbuck.
Here's what is claimed about the firm's name in Starbucks Archive:
In 1971, our founders got together with artist Terry Heckler to define their new brand. They wanted the company’s name to suggest a sense of adventure, a connection to the Northwest and a link to the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders. Co-founder Gordon Bowker, a writer, initially proposed calling the company “Pequod,” after the ship in Herman Melville‘s classic novel “Moby-Dick.” But Terry objected – would a cup of “Pee-kwod” appeal to anyone?
The brainstorming continued. While researching names of mining camps on Mt. Rainier, one of the best known landmarks near Seattle, Terry came across “Starbo,” which eventually led the team back to where they’d started. In “Moby-Dick,” the name of the first mate on the Pequod was, you guessed it, Starbuck. A brand was born.
Under "Starbo", here's what The Etymology Nerd has to say about the origin of the name:
On the Starbucks website, it says that the name of their company was inspired by Starbuck, the First Mate of the Pequod in Moby Dick. This was meant to evoke "the romance of the high seas and the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders", but apparently there's more to the story. According to Starbucks co-founder Gordon Bowker, the idea came to him when he and some others were brainstorming potential brand names starting with st- (because an advertising executive thought those were more powerful) and somebody pulled out a mining map of the Cascade range. They pointed out a town named Starbo, and that reminded Bowker of the literary reference. The name worked perfectly for another reason, too: Starbuck Island is a coral atoll in the Pacific known for its shipwrecks, and the company's logo is a siren, which lures sailors toward shipwrecks.
For more information on the Starbucks name, see this Independent article (they almost called it Cargo House, which would have been a horrible mistake).
Wanting to go one step further, I asked Google > AIO what the origin of the Starbuck surname was, and the following response popped up instantaneously:
The surname Starbuck is of Old English origin and means "from the river where stakes were got". The name originated in the Middle Ages when people were often named after their place of residence or occupation.
The Starbuck family was prominent in the history of whaling in the United States from the 17th to the 19th centuries. The family was based in Nantucket, Massachusetts and some members became well-known for discovering islands in the Pacific Ocean[...]
Language Log
Aurora (Colorado and Borealis)
Jonathan Weisman, "As Trump Arrives, Aurora Insists It’s Not the ‘War Zone’ He Sees", NYT 10/11/2024.
And today's xkcd:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/solar_protons_2x.png
Mouseover title: "If any of you want to meet some cool local oxygen atoms, I can introduce you!"
Google News thinks "Aurora" this afternoon is mostly about the effect of the solar wind on the magnetosphere:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/GoogleNewsAurora.png
Trump's Aurora rally shows up as numbers 11-14 in the list:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpAurora11.png
[h/t John Berenberg]
And there's some interesting discussion of solar protons in a book (partly) by another web-comic author, namely Kelly and Zach Weinersmith's A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?:
The Sun Wants You Dead
As a radiant ball of plasma, the Sun already spends most of its time blasting out hot ions in every direction. Earth’s magnetosphere and atmosphere protect you from most of these. If you’re in space, all things being equal, you’d rather avoid solar radiation, but it doesn’t cause instant death. However, now and then, the Sun undergoes a “solar flare,” when it suddenly increases in brightness. And then there’s something worse: sometimes a solar flare is accompanied by a “solar particle event,” which is a particle event in the same sense that a tsunami is a water event. Visualize a relatively small region of the Sun suddenly ejecting a huge stream of protons that move in one direction like a flashlight beam of death. The good news about these things is that, as science fiction deity Douglas Adams put it, “Space is big.” Randomly aimed death beams will likely miss a teeny tiny human ship. But if you happen to be caught in the headlights, the result will be acute radiation sickness, whose symptoms include vomiting, skin burns, heart issues, lung damage, compromised immune system, and—if the dose is large enough—a painful death.
You may wonder what the plan is if you happen to be aboard a spaceship for this sort of thing. For near-term efforts to go back to the Moon, the procedure in the words of NASA scientist Dr. Kerry Lee is to “make use of whatever mass is available.” That is, redistribute whatever stuff in the spacecraft or station that you can find because it is now your radiation shield. Why not a dedicated radiation blocker? Because that’s a huge amount of mass that costs a lot to send to the Moon and then just sits there. Space settlements will need to do better, and as we’ll see the likely solution involves living underground. […]
Current estimates say that once you leave Earth’s protective atmosphere and magnetosphere, every single cell nucleus in your body will be struck by a proton every few days, and by a larger charged particle every few months.
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: robust
This word has appeared in 1,321 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
have on (2)
If you have something on at a certain time, you've arranged to do something at that time.
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Word of the Day
auxiliary
Definition: (adjective) Functioning in a supporting capacity.
Synonyms: subsidiary, supplemental, supplementary.
Usage: The main library and its auxiliary branches serviced the needs of the large community.
Discuss
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pimp (1)
a manager of prostitutes
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Idiom of the Day
go Galt
To reduce, restrict, or cease one's work or productivity as a means of social protest against increased marginal tax rates, limits on tax deductions, or the use of tax income for purposes one finds morally objectionable. Taken from the name John Galt, a character in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. Primarily heard in US, South Africa. Watch the video
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Are you free now? I'll invite you to coffee.
I don't drink coffee, I only drink tea.
I have Chinese green tea, and I also have English black tea. Which would you like?
Green tea, black tea; I'll drink either.
Students cannot recognise any characters in this lesson when asked about them the next week. For homework, the students write characters on a word doc and send it to me so I feel like they would input using pinyin.
5/ Students are mostly young office workers so their goals are for job prospects and travel in China. In recent years, a lot of Chinese companies have entered Southeast Asia (e.g., Tiktok and Temu) and the management are mostly Chinese instead of locals. So office workers are motivated to learn Chinese. But because of the time constraint, they prioritise speaking and listening as it sees a quicker return (probably because they do not have to spend much effort in learning pinyin). Since grades do not matter, I cannot require much from them, and it mostly depends on how much effort (and time) they're willing to expend.
Next year I am planning to try teaching Chinese in offline centers (after I have graduated from Tsinghua) to see if it is a better alternative. But besides the "online restrictions", I feel like the student segment is also a big factor because office workers have too much on their plate (Also looking forward to approaching other student segments to test this hypothesis).
As I have repeatedly pointed out, students in Singapore (even those who are ethnic Chinese) are permitted to"write" their characters with computers and other digital devices. There's a world of difference between writing hanzi by hand and using electronic tools. The former is much, much harder — excruciatingly more difficult — than the latter.
If someone told you that you could become fully fluent in Mandarin without having to endure the agony of memorizing a single sinograph, much less to expend the months and years of toil required to master the Chinese writing system, would you do it?
P.S.: For typical human beings, there's no "quick tip" for learning to write Chinese characters. It's brute memorization the whole way. You have to spend time, lots and lots of it.
Selected readings
* "'They're not learning how to write characters!'" (11/5/21) — with a long bibliography learning how to read and write hanzi
* "Fluent bilingualism in Singapore" (5/28/19)
* "Characterless Sinitic" (9/1/21) — directly pertinent to this post; with a lengthy, helpful bibliography
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
egosurf
to search for one's own name on the Internet
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Idiom of the Day
glimmer of hope
A minute indication that something may improve, succeed, or turn out for the best in the end. Watch the video
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Drunk History vol. 6 (part 2) - Featuring John C. Reilly.
Subscribe now: https://www.youtube.com/c/funnyordie?sub_confirmation=1
Get more Funny Or Die
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Language Log
AI Hyperauthorship
This paper's content is interesting — Mirzadeh, Iman, Keivan Alizadeh, Hooman Shahrokhi, Oncel Tuzel, Samy Bengio, and Mehrdad Farajtabar. "GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.05229 (2024). In short, the authors found that small changes in Grade-School Mathematics benchmark questions, like substituting different numerical values or adding irrelevant clauses, caused all the tested LLMs to do worse. You should read the whole thing for the details, to which I'll return another time.
But what inspired this post is a feature of that paper's bibliography, in which many items have a large number of authors. For example, this reference lists 65 authors before "and et al." [sic]:
Abhimanyu Dubey, Abhinav Jauhri, Abhinav Pandey, Abhishek Kadian, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Aiesha Letman, Akhil Mathur, Alan Schelten, Amy Yang, Angela Fan, Anirudh Goyal, Anthony Hartshorn, Aobo Yang, Archi Mitra, Archie Sravankumar, Artem Korenev, Arthur Hinsvark, Arun Rao, Aston Zhang, Aurélien Rodriguez, Austen Gregerson, Ava Spataru, Baptiste Rozière, Bethany Biron, Binh Tang, Bobbie Chern, Charlotte Caucheteux, Chaya Nayak, Chloe Bi, Chris Marra, Chris McConnell, Christian Keller, Christophe Touret, Chunyang Wu, Corinne Wong, Cristian Canton Ferrer, Cyrus Nikolaidis, Damien Allonsius, Daniel Song, Danielle Pintz, Danny Livshits, David Esiobu, Dhruv Choudhary, Dhruv Mahajan, Diego Garcia-Olano, Diego Perino, Dieuwke Hupkes, Egor Lakomkin, Ehab AlBadawy, Elina Lobanova, Emily Dinan, Eric Michael Smith, Filip Radenovic, Frank Zhang, Gabriel Synnaeve, Gabrielle Lee, Georgia Lewis Anderson, Graeme Nail, Grégoire Mialon, Guan Pang, Guillem Cucurell, Hailey Nguyen, Hannah Korevaar, Hu Xu, Hugo Touvron, and et al. The llama 3 herd of models. CoRR, abs/2407.21783, 2024. doi: 10.48550/ARXIV.2407.21783. URL https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.21783.
Drilling down, that reference itself (The llama 3 herd of models") supplies its "contributor list" as an appendix:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Llama3HerdTop.png
And the appendix splits the contributor list into two parts:
Llama 3 is the result of the work of a large number of people at Meta. Below, we list all core contributors (people who worked on Llama 3 for at least 2/3rd of the runtime of the project) and contributors (people who worked on Llama 3 for at least 1/5th of the runtime of the project). We list all contributors in alphabetical order of first name.
They then list 222 “Core Contributors” and 311 “Contributors”, for a total of 533 authors.
That's an order of magnitude smaller than (what I think is) the hyperauthorship record, the 5,154 authors for "Combined Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass in pp Collisions at s= 7 and 8 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS Experiments", Physical review letters 2015.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
take after
If you take after an older member of your family, you look like them or you have a similar personality to them.
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Word of the Day
whimsy
Definition: (noun) The trait of acting unpredictably and more from whim or caprice than from reason or judgment.
Synonyms: arbitrariness, flightiness, whimsicality, capriciousness.
Usage: She was an odd girl, prone to sudden flights of whimsy, and she floated through life cocooned in her own fantastic world.
Discuss
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.
…
In "Digging History" (3/22/14), a genealogical research website, there is an elaborate treatment of the surname Starbuck,
The surname Starbuck is believed to have Scandinavian origins. Norsemen (Vikings) came down to Scotland and Iceland between 800 and 1100 A.D. to plunder and terrorize. After a time these Vikings intermarried with women of the villages and later plundered along the coast of England.
According to Alexander Starbuck's History of Nantucket, “the name Starbuck is Scandinavian and signifies a person of imposing appearance, great or grand bearing.” In the Patronomyca Britannica there is a Norse name which is pronounced “Stor bokki”. "Stor" means great (body, soul and spirit) and "bokki" means great ;man (one with higher status and ranking). The spelling variations for this surname include "Starbocki", "Starbock", "Stirbock," "Stalbrook", "Sturbock", Styrbuck", just to name a few. One family historian suggested that "Starbuck" was finally settle[d] upon because it was easier to pronounce "Stahbuck".
I don't quite understand that last sentence.
In the end, it all boils down to Nantucket, whaling, clipper ships for the tea trade, and the sirens beguiling the sailors who traversed the seas to bring back the coffee, tea, and spices so much desired by Europeans and Americans. Plus, you see how important it is when choosing a brand name to take into account the greater power of initial st- over c-, even though the following two letters of both names (Starbucks and Cargo House) are -ar. As for the final -s, well…. Selected readings
* "Sitting in a Starbucks" (2/13/23)
* "Impromptu biscriptalism on a Starbucks cup" (9/8/17)
* "Biscriptalism on Starbucks cups, part 2" (9/16/17) — all the names on the cups, even the ones written in Chinese characters, end in
* "Star what?" (7/24/11)
* "Sorrbucks" (7/7/18)
* "All the lonely Starbucks lovers" (12/4/14)
* "Taylor Swift fanilect" (2/7/23)
* "Latte lingo: Raising a pint at Starbucks" (11/30/04)
* "Hoisting a couple of pints at Starbucks" (1/25/11)
* "Starbucks and Haidabucks" (3/20/04)
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Language Log
AI Overview: bits and pieces (German "ich" and Starbuck WA)
Things are happening very fast with this "experimental" internet search tool. I realize that it is a new technology, so naturally there are bugs and kinks that have to be worked out, and I don't want to be too harsh with it. Moreover, at a certain level, it is already serving a yeomanly purpose.
For instance, I asked Google, "should ich be capitalized in the middle of a sentence". AI Overview (henceforth AIO) promptly stepped in and provided the following straightforward response:
No, ich should not be capitalized in the middle of a sentence in German. In German, the first-person singular pronoun ich (I) is only capitalized when it is the first word in a sentence.
In English, the singular “I” is always capitalized when used as a first-person personal pronoun. This includes all contractions of “I”, such as “I'm” and “I'll”.
Other things to capitalize in the middle of a sentence include…. [details omitted here]
I checked AIO's reply against the following conventional resource:
Here's another way that German differs from English: You don't capitalize the personal pronoun ich (I), unless it is the first word in the sentence.
From:
"German Capitalization Rules" | FluentU Language Learning (Dec 14, 2023)
Fair enough. AIO quickly and serviceably answered my somewhat arcane question about German punctuation.
Nonetheless, AIO sometimes gets in the way. For example, it is now firmly fixed at the top of a large proportion of the searches that I do. Sometimes I specifically want to ask Wiktionary a question (e.g., part of speech; definition; etymology; etc.), but AIO will cannibalize Wiktionary and explicitly quote / summarize / paraphrase the latter, usually giving only the gist of Wiktionary's co-opted reply. Some recent searches that yielded such AIO results: "cathartic", "agonistes", and "inalienable".
Here's how Google, i.e., AIO, swiftly responded to the latter query:
According to Wiktionary, you can look up inalienable, inaliénable, or inalienability in the free dictionary.
Inalienable means something is impossible to take away or transfer, or that it is incapable of being surrendered. For example, you might describe someone's right to something as inalienable if it cannot be changed or taken away.
Here are some synonyms for inalienable: inviolable, absolute, unassailable, and inherent.
The word inalienable comes from the prefix "in-" and the word "alienable". The word "alienable" comes from the Latin verb aliēnāre, which means "to transfer by sale". The earliest known use of the word "inalienable" was in 1647 by historian and political writer James Howell.
The Declaration of Independence used the word "unalienable" to describe life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Not bad, randomly informative, but — in light of my specific query directed to Wiktionary — the first paragraph is tantamount to obtuseness.
Incidentally, as AIO was preparing its response, instead of the frantic whirling and twirling of previous days, now it just informs me politely that it is "generating", which I thought was neat, especially considering the fact that it is all done in a fraction of a second.
Now I really wanted to put AIO's quality and trustworthiness to the test. I decided to give it something hard and substantial to gnaw on.
In my romp through the northwest, I stumbled upon the tiny town of Starbuck, Washington (46°31′7″N 118°7′36W). Wouldn't you know it, the snaky, sneaky Snake River runs nearby!
"Ah hah!", I thought, "perhaps I know something that AIO doesn't!"
I was in Seattle around the time when Starbucks was founded (March 30, 1971 at Pike Place Market. Consequently, I knew quite a bit about the legend and lore of this little company that would one day become a global c[...]
Language Log
Ben Zimmer on Keywords
Christine Oh, "Wolf Humanities Center hosts linguist, columnist Ben Zimmer for lecture on 'keywords'", The Daily Pennsylvanian 10/11/2024:
The Wolf Humanities Center hosted Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer at the ARCH building for a talk titled “Lexical Sleuthing in the Digital Age: On the Trail of Keywords and their Cultural Worlds” on Oct. 9.
Zimmer — who was a research associate at Penn’s former Institute for Research in Cognitive Science from 2005 to 2006 — gave a presentation on lexicology and linguistics followed by a question and answer session with roughly 40 attendees. The event drew a crowd of linguists and language enthusiasts from Penn's campus and the Philadelphia area.
Zimmer’s talk examined the origins of keywords, which he defined as “broad categorical terms with contested meanings.” He emphasized that keywords often become politically charged, and he takes cues to write about ones that are repeated in the news.
“Words in our language are constantly open to reinterpretation and re-signification,” Zimmer said.
Zimmer described his approach to writing language columns as “a form of narrative lexicography, telling stories about words from their origins to how they moved through various cultural, social, and political worlds.”
Throughout the event, Zimmer referenced the novel “Keywords” by Welsh writer Raymond Williams, which he cited as being particularly influential in his career with its synthesis of lexicology, linguistics, and culture. […]
Zimmer’s lecture was an installment in the Wolf Humanities Center’s “Forum on Keywords” program. Led by South Asia Studies professor Lisa Mitchell, the forum aims to explore the interdisciplinary study of mobile concepts and their evolving meanings across time, languages, and contexts. The center combines public events and seminars to investigate how keywords reflect historical forces, such as migration, colonization, and resistance, and consider the development of new lexicons in response to changing identities and fields of knowledge.
The Zoom version of Ben's talk was recorded, and I'll post a link to the recording if I can. The talk's abstract:
When Raymond Williams published Keywords in 1976, his reflections on culturally significant words were largely informed by entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. Indeed, an early inspiration for Williams came from looking up the OED entry for culture and seeing how the word's usage shifted over time. Nowadays, lexical sleuths who seek to understand a word's historical trajectory can take advantage of vast digital databases of books and newspapers, as well as other online troves of language use. We can now more fully appreciate the social, cultural, and political pathways of a keyword by following the trail of "text-artifacts" that it leaves behind.
The Keyword Forum's focus resonates with some keyword-adjacent aspects of Ben's academic background in anthropological linguistics. He spent a couple of years doing fieldwork in Java, with a special focus on "the methods by which Sundanese Muslims read, recite, translate, and interpret Qur'ânic Arabic", as reported in his 2000 paper "Al-'Arābīyah and Basa Sunda: Ideologies of Translation and Interpretation among the Muslim of West Java":
[T]he doctrine of Qur'ânic untranslatability raises new questions for scholars of Islamic discourse in non-Arab lands. First, to what extent does the localization and interpretation of Arabic allow the language of the Qur'ân to become "domesticated," and to what extent does it remain distant? Second, how have local interpretive methods of metalinguistic "glossing" been employed to explicate Qur'ânic Arabic word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, or ayat-by-ayat? And lastly, how has this exegetic power been socially distributed in local hierarchies at different historical junctures and in different cultural milieux?
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