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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: patently
This word has appeared in 55 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
scum | scumbag
a worthless or very disliked person
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Idiom of the Day
like (one's) life depends on it
With maximum, possibly desperate, effort or energy (i.e., as if one is at risk of losing one's life if one fails). Watch the video
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
So the birthplace of bureaucracy is actually Miami: Tefi talks politics at the DNC
Tefi joins us to talk astrology, Bennifer, Miami, and more! Listen in on the message we are using to reach Latin voters (we're talking to you lizard conspiracists). Will Tefi achieve a 10/10 performance in our game, Tim Walz or TV Dad? Spoilers: she always has a 10/10 performance.
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Language Log
"Garbage time of history", part 2
This is a phrase that has been sweeping through China during recent months. In Chinese it is "lìshǐ de lājī shíjiān 历史的垃圾时间". The expression "lājī shíjiān 垃圾时间" started out in sports to characterize a situation where one side has such a commanding lead that it would be impossible for the other team to catch up. It's a foregone conclusion who is going to win, so the leading team can do what is called "play out the clock", putting in second- and third-string players to give them experience. Furthermore, it would be considered unsportsmanlike to pile up the score against the losing team.
The expression "lājī shíjiān 垃圾时间" was only applied to historical analysis when essayist Hu Wenhui coined the fuller phrase "lìshǐ de lājī shíjiān 历史的垃圾时间" in a 2023 WeChat post.
According to this China Digital Times post (8/21/24) by Alexander Boyd, "Word of the Week: Garbage Time of History (历史的垃圾时间, lìshǐ de lājī shíjiān)",
“the garbage time of history” refers to the period when a nation or system is no longer viable—when it has ceased to progress, but has not yet collapsed. Hu defined it as the point at which “the die is cast and defeat is inevitable. Any attempt to struggle against it is futile.” Hu’s sweeping essay led with Soviet stagnation under Brezhnev and then jumped nimbly between the historiography of the collapse of the Ming Dynasty and Lu Xun’s opinions on Tang Dynasty poetry. Unasserted but implied in the essay is that China today finds itself in similar straits. CDT has translated a small portion of the essay to illustrate its main points:
During Brezhnev’s nearly 20 years in power (1964-1982), the New Russian Empire lashed out in all directions, and even seemed capable of taking down mighty Uncle Sam. Today, with the advantage of hindsight, it is easy to recognize that [the Soviet] colossus had feet of clay, and was a hollow shell riven with internal difficulties. The 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, in particular, plunged the empire into a quagmire. It would be fair to say that the 1989 fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union both began in 1979.
I am willing to state unequivocally that the “garbage time” of the Soviet Union began in 1979. Gorbachev only hastened the end of that garbage era.
[…] In [Chinese-American historian] Ray Huang’s opinion, the history of the Ming Dynasty came to an end in 1587, during the fifteenth year of the Wanli Emperor’s reign. The subtext of Huang’s “macro-historical” viewpoint is that that was the year in which all of Chinese history came to an end, as well. The rest, including the remaining three hundred years of the Qing Dynasty, had lost any historical “significance” and were nothing more than a “garbage time” in history.
VHM: This is a most audacious claim, one that I hope Ming historians assess, both in terms of the remainder of the Ming Dynasty after 1587 (i.e., until 1644) and in terms of the rest of Chinese history. See Huang's 1587, a Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.
[…] In history, as in all competitive sports, there will always be some garbage time. When that time comes, the die is cast and defeat is inevitable. Any attempt to struggle against it is futile, and the best you can hope for is to reach the end with as much dignity as possible. [Chinese]
Naturally, the PRC government is not taking these insinuations about its impending demise lightly, and has brought out its big guns to pontificate against the very idea that Chinese history may be in its "garbage time of history". The probable reason why the government doesn't enforce complete censorship against the phrase is that Hu Wenhui — in his original essay about the concept — does not make explicit claims that it is about the fate of China. Similarly, sensible netizens avoid making such claims. [...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: conscious
This word has appeared in 792 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
get together
to meet and spend time together
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Word of the Day
mesa
Definition: (noun) A broad, flat-topped elevation with one or more clifflike sides, common in the southwest United States.
Synonyms: table.
Usage: They scaled forest-clad heights until they emerged on a naked mesa.
Discuss
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Language Log
Teeth as part of the vocal tract
The oral cavity is one section of the vocal tract. Along with the tongue, lips, and hard and soft palates, the teeth help to form different types of speech sounds. If any one of these components is missing or deformed, it will have a pronounced (!) effect on speech production.
Two days ago, I met an older man, probably about sixty, whose teeth were highly irregular, and he was missing about half of his teeth, with gaps here and there.
It was clear to me that the man was in no way deficient in intelligence, and that he was actually knowledgeable and articulate. Problem was, he had difficulty making all the sounds he needed to express himself. It was also evident that he was trying to compensate for the missing vocal components of his mouth.
As a thoughtful, sensitive, creative listener, after a while, I got used to what aspects of his pronunciation were missing or altered, and it gradually became easier for me to understand what he was saying.
In the Chuang Tzu / Zhuangzi (Wandering on the Way), there's a character whose name I translated as "Gnaw Gap". I wonder if he was missing some teeth.
Selected readings
* "Ambling, shambling, rambling, wandering, wondering: the spirit of Master Zhuang / Chuang" (7/21/21)
* "Mosey" (7/19/21)
* "Goblet word" (5/30/20)
* Mair, Victor H., tr. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998; first ed. New York: Bantam, 1994); also available as Zhuangzi Bilingual Edition, translated by Victor H. Mair (English) and Minci Li (Modern Chinese) (Columbus: The Ohio State University Foreign Language Publications, production of the National East Asian Languages Resource Center, OSU, 2019) — this is actually a trilingual edition, since the 736 pages volume also includes the original Classical Chinese version.
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Language Log
International Talk Like a Pirate Day, again…
We missed it this year, but the New York Times didn't , and posted a link to Laurel MacKenzie's "Pirate Lingo 101":
Past Talk Like a Pirate Day posts:
"R!", 11/03/2003
"Type like a pirate day", 9/9/2004
"R!?", 9/19/2005
"Type like a pirate", 9/18/2006
"Pirate R as I-R-eland", 9/20/2006
"Powarrr law", 9/20/2006
"Post like a pirate", 9/19/2007
"R", 9/9/2008
"Said the Pirate King, Aaarrrf", 9/27/2010
"R R R", 9/19/2012
"Talk like a pirate", 9/19/2017
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Word of the Day
embodiment
Definition: (noun) A new personification of a familiar idea.
Synonyms: avatar, incarnation.
Usage: The State is the visible embodiment of justice under the conditions of human society.
Discuss
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
kneel down
If you kneel down, you lower your height by putting one or both knees on the floor.
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Language Log
Genealogy rocks
Not only is it hard to spell, few people know what it means.
As I mentioned in earlier posts, on my trip to SLC three or four days ago, I fulfilled three of my childhood dreams: 1. float in the Great Salt Lake; 2. hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in person; 3. visit the Family Research Center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the largest genealogical library in the world (I remember that when I was a graduate student more than half a century ago, Mormon archivists spent two years filming every Chinese genealogical record in the Harvard-Yenching Library; at that time I did not understand why they would do that, now I do).
I was chatting with some people in the lobby of the motel where I was staying, and a young man in his early twenties asked me why I wanted to do #3, visit the genealogy research center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (he himself was a Mormon).
I asked him, "Do you know what "genealogy" means?"
"Rocks?" he suggested.
I burst out laughing, and felt embarrassed that I did so, because I mystified the poor young man.
Selected readings
"Being descended from Confucius" (2/9/12)
"Confucius didn't mean that" (10/23/21)
"Moody's vs. Confucius and Mencius" (12/9/23)
"Mao and Chinese Character Reform: Revisionist History on CCTV" (11/7/23)
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Language Log
Can Google AI count?
Apparently not. Given this recent tweet, in which Google AI Overview explains that "October 21 is not a Libra, as the Libra zodiac sign is from September 23 to October 22", I thought I'd try for myself. The result had a different format but the same problem:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Backflip4.png
We've previously described AI problems with counting R's in "strawberry", numbering sentences, etc., so this isn't surprising.
These various LLMs are very much a moving target, so what fails now might work next week. Or maybe not — consider the "John Backflip" legend, which was first noted in the spring of 2023 but remains alive today, as per this recent Bluesky post:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Backflip1.png
When I tried it myself this morning, Google's AI overview distances itself a tiny bit by citing the source as a YouTube video and waving its metaphorical hand at other answers, while still featuring the fable as if it were true:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Backflip0.png
The fact that most of these systems' answers are correct makes such logical and factual backflips more troubling.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pain | pain in the arse | pain in the backside
someone or something that's annoying or troublesome
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: contrive
This word has appeared in four articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
get by
to have just enough of something, like money, knowledge or skills, to do what you want to do
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
FULL INTERVIEW OUT NOW. Everyone say: Thank you, @TefiShow #CreatorsForKamala #FocusOnDemocracy
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Of course, if they do step over the line and reference China, their posts will be blocked by the censors. On the other hand, as Amy Hawkins describes in The Guardian (7/17/24), many internet users seem to take delight in flirting with danger:
The sentiment can be summed up by a graphic, widely shared on social media – and since censored on Weibo.
Entitled the “2024 misery ranking grand slam”, it tallies up the number of misery points that a person might have earned in China this year. The first star is unemployment. For two stars, add a mortgage. For a full suite of eight stars, you’ll need the first two, plus debt, childrearing, stock trading, illness, unfinished housing a-nd [sic], finally, hoarding Moutai, a famous brand of baijiu, a sorghum liquor.
“Some people say that history has garbage time,” wrote one Xiaohongshu [China's Instagram] user who shared the graphic, along with advice about self-care. “Individuals don’t have garbage time.”
[…] But some social media users are sanguine about being online in such an era. One Weibo blogger, who feared his account might soon be deleted because of a post he made about a recent food safety scandal, wrote a farewell to his followers. “No matter what happens, I am very happy to spend the garbage time of history with you”.
The phrase has become a sort of meme for expressing economic anxiety without overtly blaming the Chinese government or the CCP for the sorry state of the economy. There is also the phenomenon of "soft search censorship" of the phrase which permits the state to use the term to criticize it. Consequently, there is not a blanket ban on “garbage time of history", enabling internet users to push the envelope to see how far they can go without getting shut down altogether. For example, "there are dozens of articles and videos debating the term—and China’s relation to it." Selected articles
* "'Garbage time of history'" (7/31/24)
* "HouseHold GarBage" (12/6/19)
* "Quadrilingual Garbage" (8/5/10)
* "Pernicious garbage" (118/15)
* "Poisonous & Evil Rubbish" (427/21)
* "Academic rubbish" (7/13/19)
* "'Lying flat' and 'Involution': passive-aggressive resistance" (6/4/21)
* "'Lying flat" and "Buddha whatever' (part 2)" (6/24/21)
[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]
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Language Log
Political deepfakes
Daysia Tolentino, "Trump shares fake photo of Harris with Diddy in now-deleted Truth Social post", NBC News 9/20/2024:
Amid the recent news of Sean “Diddy” Combs’ arrest, former President Donald Trump reposted a doctored image falsely showing Vice President Kamala Harris with Combs with text questioning if she was involved in his alleged “freak offs.”
The image, which Trump reposted to his Truth Social profile, is an edited version of a 2001 photo of Harris with former talk show host Montel Williams, whom she briefly dated, and his daughter Ashley. The edit replaced Montel Williams’ face with a photo of Combs.
This is not the first time the Republican presidential nominee has posted a fake image in an effort to bolster his campaign. Trump has posted several AI-generated images, including some falsely depicting Taylor Swift and her fans endorsing him, and one of Harris speaking to a crowd of communists in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention.
Thanks to the Trump's Truth archive, here's the now-deleted faked picture of Harris with Combs:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpFake1.png
…and the post with the faked "Swifties for Trump" pictures:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpFake2.png
Here's an image of the (more obviously faked) picture showing Harris addressing communists, from X-formerly-Twitter:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpFake3.png
The potential for this sort of thing is further (and even more strongly) exemplified by the "exploding goats" video. Jordan Liles, "Exploding Goats? Fake CNN Video Claimed Israel Targeted Hezbollah with Bizarre New Strategy", Snopes 9/20/2024:
A rumor circulating online in September 2024 claimed a video showed CNN anchor Jake Tapper reporting that Israel targeted Hezbollah — a Shiite Muslim political party and militant group based in Lebanon — with exploding goats. […]
However, the video clip was fake. CNN never ran any such report. Stand-up comedian, actor and writer Danny Polishchuk created the video as a gag. He also played the role of the field reporter opposite Tapper. Polishchuk engineered Tapper's mouth movements and vocal sounds with deepfake video technology and artificial-intelligence tools.
The video is quite well done — a step forward from last year's "Failure to Launch" — though the silly content means that most people would be skeptical:
BREAKING NEWS:
Mass Hezbollah Casualties Reported After Goats Rectums Explode.
pic.twitter.com/xqKRZzI23C
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) September 20, 2024
A less absurd deepfake of similar (or better!) quality could go very far before being debunked.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
busted
to be charged with a criminal offence
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Idiom of the Day
be like oil and water
To be incompatible or unable to interact or coexist easily, as due to fundamental differences in personality, opinions, beliefs, etc. Watch the video
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Language Log
"A fancy way to say 'fancy'"
I was in a Salt Lake City shop called Caputo's that bills itself as a Market and Deli, Purveyors of Regional Italian and Southern European Foods. It reminds me somewhat of the great Di Bruno Bros. in Philly, but more on the "paisan"* side (sort of like the South Asian word "desi" as used in America to describe a small down-home food shop that caters to folks from the subcontinent).
[*I absolutely love that Italian word! So much depends on the intonation with which you say it. A scholarly disquisition on a more formal set of Italian words for the same idea is the following:
You are probably thinking of the variations of the Italian “compare” often used in various dialects in the south, particularly cumpà/compà or ‘mpare/‘mbare. From Latin “compater”, formed by “cum” (with) and “pater” (father), which originally referred to the person present with the father at a child’s baptism, the child’s godfather. Over centuries these forms became a common greeting among friends in southern dialects. Since many immigrants from Italy to the US in the early 20th century were from the south and spoke their dialects, cumpà/compà /‘mpare/‘mbare became known as Italian-American colloquialisms.
In Italian, naturally I would say fra as in fratello (brother). It is very common to shorten the word by cutting off the end and emphasizing the vowel that remains at the end. To say "hey bro" in Italian, I would use one of these: “Ehi fra…” “Oi fra…” “Ciao fra…” “Ei fra…”
Another slang term for “bro” or “dude” is “zio” (uncle, like Spanish “tío,” and has the same slang meaning in Spanish too)
It comes from one of my two favorite New Jersey undergraduate paisans who took my classes a few years ago.]
I was chatting with two of the young staff members at Caputo's and asked them what they thought of a nearby Italian trattoria. They said, "A bit too bijou". There may have been a final syllable, something like "-y; -ni", but I didn't quite catch it, at least not the consonant segment, if there was one.
So I asked them to spell the word, and neither of them could do so. Then I asked them what the word meant, and the girl said "It's a fancy way to say 'fancy'", and the guy agreed with her, "Yeah, it means 'fancy'."
I thought that was an interesting way to define a word that their auditor (me) did not have the foggiest idea of what it meant.
After I left Caputo's, I gave a lot of thought to what that word "bijou'i" was and its derivation. To tell the truth, from the moment I heard the girl say "It's a fancy way to say 'fancy'", I could not help but think of "bijoux" ("jewelry", something precious; cf. "bling"). Also, the way these two young Americans said the word and talked about it, for some reason, I couldn't escape thinking that it was Congolese, of whom there are many in the SLC area. I may be completely wrong about this, and it is merely a surmise, but "bijou'i" just seemed like a Franco-Dutch Congolese creole word with an American adjectival ending. (Hah!)
Selected readings
* "Lexical bling: Vocabulary display and social status" (11/20/14)
* "Tyrant's bling" (11/12/13)
* "Bring the bling" (1/27/06)
* "Annals of word rage" (5/2/09) — Beowulf "had a bling-bling shield".
[Thanks to Nick Tursi and Vito Acosta]
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: 2024-25 Champions League Returns – Matchday 1
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Language Log
Trump all-caps theories
From Lane Greene on Bluesky (link):
I've been trying for a while to figure out a theory of Trump's capitalisation. It's mostly nouns like Country, but not always positive ones. I never did nail down the pattern.
But I've got a new theory – bear with me here.
ALL CAPS IS FOR UNGRATEFUL WOMEN.
[image or embed]
— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 12:10 PM
But then there's more data:
In investigating my theory briefly, I have found out that it has some holes. This apparently needed emergency caps too.
[image or embed]
— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 12:16 PM
Looking over a few days of "truths", I feel that Lane's idea has some force, e.g. this recent post, implicitly responding to the widely-noted gender gap in responses to Trump:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpOnWomen09202024.png
But a broader look suggests, unsurprisingly, that a broader theory is needed:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TrumpEasterAllCaps.png
Writing in all capital letters is (often) a typographical metaphor for increased vocal effort. Sometimes increased vocal effort just means that the intended listener is further away, or that the background noise level is greater. But those issues don't really apply to text, at least not in social media, where someone raising their textual voice, across a long stretch of capital letters, suggests a higher level of emotional arousal. And as this paper explains,
Dimensional models suggest that emotion is best understood as occurring within a dimensional space, most commonly a two-dimensional space spanning valence and arousal. Emotional valence describes the extent to which an emotion is positive or negative, whereas arousal refers to its intensity, i.e., the strength of the associated emotional state (Feldman Barrett & Russell, 1999; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1997; Russell, 2003). These models typically assume valence and arousal to be at least in part distinct dimensions (Feldman Barrett & Russell, 1999; Reisenzein, 1994). However, behavioural ratings of emotion word stimuli show that highly positive and highly negative stimuli tend to be more arousing (Bradley & Lang, 1999) and negative stimuli are generally rated higher in arousal than positive stimuli (e.g., Citron, Weekes, & Ferstl, 2012).
For a little bit more on the (very large) topic of typographical metaphors, see 'Everything, everything", 5/2/2017
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
hood (1)
a neighbourhood, especially in a poor, urban area
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Idiom of the Day
like cheese at four pence
In an idle, awkward, and/or out-of-place state; being ignored, abandoned, or left to wait awkwardly. Primarily heard in UK. Watch the video
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Language Log
Vanceism of the week: "Haitia"
Back in the early 2000s, George W. Bush got a lot of flac for calling Greeks "Grecians" and making similar mistakes in the mapping from place names to ethnonyms.
J.D. Vance recently went the other way, mapping the ethnonym Haitians to a possible place name pronounced /ˈhej.ʃə/, as if it were spelled "Haitia":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Or maybe that shoud be "Heyshuh", as in lanetteking_81/video/7415969639982828830">this TikTok video.
This slip is pretty far down on the list of things for which Vance has recently been criticized, so one of the few other recent allusions to his morphological choice is buried in this thedailyshow/video/7415781354694217006">Daily Show segment.
For those from other countries (or planets) who haven't been following this story, the Haitians in Springfield OH are legal immigrants, and the accusations of pet-eating are false.
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Word of the Day
dusky
Definition: (adjective) Characterized by little or inadequate light; shadowy.
Synonyms: twilight, twilit.
Usage: I met him on the road one dusky evening, and he insisted on seeing me safely home.
Discuss
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
line up
If you line up, you join a line of people standing one behind the other, or side by side.
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