35152
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
keep up (3)
If somebody or something keeps you up, you cannot go to bed.
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Language Log
AI based on Xi Jinping Thought
It's hard to believe they're serious about this:
China rolls out large language model based on Xi Jinping Thought
Country’s top internet regulator promises ‘secure and reliable’ system that is not open-sourced
Model is still undergoing internal testing and is not yet available for public use
Sylvie Zhuang in Beijing
Published: 7:57pm, 21 May 2024
It's the antithesis of open-sourced, i.e., it's close-sourced. What are the implications of that for a vibrant, powerful system of thought?
China’s top internet regulator has rolled out a large language model (LLM) based on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s political philosophy, a closed AI system that it says is “secure and reliable”.
The machine learning language model was launched by the China Cyberspace Research Institute, which operates under the Cyberspace Administration of China, the national regulator.
The philosophy, along with other selected cyberspace themes that are aligned with the official government narrative, make up the core content of the LLM, according to a post published on Monday on the WeChat account of the administration’s magazine.
“The professionalism and authority of the corpus ensure the professional quality of the generated content,” the administration said in the post.
The philosophy is officially known as “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”, and includes his instructions on all aspects of political, social and economic life. It was enshrined in China’s constitution in 2018.
In other words this machine learning model is all-encompassing, so long as the content fits within the bounds of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”.
Selected readings
* "The perils of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the PRC" (4/17/23)
* "Vignettes of quality data impoverishment in the world of PRC AI" (2/23/23)
[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]
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Language Log
Brazilian eggcorns
From André Vítor Camargo De Toledo:
Original: "Ideia de Jerico" (An arse's idea)
Eggcorn: "Ideia de Girino" (A tadpole's idea)
Why it happened: "Jerico" is almost a fossil word, and, to most people, only ever shows up when used in that idiom. It's an old word for "arse", which, as an animal, is associated with intellectual dullness here, so the idiomatic expression translates to "a dumb idea." Its meaning is preserved in the misheard version, as one would suppose tadpole's aren't much brighter than arses.
Original: "internet discada" (dial-up internet)
Eggcorn: "internet de escada" ("staircase internet")
Why it happened: Millennials like me tend to use the term "dial up internet" to refer to any kind of bad internet connection. Younger generations, not knowing what dial-up internet is, interpret it as "staircase internet", which makes sense, as people are generally much slower walking up staircases than we normally walk.
Original: "Não é da minha alçada" (not of my jurisdiction)
Eggcorn: "Não é da minha ossada" (not from my skeleton)
Why it happened: just a misheard expression. It means "that trouble doesn't belong to me" in both cases; one is a legal analogy while the other is an anatomical analogy, perhaps influenced by the idea that Eve was originally one of Adam's bones.
For some other example of eggcorns across the world's languages, see the comments on "Ancient eggcorns" (6/17/2023).
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Word of the Day
apostasy
Definition: (noun) Abandonment of one's religious faith, a political party, one's principles, or a cause.
Synonyms: defection, renunciation.
Usage: He had been very devoted to his cause, so when he declared his apostasy to the crowd, there was an audible gasp.
Discuss
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
thick (2)
full-figured without appearing overweight
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Language Log
Language Log asks: Mari Sandoz
In preparation for my run across Nebraska during the month of June, I'm boning up on the land, culture, and history of the state. It wasn't long in my researches before I encountered the esteemed writer Marie Sandoz (1896-1966). Hers is one of the most touching stories about a writer, nay, a human being, that I have ever read. She has much to tell us about her language background and preferences, and how she had to struggle with her publishers to retain them in the face of standardization.
She became one of the West's foremost writers, and wrote extensively about pioneer life and the Plains Indians.
Marie Susette Sandoz was born on May 11, 1896 near Hay Springs, Nebraska, the eldest of six children born to Swiss immigrants, Jules and Mary Elizabeth (Fehr) Sandoz. Until the age of 9, she spoke only German. Her father was said to be a violent and domineering man, who disapproved of her writing and reading. Her childhood was spent in hard labor on the home farm, and she developed snow blindness in one eye after a day spent digging the family's cattle out of a snowdrift.
She graduated from the eighth grade at the age of 17, secretly took the rural teachers' exam, and passed. She taught in nearby country schools without ever attending high school. At the age of eighteen, Sandoz married a neighboring rancher, Wray Macumber. She was unhappy in the marriage, and in 1919, citing "extreme mental cruelty," divorced her husband and moved to Lincoln.
For the next sixteen years, Mari held a variety of low-paying jobs, while writing—to almost no success—under her married name, Marie Macumber. Despite her lack of a high school diploma, she managed to enroll at the University of Nebraska, thanks to a sympathetic dean. During those years, she claimed to have received over a thousand rejection slips for her short stories. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/Nebraska_Sandhills_NE97_Hooker_County_3.JPG/300px-Nebraska_Sandhills_NE97_Hooker_County_3.JPG The Sand Hills of Western Nebraska
In 1928, when she received word her father was dying, she visited her family, and was stunned by his last request: he asked her to write his life story. She began extensive research on his life, and documented his decision to become a pioneer, his hard work chiselling out a life on the prairie, his leadership within the pioneer community, and his friendship with the local Indians in the area. The resulting book was Old Jules, published under the name Mari Sandoz, which she had resumed using in 1929.
In 1933, malnourished and in poor health, she moved back home to the Sand Hills to stay with her mother. Every major publishing house in the United States had rejected Old Jules. Before she left Lincoln, Sandoz tossed over 70 of her manuscripts into a wash tub in her backyard and burned them.
Yet she continued to write, and began work on her next novel, Slogum House, a gritty and realistic tale about a ruthless Nebraska family. By January 1934, she returned to Lincoln, and got a job at the Nebraska State Historical Society, where she became associate editor of Nebraska History magazine.
In 1935, she received word that her revised version of Old Jules had won a non-fiction contest held by Atlantic Press, after fourteen rejections. Finally, her book would be published. Before that happened, however, she had to fight her editor to retain the distinctive Western idiom in which she had written the book, as her publishers wanted her to standardize the English used in the book.
The book was well received critically and commercially when it was issued, and became a Book of the Month Club selection. Some readers were shocked at her unromantic depiction of the Old West, as well as her strong language and realistic portrayal of the hardships of frontier life.
[...]
ions, perseverations, and noncontextual substitutions, is that they obey a syntactic category rule. When one word erroneously replaces another, most of the time the target and substituting word are of the same syntactic category. Nouns slip with nouns, verbs with verbs, and so on.
In other words, we're NOT likely to say something like "When one word erroneously replacement another, …" or "exchanges, anticipation, perseverations, and noncontextual substituted […] obey a syntactic category rule".
But errors of this type are fairly common in typing. They seem to be cases where we've started to type the right thing, but as our attention shifts to the following material, our fingers follow a familiar but incorrect path.
I suspect that an explanation of this difference would tell us something important about speech production.
Some relevant past posts:
"A Cupertino of the mind", 5/22/2008
"What the fingers want", 7/30/2015
"Slips of the finger vs. slips of the tongue", 3/4/2018
"'Evil being protesting'", 6/27/2018
And in 2009, Stan Carey wrote about typing that for than ("A typo more mysterious that most"), and then catalogued many published examples ("Even stealthier than I thought", 5/5/2010).
What brought this all to mind was someone who commented on Nikola Jokić's role in Sunday's Denver/Minnesota NBA playoff game by writing:
He player 47 minutes tonight. He should have played like 41.
Again, this is a normal type of "capture error" in typing, but it would never happen in speech.
If I've missed some relevant research — which is likely — please let me know in the comments.
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Word of the Day
vestige
Definition: (noun) A visible trace, evidence, or sign of something that once existed but exists or appears no more.
Synonyms: tincture, trace, shadow.
Usage: He was so deadly pale—which had not been the case when they went in together—that no vestige of color was to be seen in his face.
Discuss
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Idiom of the Day
have (something) going for (one)
To have something that is favorable, beneficial, or advantageous to one. Watch the video
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
look after
to make sure something or someone has everything they need and is healthy
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
get off (2)
to finish work, or have a break from work
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Idiom of the Day
have done with (someone or something)
To be finished with someone or something; to cease being involved with someone or something. Watch the video
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o origins.
Thus the modern facts speak for a structurally differentiated linguistic population in ancient Siberia. Its descendants entered through a chronologically and geographically sequenced series of openings beginning in the peak LGM, first coastal and then inland, rapidly moving well to the south and well inland. Whether the early and late South American populations continue the North American early and late strata, and whether the North American geographical patterning continues to South America, warrant further work.
I am particularly intrigued by the stated Australasian/Melanesian affinities, and would want to know how these groups crossed the Pacifi Selected readings
* Nancy Yaw Davis, The Zuni Enigma: A Native American People's Possible Japanese Connection (2001)
* "Polynesian sweet potatoes and jungle chickens: verbal vectors" (1/18/23)
* "The invention, development, and decipherment of writing" (12/30/22)
* "Words for cereals" (7/27/16)
[Thanks to William Triplett]
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Language Log
One more for the "passive voice" files
There have been many LLOG posts on misuse of the term "passive voice", going back to 2003. As far as I can tell, the most recent post was "'Is is the passive voice you don't like?'", 8/11/2021.
In "'Passive Voice' — 1397-2009 — R.I.P", I wrote that
the traditional sense of passive voice has died after a long illness. It has ceased to be; it's expired and gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It's an ex-grammatical term.
Its ghost walks in the linguistics literature and in the usage of a few exceptionally old-fashioned intellectuals. For everyone else, what passive voice now means is "construction that is vague as to agency".
Today, Ambarish Sridharanarayanan sent me a link to a piece of writing that illustrates the issue perfectly:
The press release makes heroic use of the passive voice to obscure the actors: “an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.”
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Language Log
Retraction watch: Irish roots of "french fries"?
It's been a while since we had a post in the Prescriptivist Poppycock category. This example is more a case of badly-researched etymology, but we'll take what we can get, courtesy of Florent Moncomble, who writes:
In the May update of the prescriptive « Dire, ne pas dire » section of their website, in a post condemning « carottes fries » (for « carottes frites », as the past participle should go), they contend that the ‘French’ of ‘French fries’ has nothing to do with France but comes from an ‘Old Irish verb’ meaning ‘to mince’.
Sensing that that was absolute nonsense, I debunked the assertion on X in a thread that you can find here.
Specialists in Old Irish on X have joined in my (to remain polite) bemusement. Evidently the Immortels trusted the first page of a Google search and did not bother to actually fact-check this (apparently popular) myth. These are the people, paid with tax money, who we trust the official dictionary of the French language with.
I'm guessing that the « Dire, ne pas dire » entries are not written by one of les immortels, but rather by an all-too-mortel intern. Whoever wrote it, the full "Des carotte fries" advice is:
Le participe passé du verbe défectif frire est frit, mais on le rencontre surtout dans la forme substantivée au féminin pluriel, des frites, ellipse de des pommes de terre frites. Ce nom est devenu tellement courant qu’il tend à faire oublier son origine verbale et que l’on hésite parfois sur l’orthographe du participe : on trouve ainsi des menus où sont proposés des légumes fris ou des tomates fries, quand c’est bien sûr frits et frites qu’il aurait fallu écrire. Cette erreur est sans doute favorisée par le fait que nos frites se nomment fries en anglais. Rappelons, pour conclure, que lorsque les Anglo-Saxons emploient la locution complète french fries, french n’est pas un hommage à la gastronomie française mais une forme tirée d’un verbe du vieil irlandais qui ne signifie pas « français », mais « émincé ».
The Wiktionary entry gives the etymology for "French fries" as
Clipping of earlier French fried potatoes (1856) and French-fried potatoes, potatoes supposedly prepared in the French style.
with a footnote to the entry in the Online Etymology Dictionary, which notes that "The name is from the method of making them by immersion in fat, which was then considered a peculiarity of French cooking", with this explanation:
There are 2 ways of frying known to cooks as (1) wet frying, sometimes called French frying or frying in a kettle of hot fat; and (2) dry frying or cooking in a frying pan. The best results are undoubtedly obtained by the first method, although it is little used in this country. ["The Household Cook Book," Chicago, 1902]
The 1856 citation is to [Eliza] Warren, Cookery for Maids of All Work:
French Fried Potatoes.—Cut new potatoes in thin slices, put them in boiling fat, and a little salt; fry both sides of a light golden brown colour; drain dry from fat, and serve hot.
The OED has the same citation in their "French fried potatoes" entry, but antedates Wiktionary's 1903 citation for "French fries" with
1886 Savannah Morning News Clam chowder, white fish and flannel cakes, spring chickens, and Saratoga chips and French fries
The "Irish" etymology is Out There, but Laurent Moncomble debunks it:
Dernière étape, devinez quoi, il existe des dictionnaires de vieil irlandais, dont celui-ci, consultable en ligne.
Et là, on a beau chercher 'cut', 'slice', 'mince', on ne trouve rien qui ressemble de près ou de loin à 'french'. Au cas où, une recherche dans un dictionnaire d'irlandais contemporain ne donne rien non plus. 'Cut/slice' se dit 'gearr', 'mince' se dit 'mionaigh'…
Last step, guess what, there are Old Irish dictionaries, including this one, available online.[...]
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: apathetic
This word has appeared in 41 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
fight back
If you fight back, you do what's needed to win a conflict or a battle after being attacked or threatened.
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Idiom of the Day
have (got) (someone) pegged as (something)
To distinctly regard someone as being a certain type of person. Watch the video
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(Wikipedia)
What galvanized me to write this post is that, although I had learned Sandoz was of Swiss extraction and I knew about the Swiss pharmaceutical giant of that name and Swiss sculptor Édouard-Marcel Sandoz (1881-1971), her surname didn't sound like it was of Swiss derivation to me:
Swiss French and French (mainly Doubs): from the ancient Germanic personal name Sandwald, composed of the elements sanths 'true' + wald 'rule'.
(source)
My question to the Language Log readership: how does one get Sandoz out of that? Bonus: Nebraska and its bug eaters
U.S. territory organized 1854, admitted as a state 1867, from a native Siouan name for the Platte River, either Omaha ni braska or Oto ni brathge, both literally "water flat." The modern river name is from French rivière platte, which means "flat river." Related: Nebraskan.
Bug eaters, a term applied derisively to the inhabitants of Nebraska by travellers on account of the poverty-stricken appearance of many parts of the State. If one living there were to refuse to eat bugs, he would, like Polonius, soon be "not where he eats but where he is eaten." [Walsh, 1892]
(Etymonline) Selected readings
* "Language Rights Lose in Nebraska" (10/16/03)
* "More lucking out" (10/11/11)
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Language Log
Bloom filters
Today's xkcd:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/bloom_filter_2x.png
According to Wikipedia,
A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure, conceived by Burton Howard Bloom in 1970, that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positive matches are possible, but false negatives are not – in other words, a query returns either "possibly in set" or "definitely not in set". […]
This is an all-too-common situation in forensic applications, though the reason has nothing to do with the Bloom filter hash-function method. To take a simple example, suppose that a video recording shows that someone is 6'1", give or take an inch. If a suspect is is 6"1', they're "possibly in set" — though it's not strong evidence of guilt, since there are lots of people that size. But if they're 5"4', then they're "definitely not in set", at least if the measurements are accurate.
In my opinion, a more complicated version of the same thing applies to forensic speaker identification.
The "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of proof adds an additional asymmetry in criminal cases.
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Language Log
Linguistic capture errors
Back in 2008, Arnold Zwicky described a category of typos that he called "completion errors":
…a "completion error", a typo that results you start writing or typing a word and then drift part-way in to another word. I do this all too often with -ation and -ating words — starting the verb COOPERATING but ending up with COOPERATION, for instance. And several people have reported on the American Dialect Society mailing list that their intention to type LINGUISTS frequently leads them into LINGUISTICS, which then has to be truncated. (This discussion on ADS-L followed my typing "original Broadway case", with CASE instead of CAST, and commenting on it.)
26 years earlier, David Rumelhart and Donald Norman used the term "capture errors" for this phenomenon ("Simulating a skilled typist: A study of skilled cognitive-motor performance", Cognitive Science 1982:
This category of error occurs when one intends to type one sequence, but gets "captured" by another that has a similar beginning (Norman, 1981). Examples include:
efficiency – > efficient
incredibly – > incredible
normal – > norman
They further cite Donald Norman, "Categorization of action slips", Psychological review (1981), who wrote about "capture errors" of a more general type:
Capture slips. A capture error occurs when a familiar habit substitutes itself for the intended action sequence. The basic notion is simple: Pass too near a well-formed habit and it will capture your behavior. This set of errors can be described by concepts from the traditional psychological literature on learning—strong habits are easily provoked. […]
[C]apture errors have a certain flavor about them that set them off. Reason (1979) described them in this way:
Like the Siren's call, some motor programs possess the power to lure us into unwitting action, particularly when the central processor is occupied with some parallel mental activity. This power to divert action from some intention seems to be derived in part from how often and how recently the motor program is activated. The more frequently (and recently) a particular sequence of movements is set in train and achieves its desired outcome, the more likely it is to occur uninvited as a "slip of action."
The classic example of a capture error [is] the example from James of the person who went to his room to change for dinner and found himself in bed. Here are two more examples, one from my collection and one from Reason's:
I was using a copying machine, and I was counting the pages. I found myself counting "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King." (I have been playing cards recently.)
I meant to get my car out, but as I passed through the back porch on my way to the garage I stopped to put on my Wellington boots and gardening jacket as if to work in the garden. (Reason, 1979).
Rumelhart and Norman exclude these errors from their typing model: "There is no provision in the model for capture errors." And both earlier and later models of typing, as far as I can tell, either ignore these "capture errors" or similarly mention them without serious engagement, probably because they're much rarer than other sorts of typos.
But what I care about is something else. No doubt there are also "capture errors" in speech, though I don't think there's been an attempt to distinguish them systematically from other kinds of substitutions. What's interesting — and apparently ignored by psycholinguists — is the striking difference that I noted in "Slips of the finger vs. slips of the tongue", 3/4/2018:
There's an interesting and understudied way that typing errors and speaking errors are different. From Gary Dell, "Speaking and Misspeaking", Ch. 7 in Introduction to Cognitive Science: Language, 1995:
One of the most striking facts about word slips, such as exchanges, anticipat[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: galling
This word has appeared in 37 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
knackered (2)
severely damaged
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Language Log
Google AI Overview has a ways to go
…or maybe I should say, "is deeply stupid, so far".
At least, that's the verdict from my first encounter with this heralded innovation.
I updated a Chromebook, re-installed Linux, and thought (incorrectly) that I might need to add repositories in order to install some non-standard apps like R and Octave and Emacs. (Never mind if that's all opaque to you — AI supposedly knows its way around basic tech stuff…)
So I googled "how to install R in linux on a chromebook", and got this:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/AI_Overview1.png
If I were ignorant enough to try that, the apt command would respond
# apt install R base and R base Dash Dev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Note, selecting 'base-files' instead of 'base'
Note, selecting 'base-files' instead of 'base'
E: Unable to locate package R
E: Unable to locate package R
E: Unable to locate package Dash
E: Unable to locate package Dev
#
That's because the package names in question should be r-base and r-base-dev. Apparently Google AI thinks that names should (sometimes?) be capitalized, and that typographical hyphen (Unicode 0x002D) should sometimes be replaced by a space, and sometimes by the string " Dash ". Which makes sense in some contexts, but absolutely does not work in computer instructions…
Anyhow, I figured out for myself that the standard repository list for the Chromebook's Linux installation already includes the packages in question, so I simply needed to ask (in the standard way) for them to be installed.
The AI Overview "Learn more" link tells me that
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/AI_Overview1A.png
"Info quality may vary" indeed.
It's probably not an accident that most of the recent news articles on AI Overview are about how to turn it off…
Maybe GPT-4 can answer this question in a less ignorant way, even if it can't count? I don't have the time to try this morning.
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Word of the Day
arduous
Definition: (adjective) Demanding great effort or labor; difficult.
Synonyms: backbreaking, grueling, laborious, toilsome, punishing, hard, heavy.
Usage: The roofer's work was so arduous that he was forced to take numerous medications to relieve the pain in his back.
Discuss
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
old bat
an unpleasant old woman
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Language Log
Linguistic evidence for migration to the Americas from Siberia
1st Americans came over in 4 different waves from Siberia, linguist argues: The languages of the earliest Americans evolved in 4 waves, according to one expert.
By Kristina Killgrove, Live Science (May 3, 2024)
Killgrove reports:
Indigenous people entered North America at least four times between 12,000 and 24,000 years ago, bringing their languages with them, a new linguistic model indicates. The model correlates with archaeological, climatological and genetic data, supporting the idea that populations in early North America were dynamic and diverse.
Nearly half of the world's language families are found in the Americas. Although many of them are now thought extinct, historical linguistics analysis can survey and compare living languages and trace them back in time to better understand the groups that first populated the continent.
In a study published March 30 in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, Johanna Nichols, a historical linguist at the University of California Berkeley, analyzed structural features of 60 languages from across the U.S. and Canada, which revealed they come from two main language groups that entered North America in at least four distinct waves. Abstract
The known languages of the Americas comprise nearly half of the world's language families and a wide range of structural types, a level of diversity that required considerable time to develop. This paper proposes a model of settlement and expansion designed to integrate current linguistic analysis with other prehistoric research on the earliest episodes in the peopling of the Americas. Diagnostic structural features from phonology and morphology are compared across 60 North American languages chosen for coverage of geography and language families and adequacy of description. Frequency comparison and graphic cluster analysis are applied to assess the fit of linguistic types and families with late Pleistocene time windows when entry from Siberia to North America was possible. The linguistic evidence is consistent with two population strata defined by early coastal entries ~24,000 and ~15,000 years ago, then an inland entry stream beginning ~14,000 ff. and mixed coastal/inland ~12,000 ff. The dominant structural properties among the founder languages are still reflected in the modern linguistic populations. The modern linguistic geography is still shaped by the extent of glaciation during the entry windows. Structural profiles imply that two linguistically distinct and internally diverse ancient Siberian linguistic populations provided the founding American populations.
Final two paragraphs
The results are compatible with the two-origin analysis (Two Main Biological Components, or 2MBC) of Walter Neves and various colleagues (Neves & Pucciarelli, 1991; Neves et al., 2007; Hubbe et al., 2010; Hubbe et al., 2020, and several others; overviews in Rothhammer & Dillehay, 2009; Hubbe, 2015; von Cramon-Taubadel et al., 2017), which infer a distinction of early versus later populations in South and Central America from craniometric data; the early population has Australasian/Melanesian affinities while the later one has Siberian affinities. Skoglund et al., 2016 find South American genomic evidence for two populations and the same affinities. These findings are a good match for the distinction here of early versus late strata. Whether the physical diversity matches the linguistic diversity is not yet clear. The start times implied are too late, but this is probably not essential. The geographically patterned structural distribution is not addressed as Neves and colleagues deal only with Central and South America, and Skoglund et al., 2016 find too little data for North America. Pitblado, 2011 reviews other evidence for tw[...]
And there, no matter how much we search for 'cut', 'slice', 'mince', we find nothing that even remotely resembles 'french'. Along the same lines, a search in a dictionary of contemporary Irish does not give nothing neither. 'Cut/slice' is 'gearr', 'mince' is 'mionaigh'…
He ends the thread by promising
Après, si un·e #gaeilgeoir confirme les dires de l'Académie, je ferai amende honorable.
Afterwards, if a #gaeilgeoir confirms the Academy's statements, I will apologize.
I should note that there's another etymological myth for "French fries" out there, namely the idea that they were first served at a food stand associated with the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, run by a man named Fletcher Davis who came from Athens, Texas. Davis (supposedly) told a reporter that he learned to cook the potatoes that way from a friend in Paris, Texas. The reporter (supposedly) thought he meant Paris, France, and used the term "french-fried potatoes" in his story.
Given the earlier citations for the phrase, this story (even if true) is clearly not its origin — though I think it's a better myth than the one about borrowing from Irish…
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than one billion words in a database called COCA for the nouns people put before “journey” to clarify what sort they’re on. Between 1990 and 2005, the most common modifier was “return,” followed by words like “ocean,” “train,” “mile,” “night,” “overland,” and “bus.”
But between 2006 and 2019, usage shifted. “Return” remains the most common noun modifier to journey, but now it’s followed closely by “faith,” “cancer,” and “life.” Among the top 25 nouns used to modify “journey” today are: “soul,” “adoption,” and “hair.”
In almost every language, “journey” has become a way to talk abstractly about outcomes, for good reason: According to what linguists call the “primary metaphor theory,” humans learn as babies crawling toward their toys that “‘purpose’ and ‘destination’ coincide,” said Elena Semino, a linguist at Lancaster University who specializes in metaphor. As we become able to accomplish our goals while sitting still (standardized tests! working from home!), ambition and travel diverge. Yet we continue to envision achievement as a matter of forward progress. This is why we say, “‘I know what I want, but I don’t know how to get there,’” Semino explained. “Or ‘I’m at a crossroads.’”
Journeying along with cancer, instead of doing battle against it, has become one of the most frequent applications of this current buzzword, and it is also employed in what used to be thought of as a fight against many other diseases as well. The journey to health and wellness is one that more and more people are striving to take.
Some of my friends are almost what I would call professional travellers. They have visited scores, even upwards of a hundred, countries all around the world (see, for example, Stefan Krasowski at Rapid Travel Chai, who once visited (and toured through) three Middle East countries within 24 hours) For them, life is a literal, perpetual journey, not a metaphorical one like changing your hair.
A peevable feast? No, journey is their raison d'être. Afterword
I'll never forget the shock I experienced the first time I heard someone use the expression "bad hair day". Until that moment, I had never realized to what degree some people look upon the hair on the top of their head as virtually extrinsic to and independent of themselves. Learning now about hair journeys that certain individuals engage in, I can see how they are possible. Selected readings
* "An explosion of curation" (5/22/18)
* "Everything's curated now" (3/6/20)
* "Curated language" (7/9/21)
* Miya Tokumitsu, "The Politics of the Curation Craze Amid flat wages and dwindling public services, curation gives us the illusion of control." The New Republic (8/24/15) — in which "UC Berkeley linguist Geoffrey Nunberg [speaks] about the tendency for the vernacular of an esteemed or prestigious profession to trickle down into popular parlance".
[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]
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