Pun of the week: From George Takei, on Bluesky: This left me in stitches. [image or embed] — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei.bsky.social) September 21, 2024 at 10:00 AM Replies includes "I'm torn", "This is the kind of knit-wit I enjoy reading", "It's a race… dlvr.it/TDcrcc

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… dlvr.it/TDZgTr

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… dlvr.it/TDXpvR

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… dlvr.it/TDXpsh

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… dlvr.it/TDWXC9

Cultural literacy at The Guardian: There has been an enormous turbulence over the simultaneous explosion of Hezbollah pagers (some call them walkie-talkies) at 3:30 PM on September 17, 2024, involving as it does actors in regions as far flung as the… dlvr.it/TDRVfP

What did Rich Lowry say?: Yesterday, Alejandra Caraballo tweeted: The editor in chief of the National Review just said the N word in regards to Haitians and Megyn Kelly ignores it. Andy McCarthy responded: Ridiculous. @RichLowry (not tagged here, natch)… dlvr.it/TDL9pp

“Weak point; holler louder!”: My debate analysis for The Economist included these charts: : …with the commentary The final charts show the average pitches of the two candidates and their variability within each speaking turn (which can be a rough proxy… dlvr.it/TDGzL2

Trump as brass: score: Following up on "Trump as brass", I was curious about the relationship between the spoken pitch track and the score that Jase used to generate the trombone sounds. Here's his Xeet again, showing his score and playing his trombone… dlvr.it/TDGNRF

"We Await Silent Tristero's Empire": Abbie VanSickle and Philip Kaleta, "Conservative German Princess Says She Hosted Justice Alito at Her Castle", NYT 9/9/2024: An eccentric German princess who evolved from a 1980s punk style icon to a conservative… dlvr.it/TDDMLH

French Horn Church: Mark Swofford stumbled upon this church in Taipei: The Chinese part of the sign reads: fàguó hào língliáng táng 法國號靈糧堂 "French Horn Hall of Spiritual Food" This may be a branch of Táiběi língliáng táng 台北靈糧堂, which calls… dlvr.it/TDCxkG

"Bone Apple Tea": The "ABOUT COMMUNITY" description from r/BoneAppleTea: There's also r/BoneAppleTypo, and the #boneappletea Discord channel. [h/t M.O.S.T.] dlvr.it/TDC3rr

Quantifying the debate: Following up on "Type-token plots in The Economist" (9/6/2024), I lost some sleep last night doing some analyses of the presidential debate, which I shared with writers at The Economist to be published as "An alternative look at… dlvr.it/TD7H4Y

"Word salad": According to Wikipedia, word salad is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases", most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The name schizophasia is used in particular to… dlvr.it/TD1Ztv

Type-token plots in The Economist: From "The Harris-Trump debate will be a clash of speaking styles", The Economist 9/6/2024: The Economist's article covers some other easily-quantifiable aspects of political rhetoric, but this afternoon I'll focus on… dlvr.it/TCwVTz

Where weave is from: In a comment on "Trump's rhetorical 'weave'", J.R. Brewer wrote: This thread has had the side effect of causing me to learn (at least taking wiktionary at face value and not digging deeper into other reference sources) that the… dlvr.it/TCvnmt

German linguist Möllendorff and the earliest recordings of Chinese: "UCSB Library Acquires Rare Chinese Language Audio Cylinder Recordings", UCSB Library Newsletter (September, 2024) The UC Santa Barbara Library is excited to announce the recent… dlvr.it/TCtYSh

Crab raccoon, part 2: [This is a guest post by Meme Master Mark (MMM), who says he's honored that I call him that:  "3M is also from Minnesota" (see the first sentence).] Having spent many of my formative years in Minnesota, "crab raccoon" makes perfect… dlvr.it/TCk0yN

Crab raccoon: From the menu of a Chinese restaurant in Eden Prairie, MN: Because they are printed in black against a dark background, it is difficult to read the Chinese characters for the name of the dish, which are right below the English name: sūzhà… dlvr.it/TCh3wK

Transcription conventions: From Lane Greene on bluesky: This is an unusual transcript (of Harris/Walz by CNN), filled with "gonna", "wearin'", "I'll tell ya", "pulling outta the race". These things are ubiquitous in speech, but most transcribers would… dlvr.it/TCgFMn

Putin: "pollutant"? "pooch and"?: The transcriptions on YouTube are generally pretty good these days, but sometimes the results are weird. A notable recent example is the transcription of Donald Trump's 8/31/2024 Fox interview with Mark Levin, where the… dlvr.it/TCfsSn

Writing with AI: It's been clear for a while that "large language models" can be prompted to fulfill writing assignments, and that LLM detection doesn't work, and that "watermarking" won't come to the rescue. There's lots of on-going published… dlvr.it/TCfSSf

"Teacher voice": Now I read that J D Vance said he was "really disturbed" by teachers who don't have biological children. Well for a long time Tim and I were teachers who struggled with infertility. And we were only able to start a family because of… dlvr.it/TCd6hp

Doing a literature: Today's Dinosaur Comics: Mouseover title: “this has TREMENDOUS implications for my two original characters, Anna Phora and E. P. Strophe” One of the comments on Ryan North's bluesky post for this strip is: The dudes who start every… dlvr.it/TCd6ZL

Pitfalls of machine translation: [This is a guest post by Thomas Batchelor] I was recently looking at a tourist bus around the Matsu Islands of Taiwan, and they have a timetable online with the route and locations for picking up passengers, as below.… dlvr.it/TCd6PP

Freemium worship: Today's SMBC: Mouseover title: "Somehow it became God week on SMBC". (Referencing these previous strips.) The AfterComic: More and more internet content is either totally or partially pay-walled — SMBC is still free, so consider their… dlvr.it/TCd6GK

"Badass": Screenshot of a post on Threads: The audio: Your browser does not support the audio element. Why wouldn't we choose a leader who's tough, tested, and a total badass. The valence of the term badass is ambiguous. Wikipedia gives two glosses: 1.… dlvr.it/TCNq5z

Regional claims on "yeah no / no yeah": For some reason, people from different social groups in different regions all over the world believe that saying (things like) "yeah no" and "no yeah" is their special thing. Maybe it's a New York thing:… dlvr.it/TCBXGf

Personification: Most rhetorical devices have classical Greek names, arriving in English through Latin and French: analepsis, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, … But there are some common cases, like personification, where the English word is entirely… dlvr.it/TC8ZVW

More problems: Following up on J.D. Vance's reduced pronunciation of "problems", I looked through a 100-instance random sample of that word in real-life contexts, taken from the 23,147 phrases containing it in the previously-described NPR podcast corpus.… dlvr.it/TC4BdC

Scone geography: Matthew Smith, "The scone pronunciation map of Britain", YouGov 8/16/2024: The debate on whether you should pronounce ‘scone’ to rhyme with ‘gone’ or with ‘bone’ has been going on forever. There is evidence of people making light of the… dlvr.it/TC24vF

More (dis?)fluent interpolations: (…and also more /bl/ lenition…) For the latest problematic clip from J.D. Vance's past, see Hafiz Rashid, "J.D. Vance Bashed Immigration With Podcast Host Who Advocated for Rape", TNR 8/15/2024: J.D. Vance’s 2021… dlvr.it/TC0QQm

More probably: This post is following up on "Probably", 8/11/2024, which sketched the spectrum of probably pronunciations, from the full version with three clear phonetic syllables and two full /b/ stops between the first and second and second and third… dlvr.it/TBvz1c

Theme — border Russian: variations — cats: A random cat video that showed up on Facebook: Victor Steinbok, who called this post to my attention, notes: I immediately noticed an oddity in the Russian signage before even noticing the Chinese. On the right… dlvr.it/TBtVXQ

Prefixes and suffixes for common Japanese dishes: From Bored Panda (8/5/24).  For people who love food and the culinary arts, this issue of Bored Panda, which has fifty parts, is almost like a bible. Alas, no shime (see first item under "Selected… dlvr.it/TBtVWM

Probably: From Technology Connections on Bluesky: My favorite weird language thing is the near universal shortening of "probably" to "pry" in speech. And people don't notice they're doing it! If I write "yeah that's pry not gonna work" that doesn't parse… dlvr.it/TBnMHq

A new Trump speaking style?: Like some others, I have an (empirically unsupported) impression that features of Donald Trump's speaking style have changed recently. I first noticed this in listening to his 8/8/2024 press conference in Mar-a-lago — which… dlvr.it/TBljzZ

Primate preferences: Today's SMBC: Mouseover title: "Unprompted, they will walk into a cafe and pretend they have important business to do." The aftercomic: dlvr.it/TBlSKl

Refugees: Marilyn Singer is reponsible for the local (re-)invention of "Reverso Poetry: Writing Verse in Reverse": A reverso is a poem with two halves. In a reverso, the second half reverses the lines from the first half, with changes only in punctuation… dlvr.it/TBg8th

The wisdom of puns: Recent stock-market volatility reminds us of this KAL cartoon: dlvr.it/TBZKfH

This is just to say: A poem by Dan Perkins: You'll need to be signed into a bluesky account to follow the link, which is why I presented it as a .png. And you'll need to know the the background story about RFK Jr. and the bear cub — see e.g. "RFK Jr… dlvr.it/TBYw2H

Skinning a bear with Rosanne Barr: …vs. having a video conversation with her… Attachment ambiguity of the week: "RFK Jr. says he dumped dead bear in Central Park after ditching plan to skin it in bizarre video with Roseanne Barr", NY Post 8/4/2024. The… dlvr.it/TBWvNY

What AI is (not) good for?: Deep Learning "AI" systems are doing ever more impressive things, although there continues to be plenty of skepticism Out There about the underlying technologies. And now there's increasing skepticism about the economic… dlvr.it/TBTmdm

"Conservative"?: Matthew Erskine, "The Meaning of Conservative: Lessons from the Valparaiso University Dispute", Forbes 7/25/2024: Valparaiso University is seeking to sell three valuable paintings, including a Georgia O'Keeffe, to fund renovations for… dlvr.it/TBPlnJ

When AI hallucinations are a Good Thing: Locally consistent hallucinations, anyhow… Zoë Hannah, "We pushed this ChatGPT game to the limits, but playing it the right way is more fun", Polygon 7/30/2024: Apparently, we all like playing god, and we all… dlvr.it/TBMkCk

What it's like inside the Great Firewall: By now, we've had dozens of posts about the Great Firewall, VPNs, internet censorship, and so forth, but they're all from the vantage of the outside trying to look in.  Of course, that gives us a skewed picture… dlvr.it/TBKb0b

"Garbage time of history": Economics buzzword.  From the Wall Street Journal's China newsletter: Here's the linked article in Chinese. lìshǐ de lèsè shíjiān 历史的垃圾时间 ("garbage time of history") This expression reminded me of what I knew as the… dlvr.it/TBKZzz

Yay Newfriend in a pendant: Boone Ashworth, "Wear This AI Friend Around Your Neck", Wired 7/30/2024: The latest attempt at an AI-powered wearable is an always-listening pendant. But it doesn’t help you be more productive, it just keeps you company. AVI… dlvr.it/TBJsch

Annals of intervocalic coronal reduction: What word do you hear in this clip? Your browser does not support the audio element. If you heard "prison", you agree with me, and with Google's speech-to-text algorithm. But in fact the word is "president". The… dlvr.it/TB720v

English usage in Taiwan: From a Facebook page with Army background in Taiwan: Facebook page for Voice of Han Broadcasting Network (漢聲廣播電台 hànshēng guǎngbō diàntái) from Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense The large lettering on the poster reads:… dlvr.it/TB4V4R

The transformative power of translation: "Not Lost In Translation: How Barbarian Books Laid the Foundation for Japan’s Industrial Revolution", by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (July 22, 2024) I am grateful to Alex Tabarrok and his colleague Tyler… dlvr.it/TB4Dvh

New horizons in word sense analysis: Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: IMO the thymus is one of the coolest organs and we should really use it in metaphors more." Like all aspects of word meaning, such metaphors come and go. For example, batshit (in the… dlvr.it/T9n0dW

Topolect: a Four-Body Problem: From Jeff DeMarco: The fanfic fourth book in the sāntǐ 三体 ("three-body [problem]") series, translated by Ken Liu has the following sentence: Women dressed in flowing silk dresses oared elegant barges over the placid… dlvr.it/T9mkmN

"Fisherman Croc's desert song"?: Shannon McDonagh, "'What the Hell Is This?': Crocodile-Like Fossil Rewrites Triassic History", Newsweek 7/11/2024: The groundbreaking discovery of the Benggwigwishingasuchus eremicarminis reveals the presence of waterside… dlvr.it/T9Zb0r

IRL reverse dictionary: … or maybe I should say "associative memory"? Or whatever we should call the emerging modes of interaction with Meta Ray-Bans? Anyhow, here's a recently re-published Girls With Slingshots comic: The comments include a number of… dlvr.it/T9XfRG

OpenAI blocks API traffic from China: Screenshot of emails circulating on social media:     Naturally, Chinese AI developers are seriously concerned about this exclusion.  See this balanced report and many others with differing viewpoints available on… dlvr.it/T9Sc2n

Environmental effects on language change: Frazz for 7/8/2024 and 7/9/2024: There's a long history of research (and a longer history of speculation) about the linguistic effects of temperature, altitude, genes, and other language-external factors. I dimly… dlvr.it/T9SCLM

Milk tea: (To appreciate the joke at the top of the image, it helps to be familiar with the "Nobody" meme. Here the meme is used to critique companies that engage in "pinkwashing" during Pride Month and then revert to their heteronormative ways as soon… dlvr.it/T9QtLm

Our journey journey: In "Peevable words and phrases: journey", 5/18/2024, Victor quoted Lisa Miller, "When Did Everything Become a ‘Journey’?", NYT 5/16/2024: According to the linguistics professor Jesse Egbert at Northern Arizona University, the use of… dlvr.it/T9Qbjs

A Romano-Sarmatian soldier in circa 2nd c. AD Britain: We have occasionally mentioned Sarmatians on Language Log, but usually in association with the Scythians, of whom we have often spoken (most recently here, with extensive bibliography). These two… dlvr.it/T9LGSY

Another meme collision: Today's SMBC: The mouseover text: "Wishing I had just taken this job instead of joking about it." The aftercomic: For more, check out anything by Ray Kurzweil… dlvr.it/T9JxsN