Showing all posts tagged: language
The 2025 Banished Words List has recently dropped
16 January 2025
Lake Superior State University’s annual list of words and phrases we should cease using, was published recently. Among inclusions are game changer, era (you know why…), IYKYK (If You Know, You Know), and sorry, not sorry, which I can’t stand. Another term is dropped, but I don’t really take any notice off it, though maybe I should.
Once edgy and cool, “dropped” has become more of a letdown. Whether it is an album, a trend, or a product, this term has fallen flat. “Books, music, and all kinds of unnecessary things are currently being ‘dropped’ rather than introduced, released, or offered for sale. Banished for overuse, misuse, abuse, and hurting my head when all that “dropping” stuff lands on me!,” laments Susan of Littleton, CO.
Swedish House Mafia have dropped a new album. I’ve dropped a new blog post. But the image that usually forms in my mind is the item in question has ended up on the floor, rather than landing in a bookshop shelf, or a play-list, or whatever.
Also, reach-out is absent from the list. Or did the term feature in a previous year? Please feel free to contact, or message me, if you know.
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2024 word the year: enshitiffication. I nominate IndieWeb for 2025
2 December 2024
The neologism, devised by blogger and author Cory Doctorow, just over two years ago, has been named the 2024 word of the year by Australian English wordbook, Macquarie Dictionary.
This must be some sort of record, between the time a new word is coined, comes into popular usage, and then named as a dictionary’s word of the year. Enshitiffication was among sixteen other candidate new words (PDF) shortlisted by Macquarie, and also won as the People’s Choice word.
It seems apt enshitiffication is selected as word of the year, given the rise in prominence IndieWeb/SmallWeb has experienced during 2024. If there’s any sort of counterpoint to the declining integrity of many of the social media platforms, IndieWeb/SmallWeb is it.
Macquarie accepts suggestions for their word of the year, and this might be an opportunity to bring the community/movement/concept/notion, however you like to describe IndieWeb/SmallWeb, to the notice of more people.
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Oxford Comma users: people may think AI does your writing
9 October 2024
Frequent use of the Oxford Comma, also referred to as the Serial Comma, is — apparently — a tell-tale sign a written work was composed using an AI chatbot. The repeat use of the punctuation mark is among seven indicators researchers at Cambridge University, in the United Kingdom, identified after studying AI generated articles and essays.
As a life-long adherent of the Oxford Comma — read enough of the content here, and you’ll notice them — this alarms me. AI doesn’t write a word here, every Oxford Comma instance you see in my copy, was placed by me. On the up side, at least ChatGPT has the good taste to use the Oxford Comma in the first place.
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artificial intelligence, language, trends
Corporate jargon alternatives by Matt Watson
13 August 2024
American web developer Matt Watson has re-written many latter-day, jarring, corporate-speak terms, with words and phrases from long past times. For instance, instead of “circle back”, say “bring word again”. Or, replace “open communication” with the surely eye-brow raising “regular intercourse”.
In other examples, ASAP becomes “betimes”, change agent (what?) becomes “efficient cause”, while lean in is now “assiduously apply”. There are many more. Now all we need is a substitute to reach out. Hmm. Let me think. Hang on, I think I have it. How about “contact”?
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Angel Baby, a story of doomed loved, and changing Australian accents
14 May 2024
A scene from Angel Baby, a film by Michael Rymer, depicting stars Jacqueline McKenzie and John Lynch.
Angel Baby, trailer, is the 1995 debut feature of Australian filmmaker Michael Rymer. You may have seen some of his other work: Battlestar Galactica, Hannibal, both TV series, and/or his 2012 feature, Face to Face, but likely you’ve not have heard of Angel Baby.
Filmed in Melbourne, Angel Baby tells the story of a doomed love shared by Kate (Jacqueline McKenzie) and Harry (John Lynch), both of whom are battling severe mental illnesses. I won’t say too much more about it, except to note this is an example of under-appreciated Australian cinema.
And, possibly, an exemplification of how Australian accents have changed over thirty years. I say this because I was amazed at how distinct, how strong, some of the actor’s accents were. I live in Australia, and am surrounded by people with Australian accents.
That’s obviously a no-brainer — well, to an extent — but it means generally Australian accents should sound “neutral” to me, because I’m exposed to them daily. Mostly, that is. I spend several days a week in Sydney, a diverse city. Here, Australian accents are only a sample of the many I hear daily.
Perhaps this accounts for why I found some of the accents in Angel Baby so pronounced, so unmissable, because in reality I am not wholly immersed by them. But it seems to me, to detect an accent, local to the region you reside in, which may otherwise seem indiscernible, you need to go outside that area, to begin to perceive it.
I spent several years in London, England not Canada, and after a few months could easily detect Antipodean accents. It was an odd sensation to speak on the phone to lifelong friends living down under, and notice their accents. To notice, effectively, my accent. I wonder if you can pick up my accent on the phone, to lift a line from the Waifs’ 2002 song, London Still.
Australian accents are said to fall into three main categories: broad, general, and cultivated. The Australian accents I detected in Angel Baby had to be in the board category. Of course, there are any number of explanations as to why the accents seemed pronounced.
Could it be I was hearing not wholly familiar Melbourne variations of the Australian accent? Or could it be some of the actors were asked to emphasise their accents, Angel Baby being an Australian production, and all. Perhaps Rymer wanted people, particularly overseas audiences, to make no mistake they were watching an Australian film.
But I also began wondering if the internet was playing some part in my hearing Australian accents on Australian soil? Angel Baby was made in 1995. The year after 1994, which Angela Watercutter, writing recently for Wired, described as the last year before culture began to migrate online.
Could it be imagined Australian accents were among this migration, where they began to blend with every other English language accent, every other accent full stop, and begin altering? Of course, accents from other global regions are still distinct. I have no trouble discerning, for example, Irish, North American, or English accents.
Or those of other cultures, because different accents stand out. But might thirty years of internet culture, monoculture perhaps, be making a difference? Unlike thirty years ago, today we are constantly hearing, constantly absorbing, the voices of speakers from across the globe, on the web, and social media.
Might this be resulting in accents — I don’t know — dissolving into each other a bit? Are we unwitting students of elocution lessons, being served up through the world wide web? Accordingly, a “normal” Australian accent of thirty years ago, may sound quite different today. But who knows? Perhaps I am only imagining this would-be diction.
One thing is certain though. If you have the chance, look at Angel Baby. If you’re a Kanopy member, it may be available in your region.
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film, Jacqueline McKenzie, John Lynch, language, Michael Rymer, trends
A not so deep dive into a not so new neologism
17 April 2024
When it comes to what’s published online, I consider myself a moderately well-read person. Obviously, I’m not across every last thing posted on the web, but I probably spend a good couple of hours a day following news sites, what’s on the RSS feeds I subscribe to, social media, and so on.
Despite this, what I’d describe as big news stories still seem to slip me by. I’m sometimes surprised to read, for example, that a major international sports fixture is about commence. Or a music act that is otherwise a household name, is preparing to play their first show locally, and I had no idea they were even in the country.
Maybe that’s why — prior to a few days ago — I’d seemingly missed seeing the term deep dive, which is being used to refer to in-depth news stories, and blog posts, on a given topic. It’s quite possible however I missed seeing the neologism, in my daily futile attempts to sidestep that other overused noob of a term, reach out.
Of course neither deep dive, nor reach out are neologisms, new terms, as such. People I’m sure have been deep diving, or feel as if they have been, in the oceans and other bodies of water for eons. Similarly, people have been reaching out to grab an apple from the fruit bowl, or take a book off a shelf, for many long centuries.
But it is the connotation these terms are used in, that is new, or rather, somewhat new. So before writing a post heralding the advent of a freshly minted neologism, in this case deep dive, I decided to have a look around. This actually amounted to a pretty perfunctory look around, consisting of but a single search engine query.
That query led me to Merriam-Webster, a “leading provider of language information for more than 180 years”. Thanks to their listing of deep dive, I learned the term had been used to describe “an exhaustive investigation, study, or analysis of a question or topic”, since, wait for it, 1986.
1986. That’s like ten years before the internet as most of us know it, come along. Either I’ve been hanging out in all the wrong places online, all this time, or someone on TikTok has only recently made the term deep dive go viral. Obviously, my money is on the latter.
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Pre-production expenses: cost accounting for sex and drugs
6 April 2024
In this case, pre-production expenses would appear to relate to the costs associated with procuring illicit drugs, and the services of sex workers.
The term came to light during proceedings in the Australian Federal Court last week, in the course of a defamation case between a former federal parliamentary staffer, and an Australian TV broadcaster.
With “pre-production expenses”, have we witnessed the coining of a new euphemism? One that means to ask someone else to reimburse the costs another person incurred while obtaining sex and drugs? I’m not sure it’s entirely new, however. It could be accounting departments have been using the phrase to classify certain expenses for some time.
Still, as a possibly somewhat new euphemism, pre-production expenses can take its place in the vernacular along with the likes of assorted other terms, including “friends with benefits”, “pre-loved”, “wardrobe malfunction”, “between jobs”, and of course, “cook the books”.
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current affairs, language, trends
Noctalgia: when you miss seeing the light polluted night sky
25 September 2023
Noctalgia is the recently minted neologism for the phenomenon of missing dark skies at night. Noctalgia is something astronomers could tell you about. Dark, light pollution free, skies are essential for their work, but they’re not so commonplace anymore. And here we have a dilemma.
The source of this light pollution is the night lighting that keeps us safe and secure. But light pollution does not only originate from the surface of the planet. The growing number of satellites in Earth orbit, of which we likewise greatly depend, is also adding to the problem for astronomers:
More recently, the explosive growth in satellite communication “constellations,” like SpaceX’s Starlink system, has put orders of magnitude more satellites into orbit than even a decade ago, with even more on the way. Those satellites don’t just spoil deep-space astronomical observations when they cross a telescope’s field of view; they also scatter and reflect sunlight from their solar arrays. The abundance of satellites is causing the overall brightness of the sky to increase all around the globe.
Maybe noctalgia can be added to the list of contender words when dictionaries next update their lexicons, if that hasn’t already happened.
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Antarctica based scientists have developed their own accent
20 September 2023
A study of the accents of eleven scientists, originally from different regions and countries, who spent a winter together at an Antarctic base, found they had developed a new accent of their own:
In 2019, a team from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich studied the phonetic change in accents among 11 “winterers” recruited from the British Antarctic Survey. This included eight people born and raised in England (five in the south and three in the north), one person from the northwest US, another from Germany, and lastly an Icelandic person.
They recorded their voice at the beginning of the study, then made four more re-recordings at approximately six weekly intervals. During this time, they were working closely together, socializing with one another, and having limited contact with the outside world. Over the course of the stay, the researchers noticed significant changes in their accents.
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Information pollution, decision fatigue, among new dictionary words
7 September 2023
Dictionary.com has unveiled a new series of updates to its lexicon. Five hundred and sixty six new words have been added (seems a lot) along with three hundred and forty eight new definitions.
The words don’t stop coming, so we’re updating the dictionary more frequently than ever. And not just with any words: this update includes an incredibly useful concentration of terms for naming the complexities of modern life.
I haven’t looked at all five-hundred plus additions, but straight off the bat, I can tell you I like information pollution, and decision fatigue. Neologism, or terms, for the times, if ever they were.
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