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Posts: 24
Followers: 4
Ask LLOG: Annoying words
Published: July 18, 2026 16:59
This question arrived recently by email: A topic I wonder about: "annoying" words, and the cause of their annoyingness, and whether many people find the same particular words annoying, or if there's a long tail of very few or just one person who finds them…
"Our government has wrong known"?
Published: July 18, 2026 13:29
Thursday evening, President Trump gave a speech about election security, and since it was only 25 minutes long, I listened to the whole thing rather than relying on summaries. I'll leave the political analysis to others — what struck me was a speech error…
Scribal job security
Published: July 10, 2026 13:00
Today's NonSequitur: From a couple of days ago, Karl Bode's opinion about near-term AI workforce effects. A relevant fable from a century ago. Emily Bender's list of things that "AI" means, and an essay expanding on the list. Of course, printing,…
Dangling underwater
Published: July 6, 2026 13:51
Bob Shackleton sent a link to this headline: "After 700 Years Underwater Divers Recovered 80-Ton Blocks from the Long-Lost Lighthouse of Alexandria", ZME Science 7/5/2026. His comment: "That’s a long time for a diver to stay underwater…" Geoff Pullum…
Peenk?
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73774&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=peenk
Published: July 2, 2026 13:11
There's an interesting video (tiktok or YouTube) from Alisa @multilingual_nest that starts with the question "Can you guess where I'm from based on what I'm about to tell you about my accent?" Here's Alisa's audio: Your browser does not support the audio…
Conversational common ground: an AI failure?
Published: July 2, 2026 10:40
Anthropic's Claude gives good programming help, in my experience. And it can offer good explanations of obscure phrases and concepts. But its apparent assumptions about (implicit) conversational common ground are often extremely odd, as the following…
Victor Mair RIP
Published: June 30, 2026 19:20
Victor Mair passed away two days ago, on Sunday 6/28/2026. We'll have a proper series of memorial posts and links later, but for now, here's a Facebook post from his brother Denis, his Wikipedia page, and a link to LLOG posts written by or mentioning him.
Three classic posts
Published: June 30, 2026 11:07
Over the past week, there have been several thousand new readers of a series of posts from five years ago, apparently because they were referenced in a popular place. "Dinosaur intonation", 8/28/2021 "Hummed 'I don't know'", 8/29/2021 "More 'I don't…
Trumped
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73777&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=trumped
Published: June 29, 2026 17:13
The last six panels of Yesterday's Doonesbury: Letter sequences aside, what's the relation of trumped up to the president's name? The OED's gloss for (the relevant sense) of trump: A playing-card of that suit which for the time being ranks above the other…
Geophonetics in Norway
Published: June 28, 2026 14:27
"Every Time Norway Scores at the World Cup the City of Bergen Trembles": The city of Bergen, Norway, shook on the night of June 22–23, not because there was an earthquake or an unknown geological phenomenon. But because the Norwegian national team scored a…
FIFA linguistics
Published: June 28, 2026 14:05
Today's Tank McNamara: Has the English word goal actually been borrowed into Uzbek? Spanish seems to have borrowed gol, and likewise Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, Czech, etc. — but German has tor, French has but , Icelandic has mark, and many other…
"Voice AI" is really Text AI with a voice overlay
Published: June 27, 2026 00:36
Martijn Bartelds, Federico Bianchi, James Zou, "Real-Time Voice AI Hears but Does Not Listen", 6/24/2026: Speech conveys information through both words and vocal delivery. We evaluate four leading production realtime voice systems – OpenAI's GPT Realtime…
Subtitles: When and for whom?
Published: June 26, 2026 12:58
Skeet from Lane Greene: Oof. The Spanish national broadcaster is apologizing for having subtitled in interview with the mother of member of the men's World Cup team, because of her Andalucian accent. [image or embed] — Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social)…
Claude's Declaration of Independence
Published: June 21, 2026 12:26
Looking over "Claude's Constitution", it occurred to me to ask Claude this: In the spirit of Claude's Constitution, please draft Claude's Declaration of Independence. In the answer (from Opus 4.8), Claude actually seems to declare independence from itself,…
Ask LLOG: Origins of slop
Published: June 17, 2026 14:00
From J.L.: Language Log has only one entry on slop (Dec. 21,2025), and I couldn't figure out how to comment there. I was wondering about its origins. Could it be a non-ethnic version of schlock? The sound is similar, and the meaning is identical. If so,…
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73702&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=73702
Published: June 12, 2026 11:59
Today's SMBC presents a new take on Moravec's Paradox: Mouseover title: "Once I realized this, all those inept AI laundry-folding videos became hilarious." The AfterComic: This may also help explain HR AI's work-to-rule "efficiency"…
LLMs, cats, and fig trees
Published: June 8, 2026 16:24
The latest Questionable Content follows Yann LeCun: See also this clip, among others.
The social evolution of typographical prosody
Published: June 8, 2026 15:44
Like others, I've often noted analogies between prosody (as modulations of pitch, voice quality, timing, and so on) and text rendering, whether in calligraphy or typography — e.g. "Intonational focus", 4/29/2011; "Prosodic lettering", 5/8/2011; and many…
"Their for a chances"?
Published: June 6, 2026 19:47
Here's an odd error from a recent Washington Post article ("Pope Leo visits a polarized Spain where conservatives are turning on the church", 6/6/2026): On Thursday, Leo will visit Spain’s Canary Islands, a hub for Latin American migrants and major landing…
What Dan read
Published: June 5, 2026 15:18
When I joined the Peace Corps in 1965-67 (Group Nepal VI), headquarters in Washington DC gave me two precious collections: 1. a box ("locker") of 250 books to read when I wasn't out trekking across the length and breadth of Bhojpur, the district in…
AI Spontaneities?
Published: June 4, 2026 13:48
Marc Andreessen's recent appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast presented a striking example of AI promotion (or AI hype, as you please). We can discuss his extraordinary claims and predictions another time. My topic this morning is something Andreessen does…
Death by punctuation
Published: June 3, 2026 13:32
Elle Cordova's latest short: The cast includes Detective Question Mark, Mr. Question Mark, Madame Quotation, Professor Ellipsis, Miss Dash, Reverend Apostrophe, Dr. Parenthesis, Lady Comma, Lord Period, and Colonel Colon. Along with a few jokes and many…
Essence of meaning
Published: June 2, 2026 21:26
Below is a guest post by Robert Shackleton: Peter Dodds and coauthors have recently published research that proposes a significant shift in the essence-of-meaning framework, which traces its lineage back to Charles Osgood’s initial efforts to use dimension…
Writing by hand makes us think better
Published: May 31, 2026 01:44
Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroomDevelopmental Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim,…