This page is a temporary assembly point for material that may find its way to /lexicon/, its own dedicated Folder at oook.info. The runup to today's beginning seems to start with the 17i25 yellow page entry, and snowball-like then led to the following lexemes being minuted (as relevant to the array of words in play of the present) in the succeeding fortnight of yellow-pad writing:
unseemly(some of those are definitely of Zeitgeist, some are personal fascinations; each could/should spawn a mini-essay)
wabi-sabi
Bros (as in 'Techbros')
NPC ('non-playing character')
-ware (nod to Rudy Rucker)
Agency
Tar Baby
Algorithm
Cyber and Cyber-
reprehensible
recrudescence ("...the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve")
affordance
macramé
The Bully Pulpit
sin vergüenza ('without shame', but deeper)
... (see lexadd.html for the list continued)
And there are phrases that qualify as le mot juste of the moment:
...the dialectic of bullying and toadying... (Neal Ascherson at LRB, 2017)(I'll keep eyes and ears peeled for more of same)
A bout of googly due diligence with 'lexicon' makes it evident that mine is a personal use of the term, having to do with words and phrases significant in one's own thought an speech. Among other senses, there is "the lexicon" as a grand collection (e.g. the OED, or lexicons of Greek, or of Biblical material (including Concordances)); and there are lexicons of specialist vocabulary of various sorts; and there's "the lexicon" of words and phrases in play in current discourse (collections of 'keywords' capture a lot of that sense, as below). Here's some of what my google search turned up:
Lexicon Wikipedia
Lexicon wiktionary.org
NYTimes Word of the Day 22ix21 ("This word has appeared in 118 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?")
The Lexicon: An Introduction (Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics) $$$
DHS Lexicon Homeland Security
Sensory Lexicon World Coffee Research
The BGS Lexicon of Named Rock Units British Geological Survey
Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities Duke University Press
Lexicon of Greek Personal Names
Cyber Lexicon Financial Stability Board
Lexicon of Linguistics Utrecht institute of Linguistics
Oxford Phrasal Academic Lexicon Oxford Learner's Dictionaries
Lexicon of Lies Terms for Problematic Information from datasociety.net
Middle English Dictionary ("The world's largest searchable database of Middle English lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500")
Psycholinguistics/The Mental Lexicon Wikiversity.org
WordNet A Lexical Database for English, Princeton
Mental Lexicon (Psycholinguistics) thoughtco.com
I did a series of Dictionary blog entries (which could and should be expanded...) in Spring 2020 [and which ought to be part of an eventual section dedicated to Word Books]:
Words in Time and Place: Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary David CrystalWords in Time: A social history of the English vocabulary Geoffrey Hughes
The Joys of Anglo-Indian
Lexicon of Musical Invective Nicholas Slonimsky
And 20i25 yellow pad entry has some nice text re:lexicon:
Few lexical items are fixed, unchanging, entire and complete [though one might argue that 'mother' is pretty fixed, but extensible: think "mother of invention" and "motherfucker"]. Most lexemes take on flavors and nuances and relationships and connotations as they are used (viz. the emergence of an ironic use of a word or phrase, in which it means more than first meets the eye). Words and phrases have cultural lives [half-lives?], carrying meaning within speech communities but flexing as the present moment requires. You see that readily with memes and jargon, as they are passed around and put to expressive and descriptive use. Words and phrases have histories, and often seem to be attempting to EXPAND their role in language... but just as often if not so noisily some are sinking toward archaic desuetude. Catchphrases that are bobbled and dropped... Epithets that smell of mothballs (remember mothballs?)...
A couple of words that tipped me over the edge in the last few days:
Mashup Wikipedia
Fantod(s)
fantods sesquiotic.com
howling fantods Hudson Independent
fantods Green's Dictionary of Slang
links from site:oook.info lexicon search:
blog items tagged 'lexicon'on personal infospace (ca. 2005)
...and along the way I tripped over Lexicon Valley, a Slate podcast "A podcast about language, from pet peeves to syntax" (which ended in 2021, after 107 episodes)
And so we begin to see the scale of what began as an innocent list of tasty and portentous lexical items, but has turned into another Life's Work...
Several books on Keywords that seem especially relevant to work with lexicon: are collected at Keywords.html
4ii25
Email from Bryan Alexander reminded me of the Old Samuel Johnson definition of a lexicographer as "a harmless drudge", and I like the sound of the 'harmless' especially. But Johnson's definition goes on from the drudge:
...A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of wordsThe signification. It's a grand challenge to compose/contrive glosses for items that enter the personal lexicon, and for those alive in public discourse of a speech community. Such exegetical texts might summarize historical emergence and sociocultural cross-linkage, but the real point is to capture the significance of the expression: what does it mean below the surface of its dictionary definition?
(via the marvelous johnsonsdictionaryonline.com)
Some words enter the lexicon (again, personal and societal) as novelties, neologisms. calques, portmanteau words ...that express some nuance of meaning, and so enhance the language as she is spoke. By lexical innovation, a thing is labeled, acknowledged, instantiated. One encounters new (and new-ish) items all the time, and pauses to wonder about them, to consider whether they have a place in the shifting sands of one's personal lexicon. When one is surprised by a lexical encounter, the appropriate thing to do is write it down and then go in pursuit of detailing the signification...
This morning's lexical nubbins under consideration include sortition, pinkwashing, cause-marketing, parasociality vortex, jaapie [thanks Nick!], hunkering (see Hunkerin': America's Most Boring Fad at mentalfloss.com)... and the day has just begun.
It's proper to try to enumerate and visualize my stable of sources and sensors, the sites and persons I rely on and trust the veracity of and will at least deign to listen to (and of course there are other potential sources that I disdain). My lexicon thrives upon the incoming: my eyes and ears are attuned to the Messages —many written, many graphical, many aural— that enter my self-designed bubble of sources of sources through which to view and monitor the rest of humanity (which as an anthropologist, is my remit).
...But meanwhile, some specialist dictionaries by and for sportive lexicographers:
The Superior Person's Book of Words Peter BowlerThe Evasion-English Dictionary
The Logodaedalian's Dictionary of Interesting and Unusual Words George Stone Saussy
I started thinking about the relationship(s) of lexicon and meme and excavated a delicious list of meme dictionaries and other collations (see Memes.html)
Others to be located appropriately:
The Lexicon poundingtherock.comQuebec French lexicon Wikipedia
The Fandom Lexicon at duckprintspress.com
Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect Richard Cunliffe
And books (ordered, of course):
Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language Gretchen McCullochDecoding Gen-Z Slang: Your Guide to Learning, Understanding, and Speaking the Gen-Z Vernacular and Brainrot: The Gen-A Slang Lexicon
Spreading the Word: Language and Dialect in America John McWhorter
The Great Book of American Idioms: A Dictionary of American Idioms, Sayings, Expressions & Phrases
Slinky Wikipedia
...after meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump told reporters tonight that the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip," and suggested sending troops to make that happen. We'll own it," he said. "We're going to take over that piece, develop it and create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it will be something the entire Middle East can be proud of." It could become "the Riviera of the Middle East," he said.Reaction has been swift and incredulous. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, called the plan "deranged" and "nuts." Another Foreign Relations Committee member, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), said he was "speechless," adding: "That's insane." While MAGA representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) posted in support, "Let's turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago," Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told NBC News reporters Frank Thorp V and Raquel Coronell Uribe that there were "a few kinks in that slinky," a reference to a spring toy that fails if it gets bent.
7ii25
The many meanings and faces of "vernacular" Victor Mair
Word from the hood: The lexicon of African-American vernacular English
Viral Vernacular: The COVID-19 Lexicon
Etymology of vernacular etymonline
The Burning Man dictionary: Playa vernacular that you need to know mixmag.net
Do jargon, argot and vernacular mean the same thing? Well, not really. Thomas Moore Devlin at babbel.com
English idioms, phrasal verbs, and colloquialisms packardcommunications.com
100 Phrasal Verbs Used as Commands engVid.com
Gay talk : formerly entitled The queens' vernacular : a gay lexicon Bruce Rodgers (1979) at Inyternet Archive
The lexical fallacy in emotion research: Mistaking vernacular words for psychological entities Fiske, Alan Page Psychological Review, Vol 127(1), Jan 2020, 95-113
Vernacular lexemes appear self-evident, so we unwittingly reify them. But the words and phrases of natural languages comprise a treacherous basis for identifying valid psychological constructs, as I illustrate in emotion research. Like other vernacular lexemes, the emotion labels in natural languages do not have definite, stable, mutually transparent meanings, and any one vernacular word may be used to denote multiple scientifically distinct entities. In addition, the consequential choice of one lexeme to name a scientific construct rather than any of its partial synonyms is often arbitrary. Furthermore, a given vernacular lexeme from any one of the world's 7000 languages rarely maps one-to-one into an exactly corresponding vernacular lexeme in other languages. Words related to anger in different languages illustrate this. Since each language constitutes a distinct taxonomy of things in the world, most or all languages must fail to cut nature at its joints. In short, it is pernicious to use one language's dictionary as the source of psychological constructs. So scientists need to coin new technical names for scientifically derived constructs—names precisely defined in terms of the constellation of features or components that characterize the constructs they denote. The development of the kama muta construct illustrates one way to go about this. Kama muta is the emotion evoked by sudden intensification of communal sharing—universally experienced but not isomorphic with any vernacular lexeme such as heart warming, moving, touching, collective pride, tender, nostalgic, sentimental, Awww—so cute!.
lexadd.html: a place to collect additions to lexicon(s)
Kiddo slang at warp speed Victor Mair at Language Log
8ii25
List of contents from New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society Tony Bennett et al. (Blackwell 2005)
List of contents from Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data Nanna Bonde Thylstrup et al. (MIT Press 2021)
Culture Wars fought in the lexicon
12ii25 additions, to be integrated :
listicles and Merriam-Webster entry
Dumpster fire Wikipedia
Urban Dictionary Wikipedia
The year of Karen: how a meme changed the way Americans talked about racism The Guardian
Parsing Wikipedia
Common ground (linguistics) Wikipedia
Lonely Charts Personals Adam Tooze [lexicon...]
2/11/2025 11:08:12 Green energy and high-speed rail enthusiast based in Central Luzon, PH (26M, US expat). Seeking a serious partner (20-45F) with intelligence, wisdom and fun to put wind in my turbine blades. American Prospect subscription not essential, but a nice bonus.
2/11/2025 11:09:13 Harried federal government manager (as of now at least) (47, Denver) seeks F30-50 for fun and LTR. Enjoys hiking, biking, and history. Must hate dogs and actively work for their downfall.
...
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name Marginalian
temporary 14ii25 collection parked
16ii25
Topolect Wiktionary
Language, topolect, dialect, idiolect Victor Mair at Language Log
What Is a Chinese "Dialect/Topolect"?
Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms Victor Mair 1991 (pdf)
When is a fangyan a language and not a dialect Chinese Language Stack Exchange
Topolect was specifically invented in 1991 by Victor Mair as a translation of fangyan Hacker News
What is a Chinese dialect / topolect ? : Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms Victor Mair (pdf) at Semantic Scholar
Varieties of Chinese Wikipedia
Topolects in Motion: Narrative Possibilities for Language Vitality among Mobile Chinese-Canadians Shannon Ward et al. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2022 (pdf)
Topolect (taalterm) Taaleidoscoop.ni
I'm more lexicologist than lexicographer, and occasionally I slide toward lexicosophy. Perhaps the typology needs updating, to include lexigeeks, and then perhaps lexiweenies.
"Art does not make sense" Mark Liberman at Language Log
I can't see that this has anything to do with my take on Lexicon:
it is appropriate to expand the
horizons of experimental work addressing lexical process-
ing beyond standard factorial experiments that are based
on a relatively limited set of monosyllabic stimuli. The
ELP is such an attempt. The ELP is a large database of
descriptive and behavioral data, along with a search en-
gine that affords access to this database. The ELP involves
a multiuniversity collaborative effort to provide a large
database of naming and lexical decision latencies across
1,260 participants for 40,481 words and nonwords.
bugaboo
Bugbear Wikipedia
The Bugaboos in British Columbia
Fear and afraid in Merriam-Webster Thesaurus
Hiberno-English: it's a soft day Victor Mair at Language Log
The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: Cave Diving Memes
The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture via Lifehacker
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue 1788 2nd edition
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose 1811 Project Gutenberg
A classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue archive.org
reckless, wreck, wrack, rack, reckon Sesquiotica
Emojis
The Multidimensional Lexicon of Emojis: A New Tool to Assess the Emotional Content of Emojis Rebecca Goddard and Susan Holtzman Frontiers in Psychology
Emoji meanings encyclopedia emojis.wiki
List of emoticons and EmoticonWikipedia
What's the Difference Between Emoji and Emoticons?
...Japanese conglomerate SoftBank actually released the first set of emojis in 1997... In order to attract Japanese customers, Apple hid an emoji keyboard in the first iPhone back in 2007, but North American users quickly became aware of the keyboard.
Jive Wiktionary
Acronyms
Abbreviations and acronyms dictionary acronymfinder.com
Acronym Finder USC Libraries
Hella Wikipedia
South Park
Favorite Made Up Words from South Park
The F Word (South Park) Wikipedia
South Park —Trey Parker is the Master of Neologisms Jeffrey McGee
The F Word South Park Archives
KFTF - Keeping Found Things Found (personal information management) AcronymFinder
Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English (on the shelves)
and Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English online
Feeding the Lexicon from 3x24 last update
Doomscrolling
200 New Words and Definitions Added to Merriam-Webster.com Merriam-Webster
Slang Dictionary Merriam-Webster
Category:2020s neologisms Wikipedia
Broligarchy Wikipedia
Urban Dictionary Wikipedia
-core
-core Wiktionary
Getting to the heart of words made with '-core' Christian Science Monitor
Has anyone noticed this new usage of the -core suffix? Reddit
Cottagecore, Dreamcore, Normcore, and Other -Core Words dictionary.com
What does the -core suffix mean? fandom.com
Words and Phrases We Could Do Without Jennifer Rubin at Contrarian
That isn't even a "meme." What is the proper term for that kind of social-media riffing? Bruce Sterling
Two senses of "lexicon": The inventorium and the lexemicon Martin Haspelmath
Four kinds of lexical items: Words, lexemes, inventorial items, and mental items Martin Haspelmath namecheck
namecheck Merriam-Webster
Pulmonic ingressive Victor Mair at Language Log
Jung Lexicon
C. G. Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts in book form
The lost 'Arab': Gaza and the evolving Language of the Palestinian Struggle Ramzy Baroud at Informed Comment
Beyond Mesopotamia Tom Stevenson on the deciphering of Linear Elamite LRB
...Elam, like Sumeria, is an exochoronym, never used in the region itself. As the first documented polity in what we now call Iran, it remains a lesser-known contemporary of the great Mesopotamian states. Elam is recorded dozens of times in the Bible, where it features as a bellicose but impressive kingdom to the east... The Babylonian records were full of wars with the Elamites.
...Desset argues that one thing the Linear Elamite texts reveal is that the concept of 'Elam' was a Mesopotamian construct, similar to the European notion of 'the Orient'. The ancient inhabitants of the Iranian plateau may have thought of themselves as belonging to an Elamite-speaking (or, as they would have had it, Hatamtite-speaking) cultural world, but not to a country called Elam.
...The Mayanist Michael Coe used to say that three things are necessary to decipher ancient writing. You need lots of examples of the script. You need a good understanding of the cultural context of the writing system. And, most important, you need a bilingual, or better a trilingual, inscription of a known writing system — a Rosetta stone, Ganjnameh or Behistun inscription carved on the orders of a helpful long dead monarch.
...if Desset is correct, Linear Elamite is a phonographic writing system, consisting entirely of signs representing phonemes. Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs started out as logogrammatic writing systems, in which the signs record words rather than sounds. Over time they acquired syllabic signs, but they retained logograms and determinatives, which help indicate the semantic class (gods, buildings, professions) to which polyvalent signs belong.
...The word 'decipherment' is in a sense a misnomer. Ancient scripts are not ciphers. They were not designed to be unintelligible to outsiders or intentionally deceive. Ancient inscriptions were written by people following rules that may appear complex, but are no more so than the conventions of our own writing system.
Feck Wikipedia
Choronym Wikipedia
portentous meaning - definition of portentous Mnemonic Dictionary
Shakespeare's Words shakespeareswords.com
Biblical inerrancy Wikipedia
couth Wiktionary
couth Middle English Compendium
-ware Wiktionary
-ware at affixes.org
Category:English terms suffixed with -ware Wiktionary
Category:English terms suffixed with -ware (substance, kind, or use) Wiktionary
Words that end in 'ware' Scrabble Word Finder
Words that end in ware thefreedictionary.com
wetware Wiktionary
neoterise freedictionary and neoterise at onelook.com
New Words
What does artificial superintelligence mean? at dictionaryblog.cambridge.org
vibe coding Stephen Downes
Semantic space
Semantic Space - an overview ScienceDirect Topics
What is semantic space theory? Hume AI
A continuous semantic space describes the representation of thousands of object and action categories across the human brain Alexander Huth et al.
Approximating the semantic space: word embedding techniques in psychiatric speech analysis Nature
Semantics in High-Dimensional Space frontiersin.org
Semantic Space Theory: A Computational Approach to Emotion Alan S. Cowen and Dacher Keltner Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Occupy the semantic space! Opening up the language of better regulation Claudio M. Radaelli
Semantic Space Theory: A Computational Approach to Emotion Alan S. Cowen and Dacher Keltner
Exploring (Semantic) Space With (Literal) Robots Allison Parrish
semantic spaces dictionary lipamanka
Toki Pona
printable dictionary for Toki Pona
Toki Pona: The Language of Good Sonja Lang
Retroactive continuity Wikipedia
A short history of 'Retcon' Merriam-Webster
America in the Age of 'Retcon' Ethics & Public Policy Center
It's not just what you say — it's also how you say it New study reveals how the brain decodes changes in the pitch of our speech to shape meaning Science Daily
Key Vocabulary Cambridge UP (pdf)
Sylvia Ashton-Warner: Reclaiming Personal Meaning
in Literacy Teaching Nancy S Thompson (pdf)
Lexicology Wikipedia
Lexicology in 9 pages (pdf)
World Histories of Lexicography and Lexicology Language Science Press
Computational lexicology Wikipedia
Oxford Studies in Lexicography and Lexicology
Lexicology — Course Introduction Martin Weisser
English language--Lexicology, Historical Yale
Ben Tarnoff on AI NYRB 27iii25
Phrase Finder (which launches a total hell of google ads)
'bound phrase'
ELLIPSIS IN THE 21ST CENTURY ENGLISH SLANG Borys DP
what you learn in library school, what's in a name Jessamyn West, see also putting the rarin back in librarian since 1999 at librarian.net
what is the "vibe" in vibe coding?
Rob Horning (see Wikipedia) ...This all-theory, no-practice attitude posits a sort of rain-dance approach to creation in which one tries different "random changes" without worrying about "comprehension."
...When I first saw "vibe coding," I assumed it was pejorative, meant to mark it off from "real coding," where the coder understands how the code is put together. I was thinking of how vibe was being used back when it was described certain TikToks, as evoking a feeling that can't be pinned down in words, or a claim that couldn't be substantiated with data. Then it was a general word for a mood or a feeling; it seemed to mean the opposite of "having an idea," insofar as having ideas also means being able to slot them into causal relationships. Vibe indicated an inability to analyze a certain situation that is accepted instead as a gestalt, a mystic whole.
"Vibe coding" retains the implication that you can't explain or even understand how something works. But under the pressure of AI hype and its championing of incomprehension, there seems to be not a "vibe shift" but a "vibe" shift occurring, as the term drifts toward a different connotation. Where vibe once conveyed something that can't be analyzed, now it conveys a purposeful indifference to analysis or explanation, as well as to the components that make up something. It is as though the preponderance of vibe talk made explanations irrelevant in all cases, and now we speak of vibes to forbid comprehension, which would be unfun.
"Giving in to the vibe," then, means deliberately refusing to understand, as though that would be to defy AI's supremacy. One should let AI handle the data and the details so that you can just have gratified impulses, which are ultimately just a matter of data being manipulated to your liking— prompting, waiting, tweaking, and trying again until you are satisfied or bored with what you're doing. Being involved with the thinking process, the details, would be to go against the vibe. It's a superfluous burden that sets you against the spirit of the times.
Prosody Wikipedia
Guide to Prosody Poetry at Harvard (see also Guide to Poetic Terms)
A Parent's Guide To Teen Slang (2025 Update)
Universe of Discourse
What is Universe of Discourse (UofD) IGI Global Scientific Publishing
Universe-of-Discourse (UoD) factengine.ai
The importance of a UoD to conceptual modelling lies in the fact that it enables the modeler to create an accurate representation of the problem domain. By defining the UoD, the modeler can identify the key concepts, relationships, and constraints that exist within the domain and ensure that the conceptual model reflects these accurately.
Subject Semantics Why is it that 'no universe of discourse is a totally fictitious world'? studocu.com
Glottopedia, the free encyclopedia of linguistics
canny, canty, uncanny sesquiotica
Spite turns normal people into horse-paste-eating conspiracy addicts, says study boing boing
spite synonyms Merriam-Webster
An Unsettling Aesthetic Lexicon The Brooklyn Rail
Intercultural Lexicon Archive resetdoc.org
DHS Lexicon Terms and Definitions 2017 (pdf)
Structure of the Basque emotion lexicon
Itziar Alonso-Arbiol et al. (and Indonesian emotion lexicon too)
Inspiring Content including Speculative Flufftossing
Lists of diseases Wikipedia
The Disbeliever's Dictionary: A Gleefully Disrespectful Lexicon of Canada Today Quill and Quire
English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
Butter no parsnips
idioms - Why do 'fine words butter no parsnips'? English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
Fine Words Butter No Parsnips — Meaning & Origin Of The Phrase phrases.org.uk
Proverb of the week: fine words butter no parsnips verygoodcooking
AI Lexicon assistingintelligence.com
A deepity, as coined by Daniel Dennett, is a statement that seems both important and true,
Meaning of growlery OnlineSlangDictionary.com
Save Growlery! The Social Networks Built of Old Words The Atlantic
The Bedeviled Dictionary: A Lexicon of Wicked Wordplay KindleNotebook
The English Dialect Grammar: Comprising the Dialects of England, of the Shetland and Orkney Islands, and of Those Parts of Scotland, Ireland and Wales Where English is Habitually Spoken Joseph Wright 1905 (pdf)
Philology vs. linguistics Victor Mair at Language Log
Tastes of almost-Friday Rob Horning at substack
I would paraphrase that paraphrase as: machine-generated texts are meaningless in and of themselves without the context of human exchange, regardless of whether they can be syntactically parsed. The meaning of communication, the value of what is communicated depends on, as Farrell puts it the "human relationships mediated through technology" and not the technology itself, whether that is a pile of circuit boards or a pile of phonemes.
Phonemic analysis of animal sounds as spelled in various popular languages Victor Mair at Language Log
Wicked Good Way With Words
Tastes of almost-Friday
LLMs and "creative writing"
Rob Horning at substack
That's probably true, but it may be that people are sometimes seeking an escape from "the thoughts and imaginations of fellow humans" because they are threatened or inconvenienced by having to take other people into account, and what they want is an endless stream of content that negates human creativity and frees them from having to live up to it. In other words, LLMs promise to turn language — ordinarily polyphonous and uncontrollable and irreducibly social — into something more like machine gambling, a solipsistic flow experience that provides an illusion of control by impoverishing the range of experience and reducing it to refilling the slop bucket, over and over again.
The Lexicon of Comicana Mort Walker, via archive.org
Recipe verbs Separated by a Common Language ("Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK")
The Out-of-Touch-Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: Lady Gaga and the Death of Neo-Medievalism
Plummet's journey Mark Liberman at Language Log
Hashtag Wikipedia
Folksonomy Wikipedia
Folksonomies: how to do things with words on social media THE GOVLAB BLOG
Anticipatory Compliance George Monbiot (2008)
Against Anticipatory Obedience AAUP
The origin of human language: cognition and communication Victor Mair at Language Log
...one important lesson of the last year and a half is that when the chips are down an oversized endowment need not equal intellectual or social authority. Rather, it means you are a juicy target for various shakedowns in the way, in extremis, the Catholic monasteries were in the age of Henry VIII.
...The new purported salve, neutral institutional speech' unless vital interests are threatened is just as corrosive to the mission of the university. For, it turns out that in practice it is a recipe for cowed silence rather than leadership in orienting a large community to a common end. Henceforth, Columbia promises "commitment to greater institutional neutrality." Before long we will have institutions promising the greatest maximum amount of institutional neutrality!
..."Neutrality" is one of those empty words that somehow has achieved sacred and context-free acceptance like "transparency."
...Alas, the task of the modern university can't be to save liberal democracy. But its self-inflicted incapacity and inability to stand up for itself — even when richly endowed and private — is a sign of the more general corruption of society.
pernickety, persnickety sesquiotic
Mountweazels
Mountweazel Wiktionary
Mountweazel Dictionary lowercasepress.com
Not a Word Henry Alford at The New Yorker (2005)
A definition of "vibe coding," or: how AI is turning everyone into a software developer Medium Newsletter
For this unsung philosopher, metaphors make life an adventure Sue Curry Jansen and Jeff Pooley at Psyche, via Stephen Downes
Words are incorrigible weasels; meanings of words cannot be held to paper with the ink.
Signals and Symbols in Linguistic Variation and Change Mark Liberman at Language Log
Is there a comprehensive(ish) list of all the "brainrot" meme terms?
Malicious compliance
Malicious compliance<,/a> adamgrowe.com
'Malicious Compliance' Is Not the Issue With Trump's Executive Orders The president-s decrees are deliberately sweeping and chaotic.
Tom Nichols at The Atlantic
3 Art Terms That Will Change the Way You Look At Paintings Christopher P Jones at Medium
-tor as suffix and Category:Latin terms suffixed with -tor Wiktionary
Dead shark shuffle at pageturnerawards.com
The Dead Shark Shuffle at lokispeaks
Monachopsis The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Gesamtkunstwerk Wikipedia
deem, redeem sesquiotica
Stop whining! (Words for 'complain' and 'complaint') Cambridge Dictionary
Anachronym challenge xkcd
List Of 47 Words That End In -Nym Dictionary.com
Nym Words: Sufferin' Suffixes
Theda C. Snyder
Words That End with NYM Merriam-Webster
The multivalence of interjections Victor Mair at Language Log
Study Reveals Most Popular American Texting Habits Victor Mair at Language Log>blockquote>Analysis of Google search data for 2025 reveals the most searched for texting abbreviations in America.
The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: The End of Slang lifehacker
Sustainability often used as a buzzword in agricultural genomics ScienceDaily
Which English word has the most definitions in the dictionary? Boing Boing (set yields to put)
List of words with the suffix -ology Wikipedia
Unspeakable from BBC: A Chorus of Quignogs
English Corpora
balk and baulk from spearated by a common language
Indigenous Language Families of North America
Aloe, Agalloch, Agila languagehat
needs must (see also Language Log post about double modals)
The 10 Top Generation Z and Alpha Trends of 2025 (so Far) lifehacker
Trump's 'Obliterated' Claim on Iran Just Became His Latest Meme Disaster gizmodo
Who were the Galatians? How did they get where they were? Victor Mair at Language Log">
Words, morphemes, collocations, characters Victor Mair at Language Log
Some bagus new words languagehat, linking to OED New Word entries for July 2025
lizardry sesquiotic
Digital Dictionaries of South Asia U Chicago
Spinach - Etymology, Origin & Meaning etymonline.com
Online Etymology Dictionary etymonline.com
Spinach: Indian interlude Victor Mair at Language Log
link love: language Stan Carey
Tracking the 'Xanadu' Meme William Benzon
18vii25
Alignment Mark Liberman at Language Log
Alignment charts and other low-dimensional visualizations Mark Liberman at Language Log
The AI Alignment Problem:
Why It's Hard, and Where to Start
Eliezer Yudkowsky (2016) pdf
Our journey journey Mark Liberman at Language Log
Feet of Clay
Feet of Clay Wikipedia Terry Pratchett 1996
Review: Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett Hedwig's World
Leaderboard Wikipedia
Here's a Sneak Peak at the Next Batch of Emoji Coming to Your Device
Proto-emoji Victor Mair at Language Log
Of 'turn'
The International Turn in Intellectual History David Armitage (pdf)
European Intellectual History after the Global Turn Annales
American Intellectual History and the Cultural Turn Project MUSE
Linguistic turn archives.history.ac.uk
Privacy-s Algorithmic Turn: An Intellectual History washington.edu
Intellectual Historians Confront the Present The Ideas Letter
What Is 'Freeze Branding'? The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture at lifehacker
If your child says they've joined a cult called "Children of the Waning Star," it's not as bad as it seems. The online group began on July 11, when TikToker Gigi Jarvis announced she was starting a cult, "and you're all going to be a part of it." It was obviously a joke, but the video took off on the platform, earning millions of views, and before long, the cult began picking up steam. Jarvis and her followers chose the name "Children of the Waning Star," picked some special cult symbols, and declared new holidays. Jarvis even added "cult leader" to her resume. But then the blowback started.
Slay the new slang: check out a guide to social media-s baffling lingo New Scientist
from Medium Newsletter:
Semantic change Wikipedia
Non-place Wikipedia
Footguns and rakestomping Mark Liberman at Language Log
The Soft Architecture of Meaning: Language Against Entropy Karel Berkovec at Medium
Language is the running commentary in our heads: planning what to say, replaying past conversations, judging, labeling, remembering. This inner speech is so pervasive we barely notice it — it feels indistinguishable from "me."
Unlike a physical experience, which either happens or doesn't, a symbolic statement can be about something that isn't currently "real." We can describe imaginary scenarios or transmit information that might be false or abstract. A Geiger counter or a thermometer cannot "lie" — they directly reflect physical truth — but a message or gene sequence can.
This decoupling is powerful, as it allows systems to contemplate "what-if" scenarios.
...As systems grow more complex, they develop new ways to encode and transmit information — essentially, new languages. The genetic code in DNA is a prime example: it's a symbolic system that carries instructions for building complex organisms.
...Symbolic language allows a physical system to represent states of the world beyond its immediate reality — even incorrect or hypothetical ones — through patterns (signals, tokens, codes).
Communicating across metaphorical differences Mark Liberman at Language Log
Like learning physics by watching Einstein do yoga Mark Liberman at Language Log
Analysis of all the words used on NYC streets flowing data
Matt Daniels gave the dataset the Pudding treatment. Some words are found citywide, but others are unique to specific areas.
Olonkho languagehat
Fossicking Wikipedia
fossick OED
Some uninformed anti-American peeving
Mark Liberman at Language Log
Obiter dictum Wikipedia
abduction uxdesign.co
In the late 1800s, Peirce laid out a model for how humans form beliefs. Not by waiting for divine insight or following perfect rules, but by starting with uncertainty, getting uncomfortable with what we think we know, and forming a guess worth testing.
The Fixation of Belief Charles Peirce (1877)
...If the settlement of opinion is the sole object of inquiry, and if belief is of the nature of a habit, why should we not attain the desired end, by taking as answer to a question any we may fancy, and constantly reiterating it to ourselves, dwelling on all which may conduce to that belief, and learning to turn with contempt and hatred from anything that might disturb it? This simple and direct method is really pursued by many men.
The Mystique of Untranslatable Concepts Stef van den Tweel at Medium
Mono No Aware Photo-Eye
from Briana Ní Loingsigh
To say I am sad, we say tá brón orm : there is sadness on me.
The AI Bubble Mark Liberman at Language Log
Cracker Victor Mair at Language Log
The Meaning Shift of "Preppy"
waywordradio.org
What Is The 'Notices Bulge, OwO What's This' Meme? from Know Your Meme ('Search the world's largest internet culture authority...')
Virulent debater and clickbait savant: how Charlie Kirk pushed a new generation to the right Alaina Demopoulos at Guardian
avuncular sesquiotic
an article consisting of a series of items presented as a list
2/12/2025 16:46:58 Exotic asset class (M c.40 ) requires tailored de-risking. NY-LON only.
Dialect or Topolect? Victor Mair at Language Log
The English Lexicon Project David A Balota et al. 2007 (pdf)
The English Lexicon Project is a multiuniversity effort to provide a standardized behavioral and descriptive data
set for 40,481 words and 40,481 nonwords. It is available via the Internet at elexicon.wustl.edu. Data from 816
participants across six universities were collected in a lexical decision task (approximately 3400 responses per par-
ticipant), and data from 444 participants were collected in a speeded naming task (approximately 2500 responses per participant).
bugaboo Wikipedia
Emojipedia 3,782... in Sept 2023
The Internet has greatly changed the way we communicate. Since body language and verbal tone do not translate in our text messages or e-mails, we've developed alternate ways to convey nuanced meaning. The most prominent change to our online style has been the addition of two new-age hieroglyphic languages: emoticons and emoji.
Acronyms Archives dictionary.com
Spookyfish Wikipedia
Doomscrolling (Wikipedia)
Social media companies play a significant role in the perpetuation of doomscrolling by leveraging algorithms designed to maximize user engagement. These algorithms prioritize content that is emotionally stimulating, often favoring negative news and sensationalized headlines to keep users scrolling. The business models of most social media platforms rely heavily on user engagement, which means that the longer people stay on their platforms, the more advertisements they see, and the more data is collected on their behavior. This creates a cycle where emotionally charged content—doften involving negative or anxiety-inducing information—is repeatedly pushed to users, encouraging them to keep scrolling and consuming more content. Despite the well-documented negative effects of doomscrolling on mental health, social media companies are incentivized to maintain user engagement through these methods, making it challenging for individuals to break free from the habit.
-core Wikipedia
The hopecore social trend has blossomed in popularity as a balm for anxious and unpredictable times, inviting people to make a conscious choice to live in the present and find the good in every moment. Naturally, music is providing a fitting soundtrack for the hopecore movement, with tracks centering around eternal themes: the beauty of life and love, the triumph of healing. Here, we've put together a collection of tracks highlighting hopecore's messages, featuring wide-ranging sounds across pop, electronic, R&B and indie; from the looping ambience of Flawed Mangoes to the shoegaze-leaning Rahim Redcar, the hazy funk of Steve Lacy to the saccharine hyperpop of aespa and more.
...I provide not only concrete definitions of word(-form) and lexeme and succinct discussion of the relevant issues, but I also propose two new terms: inventorium (the unpredictable elements of a language) and mentalicon (the elements that a speaker stores in memory). The latter two are crucially different because all speakers store many predictable elements. The four different senses can thus be distinguished clearly by using the four terms word-form, lexeme, inventorial item, and mental item. In the final section of the paper, I note that the term lexicalization also has multiple senses, but its most important sense is inventorization.
namecheck Oxford English Dictionary
Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts Daryl Sharp
Decipherments of ancient scripts are often attributed, and sometimes misattributed, to individual scholars: Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and the Phoenician alphabet, Champollion and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Magnus Celsius and Staveless Runes, Michael Ventris and Linear B, Edward Hincks and Akkadian cuneiform, Yuri Knorozov and Maya glyphs. These were undeniable intellectual achievements. They were also endeavours tinged with madness. How else could anyone persist with such fiendishly difficult work? The 11th-century Arabic text on decipherment, The Book of Mad Desire for the Knowledge of Written Symbols, grasped something of this fact. Decipherment has attracted more than its fair share of formidable scholars, enthusiastic amateurs and crackpots, all seeking connection with a lost past, or the power to make obscure symbols speak.
Semantic space Wikipedia
LIPUmanka lipamanka.gay
The North Atlantic and the Arctic The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody
Goidelic word stress is initial but with some signs of quantity sensitivity. Phrasal intonation tends to be falling (for both declaratives and questions) in southern Irish dialects but rising in northern ones. Interrogativity is marked by phonetic adjustments in initial or final accents of the utterance. Icelandic and Faroese have traditional word-initial stress-to-weight but show signs of penultimate stress patterns in loanwords. Intonation is characterized by phrasal accents within overall downtrend patterns (also in questions, but with some accentual distinctions). The polysynthetic structure of the Inuit languages makes the notion of lexical stress irrelevant, but tonal targets are associated with prosodic domains of various kinds, and a distinction is made between word-level and phrase-level tones; devoicing and truncation are utterance final. In Central Alaskan Yupik, primary word stress marks the last foot by pitch movement. Enclitic bound phrases, phrasal compounds, and non-enclitic bound phrases are seen as larger constituents below the utterance.
There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works. (Andrej Karpathy)
...the study of elements of speech, including intonation, stress, rhythm and loudness, that occur simultaneously with individual phonetic segments: vowels and consonants... Prosody reflects the nuanced emotional features of the speaker or of their utterances: their obvious or underlying emotional state, the form of utterance (statement, question, or command), the presence of irony or sarcasm, certain emphasis on words or morphemes, contrast, focus, and so on. Prosody displays elements of language that are not encoded by grammar, punctuation or choice of vocabulary.
Domain of discourse Wikipedia
It is the overall context in which the software will be developed and operated.
A Universe-of-Discourse (UoD) refers to the specific subject matter or domain of knowledge that is being represented, studied or analysed by a conceptual model. It is the set of entities, concepts, and relationships that are relevant to the problem domain, and it defines the scope and boundaries of the model.
(AI answers:) In semantics, the "universe of discourse" refers to the set of entities that a statement or formula is referring to. It is essential for logical reasoning and truth evaluation. The statement "no universe of discourse is a totally fictitious world" is based on the principle that there must be some connection between our language and the world it describes. If the universe of discourse were a totally fictitious world, it would mean that there is no connection between our language and any actual entities or reality.
(via slideshare.nete.g.,Portal: Semantics and Lexeme
Here's a big list of words that relate in some way to the minions of Nurgle. There are terms relating to decay, disease, ruin, as well as other characteristic features such as horns, bells, bodily functions, fungi, vermin, twilight, swamps, fog, gardening, and the two extremes of joy and despair, all of which are present among Nurgle's favoured children.
fine words butter no parsnips Wiktionary
AI defies precise definition, blurred by rapid evolution, our fluid understanding of its capabilities, and the dynamic interplay between humans and technology. Artificial Intelligence, once confined to science fiction, now permeates daily life. This lexicon offers alternative perspectives, reframing AI's monolithic view and illuminating its diverse applications and implications before us.
even profound, but achieves this effect through ambiguity
...The philological study of ancient and classical texts, traditionally the very core of the humanities, has during the last generation or so been either completely marginalized within university departments or, at some universities, even altogether banished from the academic portfolio. This development is partly due to general policies of higher education, but one can argue that it is primarily a consequence of trends within the humanities themselves.
...In his recent book-length poem Context Collapse, which examines how media technologies reshape the kind of poetry that can be made, Ryan Ruby offers this paraphrase/extrapolation of a 1966 paper by computational linguist Margaret Masterman about "toy models of language":
Are two identical sentences, the first produced by a human being and the second by machine intelligence in fact indiscernible? Answer: No ... if two subsequent conditions obtain. (1) The recipient of those sentences is human (the criterion of care) and (2) said human does not know whether the sentence was produced by a human or a machine (the criterion of context). If the same sentence can have different valences —whether semantic or perlocutionary — in different contexts of production or reception, it follows that this will also be true in the noncontext of a machine-produced sentence, or when awareness transforms that noncontext into a paratext which provides a frame for interpreting and understanding it.
...The last sentence of the unsigned letter expresses commitment to the university's mission "while preserving our commitment to academic freedom and institutional integrity." While I am no critic of judicious use of hypocrisy, this passage is also a nice example of what has come to be known as 'performative contradiction.' If government officials get to dictate to you that certain departments must be put into receivership, and you then go and promise to rejig the curriculum (for 'balance'), perhaps you should not claim 'institutional integrity' or present yourself as a guardian of academic freedom'?
The incredible story of Lillian Virginia Mountweazel and dictionary tomfoolery Grammar Party
Susanne K Langer understood the indispensable power of metaphors, which allow us to say new things with old words
Metaphor is the law of growth of every semantic. It is not a development, but a principle.
Metaphors are double agents. They say one thing and mean another. Their purpose within the symbolic order is to amplify, not deceive - to grow the stock of shared meanings. When we invoke a metaphor, we dislodge words from their literal perch. Our words become ambidextrous, stretched by analogy. We can say new things.
- from Philosophy in a New Key (1941) by Susanne K Langer
- from Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol III (1982) by Susanne K Langer
Words are digital symbols transmitted as acoustic signals. The word sequence in an utterance is encoded by a phonological system whose symbol-facing side connects to morpho-syntax, while its signal-facing side controls articulation and perception. This "duality of patterning" (Hockett) or "double articulation" (Martinet) has crucial and little-recognized benefits for accurate transmission, lexical learning, and community convergence.
Malicious compliance Wikipedia
Rückenfigur, Staffage, Festaiuolo
Phil Wang and Susie Dent challenge guests to invent new words to help create the new ultimate Unspeakable dictionary
...Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE)
There's a German word, Existenz, which obviously means existence, but which is often used a little bit differently than in English. Existenz often refers to one's career, to the life one has made for oneself (instead of one's own being in the Universe).
The unit of bogosity. Abbreviated L or mL in ASCII Consensus is that this is the largest unit practical for everyday use. The microLenat, originally invented by David Jefferson, was promulgated as an attack against noted computer scientist Doug Lenat by a tenured graduate student at CMU. Doug had failed the student on an important exam because the student gave only "AI is bogus" as his answer to the questions. The slur is generally considered unmerited, but it has become a running gag nevertheless. Some of Doug's friends argue that of course a microLenat is bogus, since it is only one millionth of a Lenat. Others have suggested that the unit should be redesignated after the grad student, as the microReid.
At English-Corpora.org, we're introducing a new way to interact with corpus data. Using Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT, Gemini, and Claude, users will soon be able to have collocates, phrases, and frequency data clustered, categorized, and explained automatically. The underlying corpus data remains unchanged — but AI will provide an optional layer of analysis to help users spot patterns and connections more quickly.
Feet of clay Wikipedia
from Quora, re: turn
James Martin
avid reader, former lit instructor
It means a change in focus, as in "the linguistic turn" in philosophy, which was the beginning of an increased interest in the particular way that language functions to create meaning. There-s also an older sense of it, when discussing poetry, as the point in the poem where the poet shifts from describing a situation or problem to describing the result or consequence or a new course of action. This is pretty common in sonnets.s Children of the Waning Star an online cult?
...solastalgia, a term coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht that describes climate grief. Last year, C. L. Nichols, Author wrote about it, explaining that people "feel a deep sense of disconnection and despair when their environment is destroyed. They feel like they-ve lost a part of themselves, like they-re living in a stranger-s world."
TL;DR: Symbolic language isn-t just a human quirk — it may be a thermodynamic necessity. Complexity itself might depend on symbolic systems to emerge, persist, and evolve. This article explores language as a fundamental aspect of how reality organizes information, revealing how even our most abstract symbols are constrained by the basic laws of physics.
Yufeng Zhao extracted words found in millions of publicly available Google Street View images between 2007 and 2024. He made a search engine for the scraped data so that you can see where the words appear in images and geographically.
...a series of Yakut and Dolgan heroic epics. The term Olonkho is used to refer to the entire Yakut epic tradition as well as individual epic poems. An ancient oral tradition, it is thought that many of the poems predate the northwards migration of Yakuts in the 14th century, making Olonkho among the oldest epic arts of any Turkic peoples. There are over one hundred recorded Olonkhos, varying in length from a few thousand to tens of thousands of verses
(quoting George Will): Today's most promiscuously used word is "vibe." It probably is used so often by so many because trying to decipher its meaning is like trying to nail applesauce to smoke.
...the logic of the best guess. The leap from idea to hypothesis. The kind of thinking that doesn't guarantee you're right, but gets you close enough to try.
...Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else. On the contrary, we cling tenaciously, not merely to believing, but to believing just what we do believe... The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I shall term this struggle inquiry, though it must be admitted that this is sometimes not a very apt designation.
The world's most interesting words without an English equivalent (viz. saudade: A vague sense of longing for something other than the present)
Mono No Aware Kenro Izu The phrase "Mono No Aware" translates to "the pathos of things" and reflects a Japanese concept recognizing the impermanence of life and expressing an appreciation of the fleeting beauty of ephemeral objects. In some 100 images, Izu examines this concept in three themes: Yugen (profundity), Sabi (beauty with aging), and Wabi (austere beauty), each speaking to "the beauty of impermanence" found in his subjects.
Foghlaimeoir
In the Irish language, we are not our emotions. We are not sad or anxious. We have sadness or anxiety on us.
I am anxious, tá imní orm : there is anxiety on me.
The language recognizes these as passing states, not permanent fixtures of who we are.
