“In the Hopi language surukaphe means ‘tail coffee’, or coffee watered down to make it go further. In Brazilian Portuguese slang, chafé means ‘bad coffee’, a blend of the words for ‘tea’ and ‘coffee’. Then there’s cholo in Louisiana French, from chaud-l’eau, or ‘hot water’.”
“For years, many linguists have believed that learning language is impossible without a built-in grammar template. The new AI models … demonstrate that the ability to produce grammatical language can be learned from linguistic experience alone.”
“Real questions are almost never settled in terms of right or wrong but rather how best to balance the competing equities of various solutions. Sarcasm is too lazy to engage in such important discussion.”
“In a famous anecdote in the Confessions, Augustine describes seeing Ambrose of Milan reading on his own without making a sound. Ambrose was not the first person in history to read silently, but his quiet, private reading was unusual enough to make an impression.”
“A lawful evil character ‘plays by the rules but without mercy or compassion.’ The New Yorker uses jarring diereses to prevent misreading of words that no one has trouble reading, and it doubles consonants in words like focussed because it said so, that’s why.”
“The Nazis were dedicated trolls who weaponized their insincerity to take advantage of liberal societies ill-equipped to confront them. This was not done just for political advantage—rather, the insincerity itself was a moral act, an expression of contempt for the weak.”
“In [Edward Baptist’s] 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism … he rejects ‘plantations’ (a term pregnant with false memory and romantic myths) in favor of ‘labor camps’; instead of ‘slave-owners’ (which seems to legitimate and rationalize the ownership of human beings), he uses ‘enslavers.’ Small changes with big implications.”