The Devil's Dictionary of Technology and Law - Bar & Bench - Indian Legal News - Dictionary

A

Artificial Intelligence: An intelligence at times so intelligent that it extends beyond the comprehension of human intelligence.

Automation: A build-up to the documentary ‘Rise of the Planet of the E-Apes’. It begins with a blacked-out, anonymous house-helper narrating how he lost his job to a machine.

B

Blockchain: Learning this concept will instantly block your chain of thought and you will block it out of your system forever. See also: Jurisprudence.

Boilerplate Clause: A set of terms in a contract that is used mutatis mutandis to save time and effort, only to increase both time and effort in the form of dispute resolution.

C

Case Management Information System (CMIS): A system that informally performs stress tests on lawyers before producing their desired output. This is done to maintain the highest levels of mental endurance in the legal fraternity.

Cloud Service: A digital space to hold your data, often afforded to you at ‘no charge’ as the real product is not the cloud service but you.

Compliance: A corporate practice that has, somehow, kept thirsty predators from abusing and misusing resources to prey on each other and the masses. It involves drowning said predators in redundant procedures.

Cryptocurrency: A digital asset class that takes an investor and his money from "asmano ki uchaiyo me...bohot upar" to "500 le le land kara de" while being surrounded in the kohra of Elon Musk's tweets, thinking to himself "mai (beep) hu jo isme aya."

Cybersecurity: A process involving bonafide acts similar to fighting hostile gunmen with a pencil. You need to be precise every time, they need to be precise just once. Even this kind of security requires you to ‘jaagte raho’ at all times.

D

Data Protection: A concept you take seriously only after you’re a victim of whatever or whomever you were needed to be secure from.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi): (Un)banking using blockchain technology to defy (pun intended) the existing banking system.

Disruptive Technology: Any new technology that convinces 20-year-olds to invest in it “coz iz d future”. To create “long-term wealth and retire by their 20’s”. My dear 20-year-old, Savdhan rahe! Satark rahe!

Drone: A mechanical creature capable of air, water, and land operability. Yet, most likely to be spotted in weddings hovering over Priti and Pankaj as they do the ‘Titanic’ pose. If you spot multiple of them, someone is finding their own match in the crowd from the comfort of their homes.

E

E-commerce: A new weapon in the arsenal of the bargainers who unabashedly insist on paying the seller at discounted prices, instead of buying from the app actually offering those prices! If the customer is king, this one is irking.

E-sports: A full-time profession, pending the approval of Indian parents. It involves mastery in online physical activity and skill at the cost of real-life physical activity and skill.

F

Fin-Tech: An evolving species of finance professionals who now eye every bit of your data in addition to their historic interest in your money.

G

(5)G: Fifth-Generation technology using higher spectrum to increase the speed of messages on ‘the health risks of 5G’ among other things. An opportunity for both businesses and celebrities to stay relevant in the market.

Geospatial Tech: Use of modern tools and technologies that range from remarkable information systems capable of predicting natural calamities, to navigation systems occasionally directing you to the wrong side of a one-way road with complete confidence.

H

Health-Tech: Innovations such as contactless healthcare to ensure the health, care, and safety of doctors by avoiding contact with the families and other potentially violent stakeholders of the patient.

I

Information Solutions: A new class of professionals perennially convincing you that they are the godsend solution to all of mankind’s problems while charging you enough to cause financial problems.

Intellectual Property: Protectable creations of the mind, often unintellectual in today's age. Like this article.

Internet-of-Things: An interactive system of things leading to a world where your mobile will be connected to your laptop, tablet, smart-watch, smart-glasses, smart-coffee-mug, intelligent-fridge, clever-microwave, robotic vacuum cleaner, robotic guard dogs, and a smart gun to shoot the dogs down if their system corrupts. In simpler words, an unlimited buffet serving close-to-unlimited delicacies of data for companies.

M

Machine Learning: An overoptimistic human effort to make machines better at that one trait that has ensured their sustenance as a species. In a world of survival of the fittest!

Meme Coin: A class of cryptocurrency expected to take you ‘chaand tak’ but doesn't last mere ‘shaam tak’.

P

Phishing: A tool in a fraudster's kit-box that requires less effort and time to generate more money than its work-intensive homonym, fishing.

Privacy: An invasion of this by 'mohalle ki auntiya' is frowned upon. But a violation by tech companies, data companies, the government, and other hackers/fraudsters (who eventually service it to 'mohalle ki auntiya') is overlooked for convenience.

R

Ransomware: Digital equivalent of the Omni van.

Regulation: An often disproportionate State reaction to rein in the monster of disruptive technology much after it has affected industries, children's FDs, and the environment.

S

Simulated Reality: A concept complex enough to make a Christopher Nolan movie out of it.

Smart Contract: A contract capable of performing and enforcing itself, unlike regular contracts that require either courts or Vasooli Bhai to enforce them.

Srikrishna Committee: A cCmmittee consisting of those elderly members of the family who have a remarkable grasp of all trendy tech while a much younger you is clueless.

Surveillance: Warranted to prevent others from looting you in olden times. Enables (almost) anyone to loot you innovatively in recent times.

T

Techno-legal Nomenclature: Calling a spade a Flat-blade Manually-operated Unearthing Device (FMUD). And a shovel a Curve-blade Manually-operated Unearthing Device (CMUD). Collectively calling them and the person operating them a Manual Unearthing System (MUS). This is done to avoid ambiguity. Also to assert the exclusivity of the legal profession.

Tech Contract: A classification in contracts done because, well, why not?

Terms of Service: Extortion wearing a three-piece suit and Gucci shoes.

TMT: An area of legal practice that merits the name TNT in view of the outburst it is witnessing in recent times.

U

UI/UX: A web-based user-engagement platform design in which the term web stands for a real web meant to entangle you with the website/app for the ‘service providing’ spider to incessantly feed on.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV): Mangifera indica equivalent of the drone genus.

V

Virtual Meetings: A place online where you lose your internet connection, patience, persuasion, and confidential data before losing your mind.

Visual Line Of Sight (VLOS): Operating UAVs within this resembles a remotely-controlled helicopter. Beyond this, it resembles a nail-biting-mind-numbing-zero-margin-for-error video game.

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Word in progress: Addition of slangs to English dictionaries - Financial Express - Dictionary

The emergence of new slangs, along with their acceptance by English dictionaries over the years, is democratising the language

By Reya Mehrotra

If Geoffrey Chaucer, hailed as the ‘father of English literature’ was to be alive again, he would not get what was being said in his own mother tongue.
In December 2021, ‘floofy’ was one of the new words added to the Collins English Dictionary. It is a slang for ‘an animal, especially a cat or dog, having luxuriant fur or hair’. Similarly, ‘crypto’ (slang for cryptocurrency), ‘onion bag’ (slang for the goal in hockey, soccer, etc), ‘nelson’ (cricket slang), ‘vacay’ (informal for vacation) and ‘double-vaxxed’ (informal for having received two vaccinations against a disease), too, made the cut to the Collins English Dictionary in 2021.

Cambridge Dictionary editor Rachel Fletcher believes that the emergence of new slangs is just one of the ways in which the English language is constantly changing.

In recent times, a number of slangs and informal words has been added to the dictionary. The reasons are far from one—the rise of the ‘Gen-Z’, the social media effect, the ever-evolving language, or the post-pandemic work-from-home culture, where informality is on the rise. In fact, NFT (non-fungible token) was named the ‘Collins Word of the Year 2021’ alongside nine other words like pingdemic, neopronoun, regencycore, cheugy, metaverse and climate anxiety, among others.
In recent years, slangs like ‘butters’, which means ‘ugly’, ‘snack’ for ‘an attractive person’ and ‘grammable’, meaning ‘attractive or interesting enough to be suitable for posting on the social media service Instagram’, have been added to the Cambridge Dictionary. As for informal words around the pandemic, Cambridge Dictionary has recently added ‘rona’, short for ‘Coronavirus’, and ‘vax’, short for ‘vaccine’ or ‘vaccination’. In 2021, Internet terms ‘TBH’ (to be honest) and ‘FTW’ (for the win) were added to The Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

The year 2020 had seen a number of pandemic words like ‘quarantine’, ‘coronageddon’, ‘maskhole’, ‘covidiot’ and ‘superspreading event’ becoming a part of the daily lingo of people around the world and added to the dictionary as their usage became common. But as for slangs and informal words, it is not just because they are trending that they are finding official entries into dictionaries. What causes a word to enter a dictionary, according to Jonathan Dent, senior editor, Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Oxford University Press, is when it has been used so often and so widely that it has to be recorded and explained in an honest and evidence-based record of the language. “Descriptive dictionaries have a duty to include all the words that have justified their inclusion through sustained and widespread use,” he explains. For OED, that means all words that meet inclusion criteria from the whole history of English after the year 1150.

The making of a slang
Not all modern words might qualify as slang but could get different categorisations when being entered into a dictionary. Jonathan Dent says that OED labels words and senses according to their regional character, currency,and other factors, and as slang, colloquial, etc, according to their use. “The categorisation of particular words as ‘slang’—that is, language which is regarded as very informal, and more common in speech than writing—or as ‘formal’ or ‘standard’ English reflects how words are used at a particular point in time, rather than essential qualities of the words themselves. Yesterday’s slang word is often part of today’s vocabulary of formal or standard English, and vice-versa,” he adds.

Rachel Fletcher shares that Cambridge Dictionary too uses labels to tell users more about the contexts in which a word is typically used. The labels include information about the regional varieties of English in which a word is used, and information about the register such as whether it is informal, formal, offensive, or old-fashioned. “The entries that we label as ‘slang’ are typically extremely informal and often used by a specific group of people (young people, for instance) among themselves. For example, we can see that ‘wonga’, slang for ‘money’, is mostly used in the UK, while ‘putz’, which means ‘a stupid person’, is more common in the US, and ‘furphy’, meaning ‘a rumour’, is mostly used in Australia,” Rachel adds.

In 2020, OED added the slang word ‘zhuzhy’ (stylish, exciting), probably originally a part of the British gay slang known as Polari, but first recorded in a relatively formal context in a dramatic review of 1968. However, the word ‘ghosting’ (ignoring or pretending not to know a person, especially on social media or via text message) shares some of the contextual qualities of slang but its use has become so widespread in the ten years since it was first visible on Twitter that OED does not categorise it as slang.

Shivangi Gupta, assistant director English, British Council India, says that English has changed from the times of Chaucer to Shakespeare to Austen. “Diaspora writers have their own flavours to the language. If you have a smartphone and access to Twitter, you can introduce something that captures the imagination of many, goes viral, and then eventually ends up in the dictionary as valid usage. We have to remember that dictionaries describe how language is presently and prevalently used and understood, these are not necessarily prescriptive tools of how it ought to be used. We all contribute to shaping the language by using it,” she adds.

Shivangi’s favourite inclusions in The Merriam-Webster Dictionary are ‘whataboutism’, which is synonymous with the British English word ‘whataboutery’, and ‘copypasta’. The former means ‘the act or practice of responding to an accusation of wrongdoing by claiming that an offence committed by another is similar or worse’ and the latter is ‘data (such as a block of text) that has been copied and spread widely online’.

Rachel shares that in the past two years, about 6% of the new words that were added to the dictionary have been informal. Of those informal words, less than 1% were slangs. The reason for the small quantity is that the Cambridge Dictionary is meant to be used primarily by learners of English and since slang is mostly used by specific groups of people, it is less likely to be relevant to learners. Another characteristic of slang, shares Rachel, is that it often falls out of use relatively quickly. “Before we add a new word to the dictionary, we monitor its use over time. Only words that are used consistently over a period of time are added. A lot of slang changes too quickly to be included,” she says.

To make the process of inclusion of slangs and informal words more democratic, Cambridge Dictionary features a selection of a few words on their blogs each week for the users to decide if the word will become widely used. Words like ‘midweeker’ (a short holiday taken during the week), ‘proffee’ (a drink made by mixing cold coffee with protein powder) and ‘cardening’ (the activity of growing plants inside your car) have been recently shared on their blog.

Slang is regional
It is often popularly said that the language spoken in India changes every few kilometres. English too has no one standard form, as Shivangi Gupta, puts it. “There is not just one English, there are many ‘Englishes’,” she says. There is British and American English which are the most commonly known ones, Indian English, Australian English, Kenyan English, Philippine English, and more. So is the case with slang. Every city, state and country has its own unique slang which makes it a tedious task for dictionary curators to keep a tab and to decide whether they should make it to the dictionary or not.

For instance, while in India, the words ‘fresher’, ‘aiyo’ and ‘prepone’ might seem very common and popular, they remain restricted to Indian English.
In fact, in 2021, the word ‘fresher’, which means ‘an employee with only a limited amount of work experience; a recent graduate entering employment’, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, shares Shivangi. “The richness of English is increased by its users every day and these changes and additions to the dictionaries are a recognition of that,” she says.

Jonathan Dent agrees that slang is typically restricted to a particular context or group of people and often varies from period to period and from region to region. “More standard varieties of written English vary in similar ways, but the particular qualities of slang words and the ways in which they are used mean that slang often varies more widely, and slang terms fall in and out of fashion more quickly than the vocabulary of standard written English. Different countries (and even different cities and towns within countries) will have their own slang, and slang terms that they share with other regions, in the same way, that they typically have standard or colloquial varieties of English which have particular distinctive local features alongside those shared with other Englishes,” he says.

Apart from the geographical boundaries, what impacts slang is also the other demographic factors like the age of a particular group of people. Another factor that dictionary curators keep in mind while including slangs in the dictionaries is informing the reader of the context in which a word is typically used so that those unfamiliar with the slang used by a set of people belonging to a different region might be able to use it correctly.

So, the next time if you hear a slang like ‘GOAT’ (greatest of all time), pop open a dictionary and find the meaning. After all, ‘Iykyk’ (if you know, you know).

New slangs that were added to English dictionaries last year

Floofy (Collins English Dictionary)
Crypto (Collins English Dictionary)
Onion Bag (Collins English Dictionary)
Nelson (Collins English Dictionary)
Vacay (Collins English Dictionary)
Double Vaxxed (Collins English Dictionary)
NFT (Collins Word of the Year)
TBH (The Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
FTW (The Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
Fresher (Oxford English Dictionary)
Yeet (Dictionary.com)
Zaddy (Dictionary.com)
Snack (Dictionary.com)
Oof (Dictionary.com)

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Author Talks: The made-up words that make our world - McKinsey - Dictionary

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with John Koenig, author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (Simon & Schuster, November 2021), about words and the power we give to them. Koenig shares a few of his original definitions, as well as the lessons he has learned in his pursuit to express in words the metaphysical human experience, which remains largely undefined. An edited version of the conversation follows.

How do you go about coming up with a new word?

It’s just a matter of diving into the research and looking for something that speaks to me, a hook. Often, it starts with a Wiktionary, the dictionary that’s run by the Wikimedia Foundation. The advantage there is that they have translations of a ton of words in different languages: Icelandic, Finnish, and Greek—some of my favorites— and a ton of other languages from around the world. You can get a sense of how many ways there are to express things in language.

Then I start with a root word. For example, “immerensis,” which is the feeling that you don’t understand why someone loves you. As hard as you may try to wrap your mind around the idea, it’s impossible to understand. I found the Latin root immerens, which means undeserving, and expanded it from there to “immerensis”. Once I find a hook like that, I can then dive into real dictionaries in those languages and try to piece something together in a creative way. But often, that’s not quite enough, and I have to get creative in other ways.

There’s a lot of wordplay involved. I have another definition, “tichloch,” which is the feeling that you don’t know how much time you have left on this earth. That one is actually an acronym for “the insatiable crocodile hunts what’s left of Captain Hook,” a reference to Peter Pan. The way it’s pronounced (tick lock) refers to the word as well. I can get pretty deep into the wordplay nerdery.

How do you make sure the word you create doesn’t already exist?

The first step in my process when I come up with a feeling [that I want to define] is to try to make sure that there isn’t already a word for it. There frequently is because a lot of languages around the world are really rich in their vocabularies. There’s a Japanese word, mono no aware, which is a sense of the transience of things and how beautiful that can be, or ubuntu, which means “I am because we are.” That's a universal concept.

Sometimes the work is already done, but language is limitless. We can always expand the palette. There are lots of synonyms that are redundant, so sometimes I decide, “You know what? It’s worth it. I’m going to try to define my own take on transience.” That’s the last definition in the book. I called it “tiris,” which is the awareness of the impermanence of absolutely everything, the comfort of that, and also how disturbing that thought can be. “Tiris” is derived from Tír na nÓg, which in Irish folklore is the land of everlasting youth and beauty.

What does a ‘real’ word even mean?

I’m often asked if these words are real; that’s been the dominant question I have gotten from readers. And my answer has evolved over time. Initially I’d say, “Well, no, of course they’re not real. I just made them up. You’re not going to find these words in any other dictionary.” But over the years [something else] occurred to me. I defined a word called “sonder,” the awareness that everyone around you is the main character of their own story, but to you they’re just extras in the background. Sonder caught on in a way that none of the others have. Often, I’ll run into sonder being used in earnest online, and I’ve even overheard it being used in conversation at cafés.

That changed everything for me because we usually tend to accept the words that we are given in life. The words we use to build our lives were handed to us in the crib or picked up on the playground. Once you realize that, you realize all of our words were basically made up. All of them. The word “robot” didn’t exist until someone made it up, and now that’s part of our parlance. Dr. Seuss invented the word “nerd” because he needed a rhyme.

We allow our words to define us, but I think the natural order of things is that we define words. We imbue them with meaning. We pour ourselves into them. That is how it should be. We’re the ones that mean something. Ultimately, all words are made up.

We don’t tend to question the reality of those words because they become part of the architecture of our lives. If anything, I think it is a little bit of a problem that we take words too seriously. We allow our words to define us, but I think the natural order of things is that we define words. We imbue them with meaning. We pour ourselves into them. That is how it should be. We’re the ones that mean something. Ultimately, all words are made up.

Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, is this world still mostly undefined?

I truly believe that. Not just in emotion but in language in general. There are certain parts of the world that have been defined quite well, like physical and visible reality—the tangible stuff around us that was named back when we were still cavemen sketching on walls.

Some of the first things that we would have come up with words for were bison herds, hunting strategies, spears, and all those physical things. That was by necessity. The really deep parts of ourselves, the emotions, would have to come later. It would take great effort to actually extract some of those things and find the commonalities between us, but I sincerely believe that nobody is alone in how they feel. There are no emotions in this book or anywhere that are only ever felt by one person.

I sincerely believe that nobody is alone in how they feel. There are no emotions in this book or anywhere that are only ever felt by one person.

Typically, it’s a matter of going the long way around and trying to [dredge up] these buried objects from the bottom of a very muddy lake. That’s what it often feels like when you’re trying to express an emotion, so there’s a lot of space for language to expand in terms of the intangible things, the metaphysical, the nonphysical. That’s the most exciting part of this period in history, when it seems that we have, just in the last 200 years, discovered each other’s vulnerability and our own humanity. Now is the time to define the world as we see it, and it’s a far more complex, multifaceted, and delicate world.

What can you tell us about the word ‘OK’?

According to linguists, “OK” is the most commonly understood word in the world. One would naturally assume that out of all the words, that surely must be the most real one we have. But then you look into its origins. It emerged in 1840, and over the next couple of decades it slowly started to take over, almost like an early meme. But nobody really knows what those two letters are supposed to stand for. It could have been a fad in Boston in 1840. It could stand for “all correct,” if both of those words were misspelled [as “oll korrect”]. It could be from a presidential campaign in 1840, or it could have been borrowed from one of a dozen other languages around the world.

That’s the most exciting part of this period in history, when it seems that we have, just in the last 200 years, discovered each other’s vulnerability and our own humanity. Now is the time to define the world as we see it, and it’s a far more complex, multifaceted, and delicate world.

We don’t know what “OK” really means, even though it is the most real word we have. And if that’s true of the most real word we have, then the dominoes start to fall as to the legitimacy of language. There’s something empowering about how the mighty can fall. It’s a reminder that all words are made up, and they don’t need to have any more meaning than we give them. We’re the ones who make them real. I think of words as basically no more or less real than constellations in the sky: they’re useful to a fault. Orion exists because we say it does, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

In many other cultures they connect the dots very differently, and it’s a beautiful thing. It’s up to us to connect the dots however we want and to discard the patterns that previous generations have given us. Take words like love, for example, which perhaps are now too broad and hard to pin down because they mean too many different things. If you try to cut them out of your vocabulary or think deeper about them and go the long way around, I think it can be a very empowering thing.

What are some of your favorite words?

Nyctous (adjective; NIC-tiss)

Feeling quietly overjoyed. To be the only one awake in the middle of the night. Sitting alone with a laptop and a cup of tea. Strolling down the center line of an abandoned street. Taking in the world like an empty theater between productions. Stripped down to a simple black box hoping to be whatever you wanted to be. “Nyctous” derives from Nyctocereus, a genus of cactus that blooms only at night.

Kerisl (noun; KER-ile)

The sorrow of imagining the wealth of knowledge forever lost to history. Knowing we’ll never hear the language of the Etruscans, the battle cry of the Sea Peoples, or the burial chants of the Neanderthals. We’ll never read any more than a fragment of the works of Blake, Sappho, Aristotle, or Jesus, or enjoy the untold treasures of so many burned libraries, forgotten oral traditions, and unrecorded songs, any of which might have made up the cornerstone of the canon that we’d all be able to quote by heart and couldn’t imagine living without.

“Kerisl” is a contraction of Kerguelen Islands, which are equidistant between Australia, Antarctica, and Madagascar. It is [what remains of] a sunken microcontinent that was lost 20 million years ago. It was once three times the size of Japan, covered in dense forests, nameless animals, and possibly even people that we will never know existed. It’s all just lost between the waves.

Suerza (noun; swERR-zuh)

A feeling of quiet amazement that you exist at all. A sense of gratitude that you were even born in the first place, that you somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds, having won an unbroken streak of reproductive lotteries that stretches all the way back to the beginning of life itself. “Suerza” is from the Spanish suerte, which is luck, and fuerza, which is force. It’s basically luck–force.

Hem-jawed (adjective)

Feeling trapped inside your own language. Struggling to shake away the baggage weighing down certain words. Unable to break out of its age-old structures and melodies, frustrated that the scattering of verbal pigments on its palette could never quite capture the colors in your head. “Hem-jawed” is from hem, which is an attempt to clear the throat, and jaw, which means coarse babble.

Povism (noun; POVE-ism)

The frustration of being stuck inside your own head, unable to see your face or read your body language in context, only ever guessing how you might be coming across, which makes you think of yourself as a detached observer squinting out at a lushly painted landscape. But everyone else you’ve seen is woven right into the canvas. “Povism” is from point of view and ism.

Kenopsia (noun; ken-OPP-see-uh)

The eeriness of places left behind. You can sense it when you move out of a house, noticing just how empty a place can feel. Walking through a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on the weekend, or fairgrounds out of season. [Such places] are usually bustling with life but now lie abandoned and quiet. It’s easy to forget that most of your memories happened in places that are still around, the walls mostly unchanged, carrying on in your absence. The world you once knew and the people you still remember have long since moved on, replaced by so many others who have passed through these doors.

It’s almost impossible to imagine while you’re still there knowing abstractly that the crowds will soon be gone, the lights shut off, the music silenced. If you spend enough time in a place, it becomes infused with a certain meaning, with specific memories soaked deep into every corner of the room. It’s hard to imagine it could ever mean anything else. But soon enough there will come a day when you pack up your things and walk through your house one last time, looking slowly around the rooms, thinking back on everything that happened here, which makes it feel not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, whose inhabitants are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.

Not a day after you leave it will become someone else’s new home, a blank canvas they’ll fill up with their own memories, burying the life you built in a fresh coat of paint, leaving nothing but echoes of what was once here. Maybe that’s why we want to believe in ghosts. Maybe it’s just a fantasy, a fantasy that our memories are so powerful they’ll leave a mark on the wall that would mean something to someone else and can’t just be painted over. We just want to mark our time here, to keep the rooms filled and the memories alive. If our houses ever feel haunted, it will be because we’re haunting them ourselves, trying to revisit all the places we once knew. As if there was something still there for us, something we forgot. As if there were ever such a thing as unfinished business. “Kenopsia” derives from the ancient Greek keno, which is emptiness, and opsia, which is seeing: seeing emptiness.

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John Koenig on words and the power we give to them

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Updating the doggie dictionary: A ruff guide to language - Hindustan Times - Dictionary

New research suggests that dogs can respond consistently to an average of 89 words, with service dogs responding to more words than house pets, and some breeds being more “proficient” than others.

PREMIUM

(Shutterstock)

Updated on Jan 29, 2022 12:52 PM IST

ByDipanjan Sinha

He knows who’s a good boy, but how much else can he grasp?

Fresh research supports what dog lovers have believed for a long time: Dogs may not just “get a sense of what you’re saying”; they could be said to actually know some words.

Sophie Jacques, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Dalhousie University, Canada, and psychologist Catherine Reeve, have published findings in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science that suggest the average dog “understands” about 89 words.

These tend to be action-related phrases rather than nouns. So terms like “sit there” or “go outside” register, but not “kitchen”, “bowl”, “door”.

Jacques first started studying dogs as a means of better understanding child development, in 1993. Knowing that dogs respond to action words whereas babies tend to learn object-related words early on, for instance, offers clues to how and why humans might learn language better than other species; and how these abilities allow us to retain information, organise and plan, Jacques says.

Now, her methods of studying children have also led her to understand dogs better. In 2015, while talking to Reeve, who was then studying olfaction in dogs for a PhD at Dalhousie University, “we started discussing the possibility of cognitive abilities in dogs too”.

Most existing research focuses on the ability of specific dogs to understand words. Such studies tended to be limited to one or two individuals. “We decided to look at language variability across dog breeds and ages as child researchers have done with preverbal babies. Being a child psychologist, I knew that the way to study this in young babies was to give parents checklists of words that are commonly used with infants, and ask parents to check off those words their babies respond to consistently,” Jacques says.

Infants can indicate the words that they understand even before they talk. “So if you ask where their mother is they will look towards her or if you ask them about their doll, they will pick it up,” she says. Developmental psychologists work on this knowledge that parents observe about their children, to predict a child’s later language abilities.

In a similar vein, “we came up with a list of words that we thought dogs might know. We went to pet stores, we went online to find different sports that people play with dogs and the commands that these involve and we also looked for basic commands that are taught in training school,” she says.

The final list of 172 words was distributed among the owners of 165 dogs (94 pure-breeds spread across 50 breeds; and 71 mixed-breed dogs). The owners were asked to identify which words their dogs responded to, consistently, with a specific behaviour.

The results indicate that family pets respond to about 80 words on average, and service dogs to about 120. Service dogs as a rule tended to respond to more words than family dogs, the findings suggest.

The results vary across different breed groups. Herding dogs such as border collies and toy dogs like chihuahuas responded to more words and phrases than types such as terriers, retrievers and mixed-breeds.

While the study vindicates the stand of ardent pet parents, more importantly, it could help predict which dogs might make for better service animals. “Service dogs like a seeing-eye dog for the blind can cost around $30,000 (over ₹22 lakh) to train in the US. It is very expensive and not all dogs make it through the training. If we have tools that can predict which dog will be able to pick up the training better, it could become a much cheaper process,” Jacques says.

Accordingly, the two researchers are now studying to what extent these early learning abilities can predict the range of things a dog will be able to learn. “We are examining new dog breeds to see if their responses to words predict how they do on behavioural tests,” Jacques says. “We recently had 100 dogs visit our lab and participate in games, to see if the number of words they respond to correlates with, for instance, better success rates in difficult search puzzles.”

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• ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  

  Dipanjan Sinha

  Dipanjan Sinha is principal correspondent, weekend features in Mumbai. He has been a journalist for seven years now and worked on the desk, news and features teams

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How to use translation features in Telegram for Android - Android Police - Translation

The Telegram app for Android recently received a major update, adding a whole host of new features that make the app much more interactive and fun to use. One such convenience tool allows you to instantly translate any message you’ve received in a non-native language — all that without even leaving the chat window. It should come in handy when talking to your friends and colleagues from the other corner of the world, which is a pretty common scenario these days. But before you can start using the feature, you must enable it in the Telegram app, and here’s how you can do that.

How to enable translation in Telegram for Android

Telegram already has a dedicated section to pick your preferred language for the app interface. The new translation feature is made available in that same section.

1. Tap on the hamburger menu (three horizontal lines) in the top left corner of the homepage.
2. Go to Settings.
3. Open Language.
4. Toggle on Show Translate Button.

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Right below that toggle sits the option to exclude your native or any other language that you are fluent in. The in-chat button to translate the messages won’t appear for these exclusions. The list here includes several major world languages, though it misses out on a few, like Hindi.

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How to use translation in Telegram

With the translation feature enabled in the app, it just takes a couple of taps to convert your messages in real-time. This is what you need to do:

1. In a conversation, tap the message you'd like to translate to open a pop-up menu.
2. From the list of options, tap on Translate to let the app automatically identify the message language.
   • You’ll see the message translated into English (or whichever default language you use Telegram in).
3. Tap on Close Translation when you're done to go back to the chat thread and continue messaging as usual.

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Missing features and your privacy

Telegram’s product announcement video shows that the iOS app gives you more options when translating a message. For instance, you can copy the translated text with a single click and even manually change the language from the same window. There’s no such option on the Android app, which gets a rather simplistic translation menu, though you can manually select and copy the translated message using Android’s native text formatting tool.

As for the privacy of your messages, Telegram is using Google’s translation services to provide you with these conversions. That means the message text is sent to Google’s servers, and if there’s any sensitive information shared in your chats, that will also end up there. If that makes you uneasy, be sure to be cautious when translating your messages to avoid giving any third party access to your personal chats unnecessarily.

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Telegram has some of the largest topical user groups on any platform, with participants from all across the world. This thoughtful inclusion helps break the language barrier for many and encourages them to connect with more diverse communities. It is one of the utility features that all messaging apps should adopt to make conversations more inclusive and open.

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Blog: Some words added to dictionaries not 'awesome' (1/27/22) - Brazil Times - Dictionary

Some words added to dictionaries not ‘awesome’
By Mary Lou Sartor

We received very little snowfall here up until now. Regardless of the inconvenience and extra work; much beauty is associated with freshly fallen snow. I no longer create angels in the snow.

My wings have dropped some feathers and I can’t gain any lift. People here might talk and call that action, at my age, something far less than awesome.

I won’t say a snowfall is awesome. The centuries-old, totally overworked adjective is not an “in” word now. After listening to winners of the Oscars and Emmys and others give brief, long and sometimes tasteless acceptance speeches; the overused words like awesome and amazing becomes tiresome. God and mother were not mentioned as often and they are the most amazing of them all.

Most of us have a word-hoard in store, but it does not hurt to clean house of the least desirable ones and add some new and better choices in the mix.

For instance, I had to cast away the word raunchy years ago. My mother thought it was vulgar.

Raunchy means slovenly, dirty, obscene and smelly. I used it to describe my worn-out tennis shoes a couple of times and I lent it to my little sister's ears once. The little seven-letter word caused such a stink at our old fat-legged table it has been jailed in my vocabulary’s store, out of reach of my thinking cap for many years. I gave it a little space in this article today. That ‘bad’ word won’t come out of my mouth again Mom - ever.

In 2005, the rap star BG’s album “Chopper City in the Ghetto came out. The business-savvy fellow remarked that he wished he had patented the term, for the reason of profit from its extensive use. B.G. added that he used the term to describe their jewelry.

Several Cadillac Escalade billboards and magazine advertisements used the term Bing- Bling to promote their expensive vehicles. Even wine coolers carried the name MD 20/20, also Mad Dog market a flavor called Bling Bling Blue Raspberry.

The folks at Merriam Webster saw the need to officially add the term and several other words to their English dictionary (July 2006). I think it sounds less than awesome and rather dirty like the word raunchy.

Some dictionary experts decided to take the sting out of buckshot and decided to drop it from its pages. Bling Bling is still in use.

Now we are using Covid-related terms. I think we are more than ready for those words to drop out of sight and take the virus with them. That would be awesome. Just saying…

Reach me by phone at 1-317-286-7352.

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Chinese AI translation machine startup secures new funding - Nikkei Asia - Translation

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Chinese AI translation machine startup secures new funding  Nikkei Asia