A new translation of Franz Kafka’s diaries restores much of his Jewish musings - The Times of Israel - Translation

JTA — Franz Kafka was a devotee of Yiddish theater, fell in love with his Hebrew teacher and once encountered the owner of a brothel he frequented in synagogue on Yom Kippur.

The broad strokes of Kafka’s biography have long been known to historians, but a new English translation of the Czech author’s complete and unabridged diaries gives readers the fullest possible picture of his complex, contradictory relationship with Judaism.

For an author most famous for his depictions of loneliness, alienation and unyielding bureaucracy, Kafka often saw in Judaism an opportunity to forge a shared community.

“The beautiful strong separations in Judaism,” he praises at one point, in a disjointed style that is a hallmark of his diaries. “One gets space. One sees oneself better, one judges oneself better.”

Later, writing about a Yiddish play he found particularly moving, Kafka reflected on its depiction of “people who are Jews in an especially pure form, because they live only in the religion but live in it without effort, understanding or misery.” He was also involved with several local Zionist organizations, and toward the end of his life fell in love with Dora Diamant, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi who taught him Hebrew (though she receives scant mention in the diaries).

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“The Diaries of Franz Kafka,” translated by Ross Benjamin and out this week from Penguin Random House, collects every entry of the writer’s personal diaries covering the period from 1908 until 1923, the year before his death from tuberculosis at the age of 41.

Although versions of Kafka’s diaries had previously been published thanks to the efforts of his Jewish friend and literary executor Max Brod (with translation assistance from Hannah Arendt), they had been heavily doctored with many passages expunged, including some of what Kafka had written about his own understanding of Judaism. A German-language edition of the unabridged diaries was published in 1990.

The author of “The Metamorphosis,” “The Trial” and “The Castle” was raised by a non-observant father in Prague, and he hated the small amounts of Jewish culture he was exposed to at a young age, including his own bar mitzvah. In addition, the city’s largely assimilated German-speaking Jewish population tended to look down on poorer, Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews.

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But Kafka’s diaries also reveal a growing fascination with Jewish culture in young adulthood, particularly around a traveling Yiddish theater troupe from Poland whom he saw perform nearly two dozen times. He developed a close relationship with the company’s lead actor, Jizchak Löwy, and would host recitation events where he’d give Löwy the opportunity to perform stories of Jewish life in Warsaw.

Kafka himself would even write and deliver an introduction to these performances in Yiddish. He also witnessed his own father harboring prejudices toward his new friend Löwy, saying, “My father about him: He who lies down in bed with dogs gets up with bugs.”

“The Metamorphosis” famously revolves around a man who inexplicably is transformed into a giant bug and is then rejected by his family. In his introduction, Benjamin notes, “Scholars have suggested that such tropes, prevalent as they were in the antisemitic culture in which Kafka reckoned with his own Jewishness, influenced the themes of his fiction.”

Some of Kafka’s more ambiguous comments about his Jewish brethren were previously removed by Brod, according to Benjamin’s introduction to the diaries.

At one point while hanging out with Löwy, Kafka invokes antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish uncleanliness: “My hair touched his when I leaned toward his head, I grew frightened due to at least the possibility of lice.” Benjamin notes: “Here Kafka confronts his own Western European Jewish anxiety about the hygiene of his Eastern European Jewish companion.”

Other revelations in the unexpurgated diaries include Kafka’s musings about his own sexuality.

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Cambridge Dictionary updated its definition of ‘woman.’ Conservative media didn’t like it. - The Philadelphia Inquirer - Dictionary

Cambridge Dictionary: What have you done?

Have you decided to troll all Americans? Or just one politician?

One thing is certain: Looking up man or woman in the Cambridge Dictionary yields a different result today than it did before.

Just months after Supreme Court nomination hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, when Sen. Marsha Blackburn threw blood-red meat to conservatives by asking Jackson to define the word woman, Cambridge Dictionary’s editors recently edited the entry for woman to include the following: “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.” The entry for man includes a corresponding definition.

Like Pavlov’s dog, conservatives again started salivating.

» READ MORE: Defining ‘woman’ is complicated for everyone, including Supreme Court nominees | The Grammarian

“Cambridge Dictionary Changes Definition of ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ in Massive Cave to Trans Activists,” howled the right-wing blog RedState.

Fox News: “Cambridge Dictionary changes definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’: ‘1984 wasn’t supposed to be a how-to manual.’”

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The New York Post: “Cambridge Dictionary changes definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman.’”

The American Conservative: “Cambridge Dictionary Redefines ‘Woman.’”

And so on.

In a naked effort to inspire rage-clicks, each of these publications — even those that, on the surface, appear to adopt a less hysterical tone — exhibited either a shameful ignorance or a willful disregard of how dictionaries work.

Despite news coverage to the contrary, Cambridge’s edits aren’t some leftist appeal to woke ideology — whatever that is.

What Fox News, the New York Post, and others don’t acknowledge is that no dictionary has the power to “change” or “redefine” a word. For that matter, they don’t create or kill words either. Dictionaries describe how language is used. By updating its man and woman entries, Cambridge acknowledged that English speakers use man and woman in regular parlance in reference to trans men and women. So it edited those entries to make them more accurate.

No dictionary has the power to “change” or “redefine” a word.

It’s not, as some feared, dictionaries gone rogue.

Cambridge is relatively new to the dictionary game. The first edition of the Cambridge International Dictionary of English was published less than 30 years ago, and it’s never gained much traction against old standbys like Merriam-Webster or the Oxford English Dictionary. But neither of those includes the explicitly trans-inclusive definitions that Cambridge now has.

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Still, I recently received a letter from a reader complaining that the Oxford English Dictionary “became irredeemably ‘woke’ and irrelevant when it listed ‘irregardless’ as a word.”

Irregardless has been in the Oxford English Dictionary since 1976.

Conservative publications aren’t the only ones guilty of this misunderstanding, though far more conservative outlets covered the “news” of Cambridge’s edits. The Washington Post headline read, “Cambridge Dictionary updates definition of ‘woman’ to include trans women,” while Reuters said, “Fact Check—Cambridge Dictionary expanded, not replaced its definition of ‘woman.’” Each of those added more nuance and less inflammatory language.

Nuance might not play well with Marsha Blackburn, but should the question come up again the next time we have a Supreme Court nomination hearing, at least the nominee will have a more accurate resource to cite.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and bare infinitives to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.

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Opinion | The Secret Lives of Words - The New York Times - Dictionary

Sam Whitney/The New York Times

Some time ago, I fell into conversation with a colleague about what we had been reading lately, and the person suggested that I absolutely must give Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” a try.

The pandemic intervened, and I forgot the recommendation. But I remembered recently and picked up the novel. Frankly, despite my profound respect for the book, it was a bit of a slog. James’s writing, especially in his last few novels, is not exactly for the beach. His tapeworm sentences qualify as literary Cubism at best or obsessive obfuscation at worst. Even James once recommended reading only five pages of “The Ambassadors” at a time.

But I was struck repeatedly by the fact that, sentence structure aside, so much of the challenge posed by James’s prose is that words often had different meanings around the turn of the century than they do now. This quiet evolution of language is a facet that can be damnably hard to notice day to day, yet its importance is hard to overstate.

The central point is this: The fit between words and meanings is much fuzzier and unstable than we are led to suppose by the static majesty of the dictionary and its tidy definitions. What a word means today is a Polaroid snapshot of its lexical life, long-lived and frequently under transformation.

The reason begins with the nature of concepts rather than the words that express them. Concepts shade into one another the way colors do. For example, to be foolish is a form of being weak; one kind of weakness is to be distracted by idle fastidiousness rather than focusing on substance; but fastidiousness is also a way of being careful or observant, of which one form is being socially agreeable — as in “nice.” I raise these examples because the word “nice” actually did describe each of those concepts over the course of several centuries, like a torch passed on from hand to hand in sequence. In 1250, people were called nice when they were dimwitted. Only linguists have any reason to know the circuitous path that took us from that definition to “kind.”

Crucially, this is not some isolated instance, but a typical one. It is why “silly” once meant “blessed,” “obnoxious” once meant “subject to harm,” “generous” once meant “of noble status,” and today we speak of “heading” out from a party and “heading” up the coast without for a minute thinking it has anything to do with our noggins.

Such evolutions are part of why “The Ambassadors” is best when sipped rather than quaffed and why older texts in general can often be hard to grasp closely. We’re accustomed to focusing on such changes in word meaning in, say, Chaucer or Shakespeare. But James is useful in demonstrating that a text doesn’t need to be nearly so old; much lexical evolution can happen in just over a century.

For instance, in “The Ambassadors,” characters use the word “wonderful” so often that one half expects a song with that title to break out. But James didn’t solely intend the word in the sense we know it today. When Miss Gostrey is taken aback by something the protagonist Lambert Strether says, James writes, “She had a wonderful look at him now.” But the look she gives him is clearly not the contemporary meaning, which is more or less a synonym for “marvelous.” James most likely meant that she was giving Strether a look of astonishment — i.e., full of wonder.

The word’s meaning has ooched along since James’s time — like “nice” — through a series of conceptual jumps. That which evokes wonder is, after all, likely something you think of as markedly pleasing, and thus to us today, “wonderful” evokes the pleasure more than the surprise. Such eternally floating semantic reinventions are the essence of how language works. Thus when Strether assesses himself as “I’m true, but I’m incredible,” it wouldn’t make sense if “incredible” meant “awesome.” (“I’m honest but I’m awesome”? James was above such lexical hash.) To James, “incredible” likely meant “unable to be believed,” based on the literal meaning of the components of the word. So Strether is saying that while he intends sincerity, he doesn’t trust his own instincts, and thus he is perhaps not to be believed.

To think of language as a list of words with set meanings is like thinking of the position of the clouds right now as somehow fundamental rather than as a passing moment. Attempts to ban all utterances of the N-word, for example, are entirely understandable, be they led by people within the Black community or established as guidelines by schools or companies seeking to temper the use of hateful language. However, total bans neglect that the word has sprouted off, amoeba-style, a newer meaning as a term of affection among Black people. And contrary to popular belief, this is not a recent phenomenon. Evidence suggests that Black Americans have been using the word in this way since at least the mid-19th century, given its rich presence in interviews with often quite elderly ex-slaves by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. The idea that the original meaning of the word is always in essence the only one — that the amoeba just sat tight for some reason, or that the true meaning of “obnoxious” must always be “subject to harm” — is rooted in a sense of language as it looks on a page rather than as it lives in the real world.

That artificial perspective also encourages the popular but scientifically fragile idea that the words and grammar of your language contribute meaningfully to your particular worldview. This is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or “linguistic relativism.” You may have heard the idea, for example, that the Chinese process time as proceeding vertically because the words for “last” and “next” in Mandarin also mean “above” and “below.” Or you may have heard that the way Spanish verbs work means that those who speak it are more attuned to the nature of responsibility and blame than English speakers.

But while it is true that your language does influence the way you think in quiet, subtle ways, the idea that it creates an entire worldview is possible only if one neglects that words’ meanings are hopelessly motile. The specific rub in these language-is-thought cases is that words can fossilize into inert chunks of grammar, zombie words that retain their original shape but are no longer alive, functioning instead merely as linguistic furniture. In that state, they no longer mean anything that could shape a worldview.

Languages quite unlike English help illustrate this. Where cattle and counting are concerned, in English we talk of “heads,” as in “three heads of cattle.” But many languages use dozens of nouns in this numerative fashion with all kinds of objects. Thai for “three eels” is three “bodies” of eel; Mandarin describes three “strips” of eel. It’s as if in English we couldn’t say “three apples” or “three beds” but had to say “three globes of apple” or “three flats of bed.”

But in any given language, which of these words you use with which noun can be entirely arbitrary. In Thai, both tables and eels are described as “bodies,” while in Mandarin, eels are “strips,” but tables are roughly marked as “flats” (as in, they are flat). Now, according to the idea that your language shapes your view of the world, we might expect that in an experiment, Thai speakers would be more likely than Mandarin speakers to perceive tables and eels as having qualities in common. But in fact, they aren’t. Mandarin and Thai speakers just know which counting word goes with which object in their respective languages and that, to an extent, you just have to know. It’s akin to the meaningless gender markings in most European languages that make “river” masculine in Spanish but “hand” feminine.

In such cases we are in “grammar” territory rather than “word” territory, something linguists call “grammaticalization.” The nouns that help represent numbers, for instance, are no longer the living ones in the dictionary that they began as. They have gone dead and become mere rules. They still sound like their original versions, but when used with numbers in expressions such as “three bodies of eel,” they are just fence posts. They were once living wood, part of a tree reaching for the sky, but they became grammatical lumber, merely corralling the words they modify from one another.

Or take another example of lexical evolution in English: “you guys,” as a way of referring to or addressing more than one person. Some have objected to using it to address women or to address men and women at the same time. They argue that “guys” — a noun with a masculine heritage — implies that maleness is a default category. But then, as many of us have witnessed, often women use “you guys” among themselves as readily as do men, and they have done so now for several decades.

That’s because for many English speakers, “guys” has evolved from its heritage meaning of “men” to just “people.” Like “heads” with cattle and “tua” with tables, it is still pronounced the same way as its progenitor word. But “you guys” has morphed into a new meaning: a blank, functional way of referring to or addressing more than one human being, an option for the plural “you” that English otherwise lacks.

One more aspect of the squishiness of the relationship between words and meanings is how sheerly arbitrary they can be. How a word comes to express a particular meaning rather than another one is often no more subject to analysis than why a dropped slice of toast lands on the floor jam-side down one time but jam-side up another. Think of the difference between two words that are variations on the same one: “human” and “humane.” No one can say precisely why “humane” took on a more refined and particular meaning and “human” did not. Roll the dice again and it could have come out the other way, just as “awful” once had the same meaning as “awesome” — i.e., “full of awe” — but soured into its current meaning, leaving the use of “awfully” in expressions like “awfully good” as a memento to its origins. Or did you ever notice, as my partner pointed out to me recently, that if you place the emphasis in the word “intersection” on the first syllable, it would be more readily understood as a place where you brake your car, but if you place the emphasis on the third syllable, it is more likely to be interpreted as a point of commonality between subjects or lines in space?

Again, the cloud metaphor for words is instructive. In an eternal spin and churn cloaking the globe, the clouds endlessly shift, blend, split off new offshoots, evaporate and are born anew. Under this analogy, meanings are the solid landmasses down below. At any given point, a cloud has a particular shape and hovers over a particular area. But it may change over time. Next thing you know, “character” no longer means a written symbol, as both Shakespeare and Henry James used it. In “The Ambassadors,” Strether sees familiar handwriting and James notes that “he had dozens of well-filled envelopes superscribed in that character.” But gradually the word wafts over to a related meaning: that which marks a person out as distinct in a way similar to what a written “character” does — one’s, as it were, personal “character.” Evolving further, individuals with a remarkable aspect about them start being referred to as characters, and we have yet another new meaning.

This mutable and sometimes random essence of language may seem shabby or untoward compared with the schematic, tamed one we are taught. But in the end, real language is dynamic. The fun is in looking back at how things have changed and always having an ear open to what might be next.

John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”

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These 18 handy new words deserve a place in the dictionary - The Poke - Dictionary

Poke Staff. Updated January 10th, 2023

Redditor u/Lebowski99 posted a question in r/funny – presumably anticipating some of the answers.

What are some words that you or your family have created that should be in the dictionary?

They got the ball rolling.

I’ll start with two. When we decorate the Christmas tree as we did last month this is the time of year that we “Dedecorate” the tree.

When my daughter would overfill the toilet she would scream oh my God there’s an “Overflosion”

They both work. We thought these did too.

1.

c_avg
Via

2.

Anticipointment – when you’re looking forward to something and it is underwhelming.
memeorise

3.

Peeish – as in, “I’m feeling a bit peeish, can we stop soon?” on a road trip.
crindycat

4.

Nagrivator – person giving driving directions.
benwyte2k

5.

Gasological – doing errands in an order that wastes the least gas.
ParisaDelara

6.

Squircular – square with rounded edges.
panicinbabylon

7.

Sneezure- when you sneeze multiple times in quick succession.
Joppa_Yeat

8.

Vuja-de: The feeling this never should have happened.
haltline

9.

Kleptovers ~ secretly taking home leftovers from a party or someone’s house.
fuzzarelly

10.

Villionaire. Describes a billionaire that uses their money selfishly. Musk, Bezos, etc.
littl3bastard

11.

Wonderstanding. An epiphany essentially.
Jetpackkiwi

12.

AbefrohmanTSKOC
Via

13.

Whelming- when you have a meal that’s neither great nor bad. Its not over, not under, just whelming.
dlcollins

14.

Diatripe a tirade of trash.
Impossibletouch9401

15.

When we first moved to the US from South Korea, my mom didn’t know what the vacuum cleaner was called. So when she came home from working all day, she would ask us (me and my siblings) if we “weenged” the house because that was the sound the vacuum cleaner made lol.
MYipper

16.

When the airline passenger next to you won’t stop talking so you can sleep – disturbulance.
ericgonzalez

17.

Nervicited – when you are both nervous and excited.
gingersrule77

18.

glabrous
Via, Via

BONUS – out of the mouths of babes …

2 years ago my 3 year old called tongs “BBQ snaps.” We don’t even have a bbq so I don’t know how he knew that’s what they are for. But they have been Barbecue snaps ever since.
thatsthewayihateit

READ MORE

These wild guesses at what British words mean are so much better than the real definitions

Source r/funny Image Anna Shvets on Pexels

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Caspar Lee goes viral for sharing hilarious Afrikaans translation of 'danger' - News24 - Translation

Caspar Lee on PandaConf Stage during day one of Web Summit 2021 at the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal. (Photo: Cody Glenn/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images)

• Caspar Lee has proven he is not one of the millions of people who can speak Afrikaans.
• The South African YouTuber shared an incorrect translation of the word 'danger' in a new interview.
• He also revealed why he likes to eat braaied food but doesn't like to braai food itself.

---

Millions of people may speak Afrikaans, contrary to what Charlize Theron thinks, but South African YouTube star Caspar Lee is not one of them.

Lee appears in a new interview with The Boys – a group of guys who share "exclusive South African music, culture and interview content" on social media. 

During the interview, Lee is questioned on various topics, including his worst subject at school, to which he immediately responds: "Afrikaans."

In a snippet of the interview, which has since gone viral on TikTok, Lee is also asked to translate the word 'danger' into Afrikaans. 

"Dangeraas," the 28-year-old millionaire confidently says.

Also, in the clip, Lee explains that he is a "proper Engelsman" and does not know how to braai.

"I've never been able to braai, bro. When I was at school, they made me braai once, and I put chicken on the braai, the fire, and I got salmonella. I don't trust myself anymore. But look, I love to eat braais; I just don't like to cook them because I don't want to kill anyone and get sick."

WATCH THE TIKTOK CLIP HERE:

The full interview – titled what happened to South Africa's biggest YouTuber Caspar Lee? – is on the official YouTube channel for The Boys.

Click HERE to watch it.

During his recent trip to South Africa, Lee also opened up about how he evolved from a YouTube star to a super savvy entrepreneur in an interview with News24.

Lee is now the co-founder of multiple million-dollar companies, including Influencer.com, Margravine Management, Creator Ventures, and a business he started in his home country called Proper Living.

"My main role is connecting people," Lee said of how he manages his day-to-day job. "Doing all of these different things actually really helps each other, because you meet so many different people that can work with you on one thing or another thing, and you build a relationship like that."

READ MORE | Caspar Lee: From famous YouTube star to super savvy entrepreneur

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Opinion | The Secret Lives of Words - The New York Times - Dictionary

Sam Whitney/The New York Times

Some time ago, I fell into conversation with a colleague about what we had been reading lately, and the person suggested that I absolutely must give Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” a try.

The pandemic intervened, and I forgot the recommendation. But I remembered recently and picked up the novel. Frankly, despite my profound respect for the book, it was a bit of a slog. James’s writing, especially in his last few novels, is not exactly for the beach. His tapeworm sentences qualify as literary Cubism at best or obsessive obfuscation at worst. Even James once recommended reading only five pages of “The Ambassadors” at a time.

But I was struck repeatedly by the fact that, sentence structure aside, so much of the challenge posed by James’s prose is that words often had different meanings around the turn of the century than they do now. This quiet evolution of language is a facet that can be damnably hard to notice day to day, yet its importance is hard to overstate.

The central point is this: The fit between words and meanings is much fuzzier and unstable than we are led to suppose by the static majesty of the dictionary and its tidy definitions. What a word means today is a Polaroid snapshot of its lexical life, long-lived and frequently under transformation.

The reason begins with the nature of concepts rather than the words that express them. Concepts shade into one another the way colors do. For example, to be foolish is a form of being weak; one kind of weakness is to be distracted by idle fastidiousness rather than focusing on substance; but fastidiousness is also a way of being careful or observant, of which one form is being socially agreeable — as in “nice.” I raise these examples because the word “nice” actually did describe each of those concepts over the course of several centuries, like a torch passed on from hand to hand in sequence. In 1250, people were called nice when they were dimwitted. Only linguists have any reason to know the circuitous path that took us from that definition to “kind.”

Crucially, this is not some isolated instance, but a typical one. It is why “silly” once meant “blessed,” “obnoxious” once meant “subject to harm,” “generous” once meant “of noble status,” and today we speak of “heading” out from a party and “heading” up the coast without for a minute thinking it has anything to do with our noggins.

Such evolutions are part of why “The Ambassadors” is best when sipped rather than quaffed and why older texts in general can often be hard to grasp closely. We’re accustomed to focusing on such changes in word meaning in, say, Chaucer or Shakespeare. But James is useful in demonstrating that a text doesn’t need to be nearly so old; much lexical evolution can happen in just over a century.

For instance, in “The Ambassadors,” characters use the word “wonderful” so often that one half expects a song with that title to break out. But James didn’t solely intend the word in the sense we know it today. When Miss Gostrey is taken aback by something the protagonist Lambert Strether says, James writes, “She had a wonderful look at him now.” But the look she gives him is clearly not the contemporary meaning, which is more or less a synonym for “marvelous.” James most likely meant that she was giving Strether a look of astonishment — i.e., full of wonder.

The word’s meaning has ooched along since James’s time — like “nice” — through a series of conceptual jumps. That which evokes wonder is, after all, likely something you think of as markedly pleasing, and thus to us today, “wonderful” evokes the pleasure more than the surprise. Such eternally floating semantic reinventions are the essence of how language works. Thus when Strether assesses himself as “I’m true, but I’m incredible,” it wouldn’t make sense if “incredible” meant “awesome.” (“I’m honest but I’m awesome”? James was above such lexical hash.) To James, “incredible” likely meant “unable to be believed,” based on the literal meaning of the components of the word. So Strether is saying that while he intends sincerity, he doesn’t trust his own instincts, and thus he is perhaps not to be believed.

To think of language as a list of words with set meanings is like thinking of the position of the clouds right now as somehow fundamental rather than as a passing moment. Attempts to ban all utterances of the N-word, for example, are entirely understandable, be they led by people within the Black community or established as guidelines by schools or companies seeking to temper the use of hateful language. However, total bans neglect that the word has sprouted off, amoeba-style, a newer meaning as a term of affection among Black people. And contrary to popular belief, this is not a recent phenomenon. Evidence suggests that Black Americans have been using the word in this way since at least the mid-19th century, given its rich presence in interviews with often quite elderly ex-slaves by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. The idea that the original meaning of the word is always in essence the only one — that the amoeba just sat tight for some reason, or that the true meaning of “obnoxious” must always be “subject to harm” — is rooted in a sense of language as it looks on a page rather than as it lives in the real world.

That artificial perspective also encourages the popular but scientifically fragile idea that the words and grammar of your language contribute meaningfully to your particular worldview. This is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or “linguistic relativism.” You may have heard the idea, for example, that the Chinese process time as proceeding vertically because the words for “last” and “next” in Mandarin also mean “above” and “below.” Or you may have heard that the way Spanish verbs work means that those who speak it are more attuned to the nature of responsibility and blame than English speakers.

But while it is true that your language does influence the way you think in quiet, subtle ways, the idea that it creates an entire worldview is possible only if one neglects that words’ meanings are hopelessly motile. The specific rub in these language-is-thought cases is that words can fossilize into inert chunks of grammar, zombie words that retain their original shape but are no longer alive, functioning instead merely as linguistic furniture. In that state, they no longer mean anything that could shape a worldview.

Languages quite unlike English help illustrate this. Where cattle and counting are concerned, in English we talk of “heads,” as in “three heads of cattle.” But many languages use dozens of nouns in this numerative fashion with all kinds of objects. Thai for “three eels” is three “bodies” of eel; Mandarin describes three “strips” of eel. It’s as if in English we couldn’t say “three apples” or “three beds” but had to say “three globes of apple” or “three flats of bed.”

But in any given language, which of these words you use with which noun can be entirely arbitrary. In Thai, both tables and eels are described as “bodies,” while in Mandarin, eels are “strips,” but tables are roughly marked as “flats” (as in, they are flat). Now, according to the idea that your language shapes your view of the world, we might expect that in an experiment, Thai speakers would be more likely than Mandarin speakers to perceive tables and eels as having qualities in common. But in fact, they aren’t. Mandarin and Thai speakers just know which counting word goes with which object in their respective languages and that, to an extent, you just have to know. It’s akin to the meaningless gender markings in most European languages that make “river” masculine in Spanish but “hand” feminine.

In such cases we are in “grammar” territory rather than “word” territory, something linguists call “grammaticalization.” The nouns that help represent numbers, for instance, are no longer the living ones in the dictionary that they began as. They have gone dead and become mere rules. They still sound like their original versions, but when used with numbers in expressions such as “three bodies of eel,” they are just fence posts. They were once living wood, part of a tree reaching for the sky, but they became grammatical lumber, merely corralling the words they modify from one another.

Or take another example of lexical evolution in English: “you guys,” as a way of referring to or addressing more than one person. Some have objected to using it to address women or to address men and women at the same time. They argue that “guys” — a noun with a masculine heritage — implies that maleness is a default category. But then, as many of us have witnessed, often women use “you guys” among themselves as readily as do men, and they have done so now for several decades.

That’s because for many English speakers, “guys” has evolved from its heritage meaning of “men” to just “people.” Like “heads” with cattle and “tua” with tables, it is still pronounced the same way as its progenitor word. But “you guys” has morphed into a new meaning: a blank, functional way of referring to or addressing more than one human being, an option for the plural “you” that English otherwise lacks.

One more aspect of the squishiness of the relationship between words and meanings is how sheerly arbitrary they can be. How a word comes to express a particular meaning rather than another one is often no more subject to analysis than why a dropped slice of toast lands on the floor jam-side down one time but jam-side up another. Think of the difference between two words that are variations on the same one: “human” and “humane.” No one can say precisely why “humane” took on a more refined and particular meaning and “human” did not. Roll the dice again and it could have come out the other way, just as “awful” once had the same meaning as “awesome” — i.e., “full of awe” — but soured into its current meaning, leaving the use of “awfully” in expressions like “awfully good” as a memento to its origins. Or did you ever notice, as my partner pointed out to me recently, that if you place the emphasis in the word “intersection” on the first syllable, it would be more readily understood as a place where you brake your car, but if you place the emphasis on the third syllable, it is more likely to be interpreted as a point of commonality between subjects or lines in space?

Again, the cloud metaphor for words is instructive. In an eternal spin and churn cloaking the globe, the clouds endlessly shift, blend, split off new offshoots, evaporate and are born anew. Under this analogy, meanings are the solid landmasses down below. At any given point, a cloud has a particular shape and hovers over a particular area. But it may change over time. Next thing you know, “character” no longer means a written symbol, as both Shakespeare and Henry James used it. In “The Ambassadors,” Strether sees familiar handwriting and James notes that “he had dozens of well-filled envelopes superscribed in that character.” But gradually the word wafts over to a related meaning: that which marks a person out as distinct in a way similar to what a written “character” does — one’s, as it were, personal “character.” Evolving further, individuals with a remarkable aspect about them start being referred to as characters, and we have yet another new meaning.

This mutable and sometimes random essence of language may seem shabby or untoward compared with the schematic, tamed one we are taught. But in the end, real language is dynamic. The fun is in looking back at how things have changed and always having an ear open to what might be next.

John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”

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20 Words That Just Got Added to the Oxford English Dictionary - Mentalfloss - Dictionary

A word doesn’t need a centuries-old history or some lofty Latin pedigree to end up in the Oxford English Dictionary. It just needs to have been around long enough and used frequently enough for lexicographers to recognize that it is—slang or not—part of the English language.

This month, nearly 700 new terms made the grade. Some are completely new entries—like CODA, “a person who has one or more parents or guardians who are deaf or hard of hearing.” The acronym originally referred to the organization Children of Deaf Adults, formed in 1983, but has since broadened in usage and popularity, helped in part by the success of the 2022 Oscar Best Picture winner, CODA.

But not all the “new” terms are quite so modern. Aestel, for example, first showed up in King Alfred’s preface to his 9th-century translation of Pastoral Care, a tome by Pope Gregory I that dates back to the 6th century. Though we technically still don’t know for sure what it means, it’s “now frequently considered to be a pointer, or handle for a pointer, used to follow along or keep one’s place when reading a manuscript,” per the OED.

Other terms have been slotted beneath pre-existing entries. Air fryer, for example, is one of many phrases found on the air page; and tailgate now has a section devoted to tailgate party. Final has one for final girl, which, for non-horror fans, describes the archetypal female character—usually clever and virtuous—who outlasts everyone else in a horror film.

See some of the other new additions below, and learn more about the update here.

1. aestel: “an artefact ... now frequently considered to be a pointer, or handle for a pointer, used to follow along or keep one's place when reading a manuscript”
2. agrivoltaics: “the simultaneous use of an area of land for farming and for electricity generation using photovoltaic solar panels”
3. air fryer: “a small convection oven, typically used to fry foods using very little oil”
4. Captain Obvious: “(a sarcastic or disparaging name for) someone who makes an obvious or superfluous statement”
5. CODA: “a person who has one or more parents or guardians who are deaf or hard of hearing”
6. crash diet: “a diet intended to result in a very rapid weight loss through severe restrictions on calorie intake over a relatively short period of time”
7. dap: “a casual gesture of greeting, acknowledgement, or affirmation, typically involving slapping palms, bumping fists, or snapping fingers”
8. final girl: “a stock female character who survives to defeat or evade the attacker after the other characters have been killed, and who is typically portrayed as intelligent, serious, cautious, and chaste”
9. halfsies: “halves; two equal shares or parts”
10. jag: Scottish term for “a hypodermic injection, esp. a vaccination”
11. keep cup: “a reusable cup”
12. mononym: “a one-word name ... by which someone, esp. a celebrity, is known”
13. parasocial: “designating a relationship characterized by the one-sided, unreciprocated sense of intimacy felt ... for a well-known or prominent figure”
14. pinkie promise: “a promise made while linking one's little finger with that of another person, and regarded as especially binding or sincere”
15. porch pirate: “a person who steals parcels that have been delivered and left unattended outside the intended recipient's home, business, etc.”
16. sh**housery: “something regarded as despicable, unacceptable, or bad”
17. superyacht: “an exceptionally large or powerful yacht”
18. tailgate party: “a party typically held in the car park of a stadium before a sports event ... at which food and drink are served at the open tailgate of a motor vehicle”
19. tallywacker: “the penis” or “a stupid, annoying, or otherwise objectionable person (esp. a man)”
20. textspeak: “language regarded as characteristic of text messaging and other forms of electronic communication, often consisting of abbreviations, acronyms, emoticons or emojis, etc.”

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