Zaffre has bought the debut novel, Guilty by Definition, from “Countdown” star and lexicographer Susie Dent.
Kelly Smith, senior editor, acquired world rights from Rosemary Scoular at United Agents. Guilty by Definition will be published in hardback, e-book and audio in summer 2024.
Guilty by Definition is a mystery set at the heart of the Clarendon English Dictionary, where a series of anonymous letters challenges its team of lexicographers to unravel a thread of linguistic clues. Hinting at secret lives and a personal link to one of the editors, the letters could lead to the truth behind a decades-old disappearance and an untold chapter in the evolution of English.
Dent said: “I am so thrilled to be joining Bonnier Books UK on a completely new venture. Guilty by Definition draws on my work as a lexicographer and etymologist; both jobs involve clues and evidence, and the parallels between word detectives and the real kind seemed a perfect basis for a mystery novel.
“The story will lay a trail of linguistic clues that the characters—and, I hope, the readers—must unravel if they are to solve a mystery that has lingered for years. Even the most everyday words have secret lives; it turns out the most normal-seeming people do, too.”
Smith, who was recently promoted at Zaffre, said: “Guilty by Definition perfectly blends Susie Dent’s inimitable talent as a wordsmith with a compelling and moving mystery of a woman’s determination to uncover the truth about her sister’s disappearance. It has been such a pleasure to work with Susie on her first fiction project and I can’t wait to publish this spectacular story next summer.”
Dent has previously has only worked on non-fiction projects such as the Roots of Happiness (Puffin) and An Emotional Dictionary (John Murray). She attended Oxford University and worked for the OED, so the setting of the novel is inspired by her own knowledge of the city, where she still lives. She hosts the "Something Rhymes with Purple" podcast with Gyles Brandreth and first appeared on Dictionary Corner of the TV show "Countdown" in 1992.
We've already seen Google's "Live Translate" working its magic on phones calls, but to date, this feature is still exclusive to Pixel devices. If you happen to be a Samsung fan, though, chances are you may get to use a similar feature — without having to install third-party apps — early next year.
According to the Korean giant, its next phone — our money's on the "Galaxy S24" family — will come with "Galaxy AI," which is "powered by both on-device AI developed at Samsung and cloud-based AI" from providers. Part of this package will include "AI Live Translate Call," which will show real-time translations in the form of a chat log during phone calls — as is the case in the demo screenshot showcasing a dialog between a New York-based English speaker and a Seoul-based Korean speaker. As a bonus, the tool throws up an "add event" button whenever there's a mention of a time and a date, to let you instantly mark the calendar for your foreign acquaintance.
There's not much else here about Galaxy AI, except that "it will change how we think about our phones forever," said Wonjoon Choi, EVP and Head of R&D, Mobile eXperience Business. There's no word on whether Galaxy AI will also include Samsung's Gauss generative AI capability, but given the exec's wording and the recent similar offerings from Google, we wouldn't be surprised if we're getting the whole shebang in the Galaxy S24 lineup next year.
Does the word “moist” scare you? Would you buy a product called “moist mayo”?
These questions and more come to mind in the wake of a larger-than-life jar of mayonnaise showing up on the steps of Merriam-Webster’s headquarters in Springfield on Monday.
The words “real moist” are front and center on the jar. The 6-foot-4 jar was placed by none other than Kraft Real Mayo, a branch of the company known for its macaroni and cheese meals.
The company’s mission is to get the word “moist” searched online as much as possible to receive Merriam-Webster’s coveted “Word of the Year” award — and change perception of the word.
In years past, the dictionary company’s award was given to gaslighting in 2022, vaccine in 2021, and pandemic in 2020.
The word “moist” has received decades of bad rap, thanks to 2010s internet. Urban Dictionary refers to “moist” as “a word people pretend to hate because the internet told them to.”
Kraft Real Mayo Brand Manager Frances Sabatier said most people don’t know why they don’t like the word.
“Kraft Real Mayo has such a devoted fanbase of mayo lovers, and we want to embolden them to help us change the perception by searching the word ‘moist’ online so many times that it’s elected Merriam-Webster’s word of the year,” Sabatier wrote in an email.
Maisel Torres, 17, of Springfield, talks about the giant mayonnaise jar he encountered while walking down Federal Street past Merriam-Webster Dictionary headquarters. The Kraft food company delivered the jar to make their case for designating "moist" the dictionary's "word of the year". Don Treeger / The Republican) 11/8/2023The Republican
Maisel Torres, 17, came across the outsized jar Wednesday afternoon. He said the it brings color to the Federal Street neighborhood. He added that mayonnaise is not the word that comes to mind when he hears the word “moist.”
Instead, it’s cake and brownies.
However, Kevin Drayton, of Springfield, said he does think of mayonnaise when he hears “moist.”
A Merriam-Webster representative could not be reached for comment.
According to its website, however, the word was pronounced “moiste” by the Anglo-French and was first used in the 14th century.
The brand has more than the Springfield stunt in mind. It is planning to host a “Search-A-Thon” livestream on Twitch on Nov. 18 with the help of gaming influencers who intend to encourage viewers to search the word “moist” as much as possible, Sabatier said.
In addition to the that, Kraft plans paid advertisements on the social media sites Instagram, TikTok and Reddit, as well as on-the-ground canvassers, all designed to raise awareness about its “Search Moist” campaign.
Does the word “moist” scare you? Would you buy a product called “moist mayo”?
These questions and more come to mind in the wake of a larger-than-life jar of mayonnaise showing up on the steps of Merriam-Webster’s headquarters in Springfield on Monday.
The words “real moist” are front and center on the jar. The 6-foot-4 jar was placed by none other than Kraft Real Mayo, a branch of the company known for its macaroni and cheese meals.
The company’s mission is to get the word “moist” searched online as much as possible to receive Merriam-Webster’s coveted “Word of the Year” award — and change perception of the word.
In years past, the dictionary company’s award was given to gaslighting in 2022, vaccine in 2021, and pandemic in 2020.
The word “moist” has received decades of bad rap, thanks to 2010s internet. Urban Dictionary refers to “moist” as “a word people pretend to hate because the internet told them to.”
Kraft Real Mayo Brand Manager Frances Sabatier said most people don’t know why they don’t like the word.
“Kraft Real Mayo has such a devoted fanbase of mayo lovers, and we want to embolden them to help us change the perception by searching the word ‘moist’ online so many times that it’s elected Merriam-Webster’s word of the year,” Sabatier wrote in an email.
Maisel Torres, 17, of Springfield, talks about the giant mayonnaise jar he encountered while walking down Federal Street past Merriam-Webster Dictionary headquarters. The Kraft food company delivered the jar to make their case for designating "moist" the dictionary's "word of the year". Don Treeger / The Republican) 11/8/2023The Republican
Maisel Torres, 17, came across the outsized jar Wednesday afternoon. He said the it brings color to the Federal Street neighborhood. He added that mayonnaise is not the word that comes to mind when he hears the word “moist.”
Instead, it’s cake and brownies.
However, Kevin Drayton, of Springfield, said he does think of mayonnaise when he hears “moist.”
A Merriam-Webster representative could not be reached for comment.
According to its website, however, the word was pronounced “moiste” by the Anglo-French and was first used in the 14th century.
The brand has more than the Springfield stunt in mind. It is planning to host a “Search-A-Thon” livestream on Twitch on Nov. 18 with the help of gaming influencers who intend to encourage viewers to search the word “moist” as much as possible, Sabatier said.
In addition to the that, Kraft plans paid advertisements on the social media sites Instagram, TikTok and Reddit, as well as on-the-ground canvassers, all designed to raise awareness about its “Search Moist” campaign.
Samsung's flagship Galaxy smartphones launching next year will offer live translations of calls using AI and other upped AI features, the South Korean tech giant said on Thursday.
Live translation of calls is just one feature among Samsung's new Galaxy AI brand, which is a "comprehensive mobile AI experience" based on one-device AI developed by the company and cloud-based AI from its partners.
Galaxy AI is "coming early next year," Samsung said, indicating that it is highly likely to be introduced on the Galaxy S24 series that will debut at that time.
According to Samsung, the translation feature, called AI Live Translate Call, is integrated into the native call feature so third-party apps won't be needed.
As you speak during a call with someone speaking another language, audio, and text translation will appear in real-time, the company said.
The feature is offered through on-device AI so that private conversations won't leave the phone, Samsung added.
"Galaxy AI is our most comprehensive intelligence offering to date, and it will change how we think about our phones forever.," Wonjoon Choi, Head of R&D at Samsung MX __ the company's smartphone business unit __ said.
Samsung seems poised to launch more AI features on its products. On Wednesday, the company unveiled its generative AI model called Samsung Gauss, which consists of language, code, and image models. Samsung said Samsung Gauss will be applied to various products in the future.
The days of having a dictionary on your bookshelf are numbered. But that’s OK, because everyone already walks around with a dictionary – not the one on your phone, but the one in your head.
Just like a physical dictionary, your mental dictionary contains information about words. This includes the letters, sounds and meaning, or semantics, of words, as well as information about parts of speech and how you can fit words together to form grammatical sentences. Your mental dictionary is also like a thesaurus. It can help you connect words and see how they might be similar in meaning, sound or spelling.
As a researcher who studies word retrieval, or how you quickly and accurately pull words out of your memory to communicate, I’m intrigued by how words are organized in our mental dictionaries. Everyone’s mental dictionary is a little bit different. And I’m even more intrigued by how we can restore the content of our mental dictionaries or improve our use of them, particularly for those who have language disorders.
Language is part of what makes humans special, and I believe everyone deserves the chance to use their words with others.
Your mental dictionary
While a physical dictionary is helpful for shared knowledge, your personal mental dictionary is customized based on your individual experiences. What words are in my mental dictionary might overlap with the mental dictionary of someone else who also speaks the same language, but there will also be a lot of differences between the content of our dictionaries.
You add words to your mental dictionary through your educational, occupational, cultural and other life experiences. This customization also means that the size of mental dictionaries is a little bit different from person to person and varies by age. Researchers found that the average 20-year-old American English speaker knows about 42,000 unique words, and this number grows to about 48,000 by age 60. Some people will have even larger vocabularies.
By now, you might be envisioning your mental dictionary as a book with pages of words in alphabetical order you can flip through as needed. While this visual analogy is helpful, there is a lot of debate about how mental dictionaries are organized. Many scholars agree that it’s probably not like an alphabetized book.
Scientists created an interactive map of which brain areas respond to hearing different words.
One widely rejected theory, the grandmother cell theory, suggests that each concept is encoded by a single neuron. This implies that you would have a neuron for every word that you know, including “grandmother.”
While not accepted as accurate, the aspect of the grandmother cell theory suggesting that certain parts of the brain are more important for some types of information than others is likely true. For example, the left temporal lobe on the side of your brain has many regions that are important for language processing, including word retrieval and production. Rather than a single neuron responsible for processing a concept, a model called parallel distributed processing proposes that large networks of neurons across the brain work together to bring about word knowledge when they fire together.
For example, when I say the word “dog,” there are lots of different aspects of the word that your brain is retrieving, even if unconsciously. You might be thinking about what a dog smells like after being out in the rain, what a dog sounds like when it barks, or what a dog feels like when you pet it. You might be thinking about a specific dog you grew up with, or you might have a variety of emotions about dogs based on your past experiences with them. All of these different features of “dog” are processed in slightly different parts of your brain.
Using your mental dictionary
One reason why your mental dictionary can’t be like a physical dictionary is that it is dynamic and quickly accessed.
Your brain’s ability to retrieve a word is very fast. In one study, researchers mapped the time course of word retrieval among 24 college students by recording their brain activity while they named pictures. They found evidence that participants selected words within 200 milliseconds of seeing the image. After word selection, their brain continued to process information about that word, like what sounds are needed to say that chosen word and ignoring related words. This is why you can retrieve words with such speed in real-time conversations, often so quickly that you give little conscious attention to that process.
Until … you have a breakdown in word retrieval. One common failure in word retrieval is called the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. It’s the feeling when you know what word you want to use but are unable to find it in that moment. You might even know specific details about the word you want, like other words with similar meaning or maybe the first letter or sound of that word. With enough time, the word you wanted might pop into your mind.
These tip-of-the-tongue experiences are a normal part of human language experience across the life span, and they increase as you grow older. One proposed reason for this increase is that they’re due to an age-related disruption in the ability to turn on the right sounds needed to say the selected word.
Speech-language pathologists help patients improve on their word retrieval abilities and speech.fizkes/iStock via Getty Images Plus
For some people, though, tip-of-the-tongue experiences and other speech errors can be quite impairing. This is commonly seen in aphasia, a language disorder that often occurs after injury to the language centers of the brain, such as stroke, or neurodegeneration, such as dementia. People with aphasia often have difficulty with word retrieval.
Fortunately, there are treatments available that can help someone improve their word retrieval abilities. For example, semantic feature analysis focuses on strengthening the semantic relationships between words. There are also treatments like phonomotor treatment that focus on strengthening the selection and production of speech sounds needed for word production. There are even apps that remotely provide word retrieval therapy on phones or computers.
The next time you have a conversation with someone, take a moment to reflect on why you chose the specific words you did. Remember that the words you use and the mental dictionary you have are part of what make you and your voice unique.
The Jesus Film Project is continuing on its mission to impact the nations with the Gospel message by reaching an indigenous tribe with its 2,100th translation of the Jesus Film.
The Cru ministry's popular film, based on the Book of Luke, is set to be launched next year in the Waorani language which is spoken by approximately 3,000 indigenous people of Amazonian Ecuador.
"The translation of our telling of Jesus' story into the Waorani language is notable considering the history of Christianity with the Waorani tribe. This initiative was made possible through collaboration between Jesus Film Project and a consortium of indigenous groups, along with the agreement and support of the Waorani elders," explained Chris Deckert, Jesus Film Project's Director of Language Studios.
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The Waorani tribe is the same tribe whose warriors martyred five American Christian missionaries, including Jim Elliot and Nate Saint, in 1956 for sharing the gospel.
ITEC, a ministry founded to serve the Waorani people and other people groups has been instrumental in helping Jesus Film Project connect with key leaders within the Waorani community.
Cru Ecuador will be working with ITEC and other ministries to use this new tool to bring the love of Jesus to the Waorani people.
"The ability to release the JESUS film in Waorani is the result of our incredible team's hard work and dedication. We want to ensure the accessibility of the film, not just in the world's most widely spoken languages but also in the heart language of every community. We look forward to witnessing the transformative power of this film among the Waorani people," said Josh Newell, executive director of Jesus Film Project.
To date, more than 200 million people have made decisions to know Jesus Christ after viewing the JESUS film, according to the Jesus Film Project's website. To this day, it remains the world's most translated film.
"The opportunity is great. Scripture tells us the spiritual harvest fields are ripe, and with the help of friends like you, many more unreached peoples can hear and respond to the message of hope in Christ. The time to act is now," reads a statement on their website.
