IAW I am using cringe slang at my daughter and she is making fun of me and I am proud of her

Prounouns in the #crossword in *1930*!

There's no easy way to say this: isthmus

More new entries for interstellar-travel fans, in the Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction: Today's batch: "Arcturan" + vars., with 2 nouns +1 adj. From 1920 onwards, still in broad use. sfdictionary.com/view/3061/ar... sfdictionary.com/view/3066/ar... sfdictionary.com/view/3068/ar...

Hello, looks like independent publishers should beef up our books coverage. If you're into the idea of joining the @flaminghydra.com collective and writing a book review each month (800-2000 word range), please send us your ideas and some clips to [email protected]

Speaking of books (please, can we speak of books, instead of their death?), I'd vaguely heard of the poet / polymath Weldon Kees, but didn't know anything about him. It was thus a great pleasure to watch this bio by Dana Gioa. Will be seeking his work out now. www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9GP...

Nothing against the lads from Wolverhampton, but as a UK-knowledgeable American I'm still astonished to learn just how massive a band Slade was. Six #1 singles! _17_ consecutive top-20 singles! First band to have three singles debut at #1!

OK today I read the news, listened to a Smog album, and watched Kurosawa's _Ran_, and there isn't enough MDMA in the world to get me into a good mood. Is it too early to go to sleep and hope for a reset in the morning?

"Caouissin ... would like to think the language will follow a similar path to Welsh, which has enjoyed a revival over the past half-century and is spoken by 538,000 people" People keep getting this wrong about Welsh! There has not been a "revival". Let me explain. 1/

In another venue, @petermgilliver.bsky.social has called my attention to this outstanding event—a performance of the complete choral music of Thomas Tallis in one (long) day, and I think I have to plan a trip to Oxford to attend it. www.justgiving.com/campaign/tal...

New entry for the Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction: "bemmy", a hypocoristic form of everyone's favorite alien-related term "BEM" (bug-eyed monster). From the late '40s; popularized in Andre Norton's Star Rangers; still in use. sfdictionary.com/view/3054/be...

Not too many things make me happy nowadays, but a spectacular @robynw414.bsky.social Friday #crossword puzzle is one of them. _So good_ today! And in such a fun way; my brain slowly plodded through it and felt better and better as I filled it in.

Looking urgently for a #reviewer for a corpus-based analysis of N most frequent words - in #NLP / #NLProc / #linguistics applications - Even better if you care about Semitic languages but not a requirement Please Emil / DM me if you can review! Please boost otherwise 🙂 Thanks!

Fans of early #comics & the history of slang might be interested to know of the _free_ availability of the 1993 book _A TAD Lexicon_, by #Dictionary of American Regional English editor Leonard Zwilling, about the linguistic contributions of T.A. "TAD" Dorgan. scholarsmine.mst.edu/artlan_phil_...

Today's update for the Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction: "Galactic", for a language spoken throughout a galaxy. Was 1954; added several early-1950s quotes in different nuances. Other cleanup and linking as well. sfdictionary.com/view/1633/ga...

Fuckin' NYT robbin' me of my royalties

That think where I'm ravenous and trying to rush making a late dinner, and I grab a red tube from the fridge and squeeze two tablespoons of harissa into my pasta. Whoops.

Early Modernists: I've encountered a symbol in a page signature and don't know how to represent it in a citation. The closest I can find in MS Word is unicode 0260, "Latin small letter g with hook." How would you represent this? Does it have a name?

New entries for the Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction! The group of "Capellan" entries, referring to those from the Capella system (the star in Auriga). From the 1920s, still in use. sfdictionary.com/view/3063/ca... sfdictionary.com/view/3064/ca... sfdictionary.com/view/3059/ca...

Americans will do anything to avoid the metric system, part eleventy-billion.

Another freaking f-word. New post for @stronglang.bsky.social about "freaking" as a euphemistic intensifier: stronglang.wordpress.com/2026/01/22/a... 🐦🐦

Today's antedating for the Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction: "Terrestrial", for a (universal) language spoken on Earth, from 1944 to 1936. sfdictionary.com/view/2789/te...

Article o'the day: "The Legend of Ea-Naṣir": How a Babylonian Businessman Became an Internet Meme, in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10...

Found on Threads; bringing it here so @jessesword.com and @korystamper.bsky.social and @skleinedler.bsky.social and @benzimmer.bsky.social get to enjoy.

Help transcribing some 18th century English? It's a recipe for Gingerbread (YUM) but the last few lines are inscrutable to me. My attempt at transcription is in the alt text, please let me know if you can help me with the end! I want to make some 18th century gingerbread!

New entry for the Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction: "Uranian", for the language of Uranus. Had been jammed into the existing entry, but we upgraded it. From 1941 and still out there. We have a lot of demonyms and language terms in the pipeline. sfdictionary.com/view/3062/ur...

Etymology: "politicians are bloodsuckers suffering from face spasms!" (Apropos of nothing in particular.)

I used to fuck like that.

Had an intriguing editorial discussion recently: how did people in the past talk about 'minutes' when they didn't have watches or standardised times? How does that affect your thinking? Come down an Elizabethan/Jacobean rabbit hole with me. 1/

Please read this beautiful essay by Ruth Franklin on America: both the country, and the Simon & Garfunkel song. ruthfranklin.substack.com/p/empty-and-...

In another place, people were suggesting songs that reliably cheer you up, and in case anyone needs the perfect one, may I present Gil Scott-Heron's "Lady Day and John Coltrane": www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aRN...

Hello! We have a whopping _three_ new entries for the Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction, all pertaining to critters from Deneb. 1940s onwards, common '50s, now rarer, like many such terms. sfdictionary.com/view/2759/de... sfdictionary.com/view/2760/de... sfdictionary.com/view/3056/de...

Lovely article about an oddball who bought a failing high-end oboe company and is trying to make it work, with a staff of oddballs. This is what I want to read. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/a...

Flagging for my language-related followers, in case you haven't noticed, the welcome re-emergence of elephind.com, a single search engine for a huge range of (free) newspaper archives including some unusual ones like US college newspapers. #lexicography #OEDantedating #linguistics 1/2

Big antedating for the Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction: "Venerian", the language of Venerians (i.e. those from Venus), from 1948 to 1930. This is pretty much dead after the 1950s, so we'd be grateful for any postdatings too. sfdictionary.com/view/397/ven...

Never too early to start teaching the young about automatic memory management.

The 2025 Word of the Year is "slop," both as a noun for low-quality AI-generated content and as a combining form for anything of little value. Read the full press release. #WOTY2025 #ADS2026 #LSA2026 americandialect.org/2025-word-of...

The American Dialect Society has chosen its word of the year: slop…used as both a freestanding noun, and a productive suffix! Check out all the words we nominated at the link! And while I nominated “that’s AI” (and it won for most useful), there’s no fake news here!

I got an email fr a 140-year-old company I sometimes shop from, offering me "Archive Treasures". It goes on to mention "treasures from our past" which I am "invited to explore" &c. AFAICT this really is just a postseason sale. What angers me is that the co. truly has an archive. But this is not it.

NYC folks! I'll be in NYC on Thursday, January 29 to talk about creating the new edition of the @merriam-webster.com Collegiate Dictionary at the Barnes & Noble in the Upper West Side. stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/978006...

Fascinating antedating for the Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction: "edisonade", John Clute's term for a proto-SF story abt a young inventor. Clute had previously told us that he coined this for the Encyclopedia of SF, but he actually used it 3 years earlier! sfdictionary.com/view/2011/ed...

The American Dialect Society (@americandialect.org) has announced the nominations for its Word of the Year—this is the one that matters, people! Vote will be tonight. americandialect.org/nominations-...

New entry for the Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction: "space legs", bodily comfort in space, after "sea legs". From 1936, including a 1964 example from Anaïs Nin describing an LSD trip! Been meaning to publish this one for a while. sfdictionary.com/view/1293/sp...

The new Smith & Taylor Classics edition of old fave Fanny Hill, with an intro by me and an afterward with @stoya.bsky.social and me, is now out. Come for the discomfiting porn, stay for my sarcastic footnotes. It's a whole big thing. www.unnamedpress.com/all-books/p/...

Historical #Dictionary of #ScienceFiction update: lots of holiday coding for a small benefit, but pseudonyms are now handled better. You can look up e.g. Andrew North or Will Atheling, and get those as well as x-r's to Andrew Norton and James Blish. Still adding more; feedback welcome!

I've lately seen a number of previously unwatched "classic" or "important" movies that have disappointed me. I was therefore nervous about yesterday's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, but OMG what an absolutely incredible film. I can't say enough about how much I loved it.

My Dad is Dracula (and a Medieval Scholar) 🏰

If you need a timeline cleanse (& yes, of course you do), there's always John Bonham's miraculously great Moby Dick fr the 1970 Royal Albert Hall show. (I'd seen it before, but reminded by last week's @flaminghydra.com piece about it flaminghydra.com/cetacean-solo/) www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOb8...

Got a poetry book delivered that has about the worst production quality I've ever seen from a commercial press (albeit a small one); it's just astounding. Wasn't cheap either. Very frustrating.