Notices by Mignon Fogarty (grammargirl@zirk.us)

The American Dialect Society has chosen "rawdog" as the #woty2024 word of the year!

"Rawdogging" was was also a runner-up this year from the Macquarie Dictionary in Australia and the Collins Dictionary — at least. Those are the two I remember from my WOTY episode with John Kelly a couple of weeks ago.

This is a cool story about a college sophomore doing linguistics research on Jhar, a largely undocumented language spoken in Nigeria. He's sending recordings back and forth with native speakers using WhatsApp.

https://www.syracuse.edu/stories/aaron-lener/

Just some tiny greens overtaking a bit of driftwood in my favorite corner of our yard.

The banana slices and sweet potato strips were still chewy after 10 hours at 158 degrees, so I let them go another 10 hours overnight at 95 degrees, and now they are crunchy.

I can't discern any real difference between the precooked and raw sweet potatoes. If I "squint," the precooked ones might be a tiny bit crunchier, but it's not a dramatic difference.

I shook a little salt over the sweet potatoes before dehydrating, but they could use more.

Two things:

1. The precooked sweet potato chips retained their crunch better than the raw slices. After the chips had cooled for a couple of hours, the precooked chips were definitely crunchier.

2. Even though I rubbed oil over the trays, the banana chips stuck in places. So if you try this, be sure to oil every little spot; those banana chips are sticky. (No similar problem with the sweet potato chips.)

If you love true crime, you'll love this week's Grammar Girl interview with Natalie Schilling, a forensic linguist, talking about what she calls "the case of the mystery dialect":

A girl disappears and a woman turns up later claiming to be the missing girl — but has an unusual accent that doesn't fit. How does a linguist approach this problem? It's fascinating stuff!

Read: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/schilling-bonus/transcript

Watch: https://youtu.be/MF745suxwEQ

Listen: Read: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/schilling-bonus/transcript

#GrammarGirl #linguistics

I successfully fulfilled my role providing comic relief at dinner whenever anyone started to get testy. 10/10. Five gold stars to me. 🤪

The best thing about Mastodon on holidays is that I can be absolutely certain nobody I’m hanging out with will read my messages here!

Do you have a familect — words or phrases you use with your family that nobody else would understand — like if you say you "Yosimite'd" dinner because of a funny experience you had camping.

Family gatherings are a great time to talk about familects! 🧵

@ernie I have a 2019 iMac I'd like to use as an external monitor with a Mac Mini. The Apple website and other sites say that's not possible, but that seems inconceivable to me.

I'm not asking you to do research for me, but I thought if anyone is likely to know off the top of his head if there's a hack, it would be you!

This is a great piece by @glennf about the history of boilerplate that includes delightful words such as "flong" and "flapdoodle."

https://www.patreon.com/posts/i-dont-want-just-117791189

Merriam-Webster's word of the year is "polarization."

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year?2024

#WOTY2024

If you love dictionaries, you'll love this week's Grammar Girl podcast with @emckean, founder of the Wordnik dictionary.

In this clip, I talk about adopting the word "podcast," and she talks about a man who adopted "beautiful" as a gift to his wife.

Check out the full interview to learn how one delightful person can run a whole dictionary!

Read: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/mckean/transcript

Listen: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/making-your-own-dictionary-with-erin-mckean/id173429229?i=1000679326998

Watch: https://youtu.be/EdU1H85u_HU

#GrammarGirl #Dictionaries

I know you all hate this and yell that nobody wants it, but I have no faith in humanity.

I think 90% of people are going to love hearing chipper people praise their taste, and soon we'll have monthly personalized podcasts from more services than I can even imagine.

Here's your Slack MoNtH iN reVieW!!! "Wow, its amazing how much Bob loved your ideas, and you had such a fun exchange with Maria. You're killing it in all the best ways."

Sigh. I hope I'm wrong.

https://www.wired.com/story/spotify-wrapped-ai-podcasts/

The Oxford Word of the Year is "brain rot, a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media."

https://corp.oup.com/word-of-the-year/

#WOTY2024

Oxford says its word of the year, — "brain rot" — first appeared in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book "Walden," but they've seen a big increase in people using it in the last year.

https://corp.oup.com/word-of-the-year/

#WOTY2024

To all the novelists who struggle with feeling like your work is important:

My husband had a tough medical procedure today. He'll be fine, but ugh ... what a day. And we both got a whole lotta comfort from listening to an audiobook this afternoon while he rested, and we will again tonight. Thank you.

He's making a list. He's checking it twice. He's trying to remember whether he should put a period at the end of each list item. He removes the *&%^#!* AP Stylebook from the nice list.

I was reminded of one of my favorite historical tidbits this morning:

The "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters were never actually released during WWII.

They were printed, but then recycled because of paper shortages.

We only know about them because the design was rediscovered and popularized in 2000.

https://www.london.ac.uk/about/history/history-senate-house/story-behind-keep-calm-carry

Check out these quirky night lights!

The words "night" and "light" are so old the Oxford English Dictionary just lists "Old English" as the date of first use.

"Night light" goes back to 1648 in English, but the first use seems to be in a Dutch book, and from that, and I learned two fun things about Dutch:

1. "Groot" means "large."

2. "Woordenboek" means "dictionary" (word book).