The influence of middle-schoolers on our language

One of the podcasts I routinely download for listening to while running errands is Science Friday from NPR.  A recent episode was entitled "What the Sigma is Algospeak?"  It's mostly about GenAlpha slang, and much of the discussion was beyond me, but this part of the interview was particularly interesting (the transcript has some minor typos):

ADAM ALEKSIC: I think that these algorithms are pushing more consumer labels and language on us than we’ve ever had before. We’ve had TV advertising, but you could just turn off the TV. Now, even when you’re not on the algorithm and you’re in a bar hanging out with some friends, the song playing on the radio is a song that was popularized through TikTok, and now that’s affecting your collective headspace.

And you walk down the street and you see these Dubai Labubus. And all that kind of affects our headspace, and we feel this pervasive feeling of being watched and being sold to, and it’s exhausting, and that’s why we turn to absurdism. And absurdism comes in times of high social change. I don’t think it was a coincidence that Dadaism and that kind of stuff was right around World War I.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What demographic, age-wise, is on the cutting edge of algospeak?

ADAM ALEKSIC: It’s definitely middle-schoolers.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Really?

ADAM ALEKSIC: If you’re not tapped into middle-schoolers, you don’t where the actual change is happening. These kids, they’ve always been coming up with new ways to create new identities and differentiate themselves from adults. And in forging this shared identity, they often create new language, right? And that’s always been a thing.

It’s always been, oh, the kids are talking different these days. We’ve always had that attitude. The algorithm sort of naturally picks up on what middle-schoolers find fascinating, and then we compound that through, let’s say, cringe culture. So the fact that rise was actually trending among middle-schoolers and then cringe creators start making humorous, parodying videos of the word “rizz,” but they actually pushed the word “rizz” more, and then more middle-schoolers identify with it– usually, the changes you can see are in the middle schools.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Because they are the most online?

ADAM ALEKSIC: Not necessarily the most online. I think they’re probably as online as older Gen Z people, or something. It’s just the most impressionable, and they have the least crystallized idea of what language is. They’re the most flexible to language change.

More about the algorithms that influence language at the link, where there is both a clickable recording and a written transcipt.

Addendum:  Video embedded, with a hat tip to reader Bulletholes for finding it.

A reminder that ancient statuary was often painted... and perfumed !

The painting is by Jean-Léon Gérôme - Painting Breathes Life into Sculpture, 1893. 

Although it was initially thought that Greek statues were mostly unadorned white marble, by the early 19th century the systematic excavation of ancient Greek sites brought forth a plethora of sculptures with traces of multicolored surfaces. Some of these traces are still visible to the naked eye even today, though in most examples the remaining color has faded or disappeared entirely once the statues were exposed to light and air. In spite of this overwhelming evidence for painted statues, influential art historians such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann so strongly opposed the idea of painted Greek sculpture that proponents of painted statues were dismissed as eccentrics and their views largely dismissed for several centuries. It wasn't until published findings by German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann in the late 20th century and early 21st century that painted Greek sculptures became an established undeniable fact. Using high intensity lamps, ultraviolet light, special cameras, plaster casts and certain powdered minerals, Brinkmann was able to scientifically prove that the entire Parthenon, including the actual structure as well as the statues, was in fact painted. He furthermore was able to reveal the pigments of the original paint and has created several painted replicas of Greek statues that are currently on tour throughout the world. Also in the collection, are replicas of works from other Greek and Roman sculptures showing that the practice of painting sculpture was wide spread and in fact the normative practice rather than the exception in Greek and Roman culture.

More at the Wikipedia entry.  Image found at Miss Folly, via.

Reposted from 2010 to some text and add two images from BBC Culture:

Even bronze statues would have been much brighter than their dark brown appearance suggests today: bronze acquires a patina over time. What we see as a uniform greenish-brown head would once have been gleaming bright, almost golden. Hair would have been painted dark and the flesh might well have been painted too. The eye sockets of ancient statues are often empty, because the eyes were made separately, and they have been lost over time. There is a magnificent pair of Greek eyes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York [above], made of bronze, marble, quartz and obsidian...

And the Greeks are not the only ones whose statues were painted: the Romans were similarly enthusiastic about brightening up their marble. Paolo Liverani, of the University of Florence, has worked on a project to recreate the statue of Augustus of Prima Porta [below]. The emperor’s statue was discovered in 1863, and showed traces of the paint which once decorated it. A cast of the statue, its polychromy restored (and, in part, imagined), now stands in the Vatican Museum.

And finally this interesting tywk:

Winckelmann was a particular fan of Roman marble copies of Greek bronze statues: the Romans often copied Greek originals in marble. You can tell it is a marble copy of a bronze if a figure is leaning on something: a tree trunk, or a staff, for example. Or perhaps there is a little chunk of marble joining the two legs together.  Marble lacks the tensile strength of bronze, so it requires extra support to keep the figures stable.

Reposted from 2018 to add this excerpt from an essay in Harper's Magazine: 

"In the center of the city, near the Capitoline Hill and the monstrous slab of wedding cake that is the Vittorio Emmanuele II monument, runs the Via delle Botteghe Oscure, a wide and—by Roman standards—relatively undistinguished street, most notable in recent times as the site of the headquarters of the Italian Communist Party. Patrick Modiano stole its name for one of his melancholy novels about Paris and historical amnesia, but this original “street of dark shops” was dark, for at least part of its history, because of smoke and soot. In the eighth and ninth centuries, it was the site of a kiln in which monuments were broken up and burned to make lime for mortar. The thought of workshops running for decade after decade, century after century, grinding up works of art and feeding them into ovens, induces a kind of sublime terror, a feeling of insignificance in the face of the past. So much has vanished, so much labor and human expression has turned to dust."

Reposted from 2024 to add information about the perfuming from an article in Smithsonian Magazine: 

In ancient Greece and Rome, statues not only looked beautiful—they smelled good, too.

That’s the conclusion of a new study published this month in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology. Cecilie Brøns, who authored the study and works as an archaeologist and curator at the Glyptotek art museum in Copenhagen, finds that Greco-Roman statues were often perfumed with enticing scents like rose, olive oil and beeswax.

These fragrances were “not merely decorative but symbolic, enhancing the religious and cultural significance of these sculptures,” writes Bill Giannopoulos for the Greek City Times. In some instances, the scents were also applied in ways that helped preserve the statues...

The statues were anointed in different ways. In some instances, they were covered in a mixture of waxes and oils through a process known as “ganosis.” In others, they were coated in olive oil as part of a process called “kosmesis,” which was meant to help protect the sculptures from the elements.

A book for English majors and language lovers

"Starting in the fourteenth century, “meseems” was used sort of like the word “methinks,” but instead of “I think” it meant “it seems to me.” A very useful word, meseems. In Middle English and Early Modern English, the word “eftsoons” was used to mean “soon afterward.” The adverb “eft,” meaning “afterward,” shares a root with the modern word “after.” “After,” or “aefter” in Old English, combines this root with a comparative suffix, while “eft” simply has an adverbial -t at its end. Indeed, the word “after” originally meant “farther off” or “more away,” either in time or in physical distance, with the frequentative -ter ending implying extra distance. You’ve heard the words “forego” and “foregone,” as in “a foregone conclusion,” but what about “foredo” and “foredone”? In Middle English, “foredone” was used euphemistically to mean “killed” or “destroyed.” By some English people, “foredone” is still used to mean “overcome with fatigue,” as in “I’m foredone with exertion after working in the sun.” This resembles today’s phrase “we’re done for,” which characters in books and movies say when they’re in grave danger. The word “dern,” meaning “hide” or “conceal,” is still used by some English speakers, most often as the past participle “derned,” but it’s based on an Old English word meaning “secret” or “hidden,” and it shares a root with the word “dark.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the word “gratulate” meant “to give thanks” or “to show joy,” from the Latin gratulari, meaning the same. Possibly the most joyful Middle English word is “balter,” which means “to tread in a clownish manner, as an ox does the grass.”"

--From Useless Etymology, which will be published in October by John Murray Press.

Excerpted in toto from last month's Harper's Magazine.

An interesting anomaly in a rock found in Arkansas

A deep linear groove not caused by power tools or modern equipment, and not a "natural formation."  Explanation at the rocks subreddit.

The Trump administration's opposition to cage-free eggs

In 2012 fewer than 10% of the egg-laying hens in the US were cage-free. Instead the vast majority were raised in enclosures that longtime animal welfare campaigner Josh Balk describes as “the size of a home microwave.” By then, Balk had been pushing his cage-free agenda for the better part of a decade, starting as a recent graduate of George Washington University working with students on their successful petition to remove eggs from caged birds from a campus market in 2005. Less than two years later, more than 100 college and university dining systems had joined the cage-free movement, despite a then-40% price premium over regular eggs...

But the real turning point came in 2015. That year packaged-food companies including General Mills and Nestlé, as well as restaurant giants Cheesecake Factory, Starbucks, Subway and others, announced their own plans to achieve 100% cage-free egg status... The Golden Arches then beat its own timeline, announcing in February 2024 that it was sourcing all its eggs from hens that could spread their wings and walk around outside the confines of teeny-tiny metal cages...

California passed Proposition 2 in 2008 in a landslide—with 63.5% of voters choosing to require that all egg-laying hens in the state, as well as pregnant pigs and veal calves, be housed in quarters that let them stand up, fully stretch limbs, lie down and turn around. Nine other states, including Arizona, Massachusetts and Michigan, have since passed similar measures. The year after Prop 2 passed, the California legislature mandated that as of 2015 all eggs sold in the state—the most populous in the country—would meet the Prop 2 standards...

“There is a lot of talk about cage-free, but are people actually buying them?” he asked. Data from NielsenIQ offers a clear answer: yes. At US retailers, unit sales of eggs labeled “cage-free” were up about 16% for the 52 weeks ended on June 28. Pasture-raised eggs, a category that goes even further than cage-free, were up even more, at 25%. Unit sales of eggs overall were up a mere 1.6% in the same period...

Now the Department of Justice is stepping in with a lawsuit against the state of California that it says will protect residents from the “real harm” caused by its “rogue” cage-free egg commitments and the ensuing higher prices, as USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins put it in a press release. “Thankfully, President Trump is standing up against this overreach,” she said... Although the suit blames cage-free laws for higher prices in the state, there’s widespread agreement within the industry that price spikes have been a direct result of bird flu, not cage-free eggs...

More information at the archived article from Bloomberg.

Spogomi explained

Spogomi, a Japanese litter-picking sport, has come to the UK. Invented in 2008, it was intended as a competition to encourage people to clean up public spaces. It is now played in schools across the country as people gamify collecting rubbish.

Sarah Parry, a 29-year-old doctor from Glasgow, is part of the reigning world champion team. The British team beat the Japanese in Tokyo in 2023, the last time the competition was held, when she and her two teammates managed to bag 61lbs (28kg) more rubbish than the host country.

The teams have 45 minutes to collect as much litter as possible, then 20 minutes to sort their litter. Teams are awarded points based on the type of litter and its recycling category...

Litter-picking may sound like a peaceful pursuit, but it can be strenuous.

“It is very physically difficult,” Parry said. “I have run 33 marathons and the sorest my legs have ever been is after winning the Spogomi World Cup two years ago.

“It’s a lot of very fast walking and you are carrying a lot of awkward-shaped items and using different muscle groups, and it’s heavy litter and it was very hot in Tokyo when we competed. We collected over 50kg so you have to carry that between you while power-walking through a busy urban area.”

It's rather sad that this sport exists.

The Moulin Rouge, 1923

A photograph from the archives of National Geographic.  Credit: Jules Gervais Courtellemont.

For more on the moulins of glaciers and why this building is red, see this 2009 post.

Reposted from 2013 to add this bit of advice from someone on a golf trip to Scotland:

“I say two things to Europe. Stop the windmills. You’re ruining your countries. I really mean it, it’s so sad. You fly over and you see these windmills all over the place, ruining your beautiful fields and valleys and killing your birds,” he said.  

Recognize the movie?

Beware of Mister Fog

When I was pulled over for speeding, I told the officer, "I'm sorry, but the road seemed clear, and..."

 "How would you have reacted if Mister Fog had suddenly appeared?" he interrupted.

Annoyed at his patronizing manner, I replied, "I suppose I would've applied Mr. Brake and summoned up Mr. and Mrs. Headlight!"

Enunciating each syllable, the officer repeated, "How would you have reacted if mist.... or... fog had suddenly appeared?"

 -- Peter Melville, Cornwall, England

(from a 2013 issue of Reader's Digest).  Reposted in 2025 because we need some laughs.

Neuf-Brisach, France is an octagonal city

"An aerial view of an octagonal fortress that forms one of the most extraordinary cities in the world. Constructed in the 17th-century by Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, a military architect serving King Louis XIV, the city in Alsace features evenly spaced bastions, perpendicular streets and star-shaped fortifications."    Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

One of the Photos of the Day at The Guardian.  Here's the Wikipedia entry.  And you can zoom in and see streetviews at Google Maps.

"Nyctinastic" plants explained

I think I've seen this in real life, but never appreciated it.  Pictured above is a three-leaf clover with holes generated by insects.  Note the symmetry, which is explained at LiveScience:

Each night at sunset, a handful of plants "fall asleep." Species as diverse as legumes and daisies curl up their leaves and petals for the evening and do not unfurl until morning. 

Now, a new study suggests that plants may have been folding their leaves at night for more than 250 million years. By tracking the unique bite marks that insects inflict only upon folded leaves, the authors determined that one extinct group of plants were likely nyctinastic — the scientific term for plants curling up in response to darkness...

Charles Darwin described "sleep movements in plants" in 1880 in his book "The Power of Movement in Plants," but the phenomenon had already been documented as far back as 324 B.C. by Androsthenes of Thasos, an associate of Alexander the Great. It's hard to miss — stroll through any garden near dusk, and you'll likely notice a few flower species closing their petals...

But if plant sleeping behavior is a defense mechanism, it clearly does not work every time. In fact, one of the telltale signs of nyctinasty is that the plants' leaves are often pockmarked by perfectly symmetrical holes. Not unlike what happens when a child cuts shapes into folded paper to make a snowflake, any hole punched through a folded leaf by an insect will show up on both sides of that leaf when it opens.

Here is an image of a fossilized leaf depicting the same event:

More details and relevant links at LiveScience.  Reposted from 2023.

Offered without comment...

Excerpt from a transcript of the July 23 As It Happens podcast from the CBC:

[Acey Rowe, host]: You may have seen the cellphone video -- a Black man in Jacksonville, Florida is punched in the face, pulled from his car and beaten by police during a traffic stop. This follows an exchange where he repeatedly asks the officers why he's been pulled over and asks to speak to a supervisor, as they demand he leave the car. His name is William McNeil Jr. and today the 22-year-old college student spoke about what happened to him -- as his lawyers demand accountability. Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters, however, urged people not to rush to judgement. He says the cellphone video, quote, "does not comprehensively capture the circumstances." Unquote. Mr. McNeil was with his parents and their lawyer, Ben Crump, when he spoke to reporters today. Here's what they had to say, beginning with his mother Latoya Solomon.

SOUNDCLIP

LATOYA SOLOMON: The day I seen that video, I couldn't finish it past the window breaking. It wasn't until maybe a few months ago I finally finished the whole video. But I'm thankful to God for protecting him, because I know what the outcome could have been. But I believe in faith in God is protected my only son.

ALTON SOLOMON: Morning. I'm Alton Solomon, the father, stepfather. But I can't call him my stepson, because this is my son. I've been through what he's been through. To see that video made me go back to the moment when I was 22. It hurt. It made me upset. But I've seen what my son did that I had to do, and he sat right, and he did right. To see that, [deep breathing] it's a hurting feeling to be a father that loved God first. And to see all my kids not being able to wake up in the morning, get my phone call saying your child is gone. That's a hurting feeling, but I thank God. Because God got him.

BEN CRUMP: William's just gonna make a few remarks. And keep this family in prayer, because as his mother and father both said, they knew he could have been the next hashtag. It could have a different result had he not kept his demeanour.

WILLIAM MCNEIL JR.: First of all, I want to thank God for bringing everybody here together. And thank y'all for supporting me. That day, I just really wanted to know, you know, why I was getting pulled over, and why I needed to step out of the car when I knew I didn't do nothing wrong. I was really just scared. Yeah, that's it.

Tea for one ?

I've been surprised at how little the official Consumer Price Index has risen since the onset of the tariffs.  Part of this may be the result of companies eating some of the costs, but a more subtle effect is "shrinkflation" - a process that has been going on for decades as companies downside the size of products while holding the sticker price unchanged.  Anyone who pays attention to their budget and shopping is aware of the process; hat this is accelerating is evidenced in this article in Reuters:

Toy makers that serve retail giants like Walmart, Target and Amazon are reducing the number of accessories in toy kitchen sets, removing batteries from electronic playsets, simplifying doll makeup and reducing packaging, as a 30% blanket tariff currently imposed on Chinese imports puts a damper on their bottom lines...

Educational toy maker Popular Playthings - whose China-made animal sets, trucks, and magnetic food sets can be bought on Amazon - is delaying and paring down a magnetic cake set it had planned to launch in June, CEO Jason Cheung said in an interview. The company is reducing the power of the magnet, using cheaper packaging, and removing one of two serving plates that were to come with the set -- all while upping the price from $29.99 to $34.99.

"Originally it would come with two plates so two kids can have cake at the same time,” Cheung said. Now, "one (child) will serve, while the other can eat."

Time to cue Led Zeppelin "Tea For One."

Colorful "rocks" found in a Georgia yard

From the discussion thread at the whatsthisrock subreddit:

OP, that looks like cement-solidified-and-stabilized industrial waste, possibly from dye, glaze, or pigment manufacturing.

Going back to the 1950s, manufacturers have mixed their hazardous wastes with concrete to solidify and bind it to prevent it from migrating off-site or into waterways, and to allow it to be disposed of as solid waste. I can clearly see a thin layer of plain cement on the bottom and top of those pieces. Industrial dyes and pigments back in the 20th century contained manufacturing by-products like dioxins and toxic heavy metals used as colorants.

Please err on the side of safety and dispose of whatever you collected. It could be very old and full of bad stuff. If the in situ concrete is breaking up, perhaps call the county environmental agency to let them know.

The ongoing genocide in Gaza, updated

Excerpts from the CBC's As It Happens transcript from several days ago, featuring an interview with Ajith Sunghay, who is the Head of the UN Human Rights Office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory:

NK: You know, when we talk about these hundreds and hundreds of people being killed around aid distribution sites, what are Palestinians in Gaza telling you? What are your staff members there telling you about the kinds of choices people are having to make right now?

AS: It's very difficult. I mean, to be honest with you, we are lost for words to describe how things are in Gaza. Two-point-two million people are suffering, and not necessarily all dying, but in different ways. In that background -- against that background -- we see, and I have to say, you know, before the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation stepped in to distribute food, there were 400 places -- 400 centres -- where the UN and its partners were distributing food. That is for 2.2 million people. That's been reduced to about four centres. And now, three centres in the last few days. We're talking about 700,000 people squeezed into each centre trying to get food. It is chaotic, and people are being shot. And this has happened over the last six weeks. We see 700-plus people who have been shot and killed while trying to get food. They are not a threat to the Israeli Defense Force. So, why are they being shot? This is a crowd control issue. So, you can imagine, after six weeks, when people have been shot and killed every day trying to get food, they still go. And that is because their choices are just to either starve and die, or go to these places, struggle, step on each other, fight for this meagre resource, and get shot. And that's a very, very difficult choice to make. And they say we know the risk, but we will take that risk. We'd rather die one way or the other. So, it's that desperate.

A column at The Guardian collected some of the more outrageous statements by Israeli politicans in the past couple years:

“All of Gaza’s infrastructures must be destroyed to its foundation and their electricity cut off immediately. The war is not against Hamas but against the state of Gaza,” said May Golan, minister for social equality and the advancement of the status of women of Israel on 7 October 2023.

“Flatten everything [in Gaza] just like it is today in Auschwitz,” David Azoulay, council leader for the northern Israeli town of Metula, said in an interview with an Israeli radio station, December 2023.

“Now we all have one common goal – erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth” Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament, wrote on X 7 October 2023. Vaturi also wrote: “The war will never end if we don’t expel everyone.” (2 November 2023) and “To wipe out Gaza. Nothing else will satisfy us … Don’t leave a single child there, expel all the remaining ones in the end, so they have no chance of recovery.” (9 October 2023)

“The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death,” Yitzhak Kroizer, a member of national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party, said in a radio interview. This did not get much international coverage but was cited in the letter sent to the attorney general at the end of 2023 accusing the country’s judicial authorities of ignoring incitement to genocide.

“The children in Gaza have brought this upon themselves,” said Meirav Ben-Ari from Yair Lapid’s opposition party Yesh Atid in response to a Palestinian lawmaker bemoaning the loss of civilian life on 16 October 2023.

“There should be 2 goals for this victory: 1. There is no more Muslim land in the Land of Israel ... After we make it the land of IL, Gaza should be left as a monument, like Sodom …” said Likud member of the Knesset Amit Halevi on 16 October 2023.

“They [the children] are our enemies,” said Simcha Rothman, a member of the Knesset for the National Religious party, part of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. Rothman was responding to a question from a Channel 4 (UK) interviewer asking “the children are your enemies?”

Addendum from email received from World Central Kitchen July 20: 

World Central Kitchen teams in Gaza have again run out of ingredients to cook warm meals. We served 80,000 meals yesterday, emptying the last of our replenished stocks while aid trucks remain stuck at the border. 

Our brave teams are still baking bread and delivering water each day—essential lifelines for Gazan families. 

Our Field Kitchens are prepped and ready to resume cooking the moment new supplies arrive. Every second counts. Families in Gaza rely on these hot meals.

WCK’s commitment remains steadfast. We are on the ground, working alongside local chefs and partners, ready to ramp up operations the moment food can safely reach our kitchen.

And this from The Guardian yesterday:

At least 32 people were killed and more than 100 injured on Saturday morning when Israeli troops opened fire on crowds of Palestinians seeking food from two aid distribution hubs in southern Gaza, according to witnesses and hospital officials.

People on the scene described it as “a massacre”, and claimed Israel Defense Forces fired “indiscriminately” at the groups of Palestinians – reported to be mostly young men – who were making their way towards the hubs run by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Most of the deaths, which a civil defence agency spokesperson, Mahmud Bassal, attributed to “Israeli gunfire”, occurred in the Teina area, about two miles from a GHF aid distribution centre east of Khan Younis.

Medical sources told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that many of the wounded are in a serious condition, while witnesses at the scene said many of the dead and injured were children and teenagers.

The Nasser hospital in Khan Younis received 25 bodies, as well as dozens of wounded people, while nine others were killed near a centre north-west of Rafah, the civil defence agency said.

Dr Atef al-Hout, director of Nasser hospital, described the situation as “an unprecedented number of casualties in a very short time”, warning that the actual death toll could be higher.

“We’re unable to provide adequate medical treatment as we lack equipment, medicine and personnel,” he told Haaretz. 

July 23:

Tel Aviv, Israel: Israelis protest the food shortages in the Gaza Strip by marching with sacks of flour towards the defence ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv.  Photograph: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images, via The Guardian.

The future of clean energy

Selections from a gallery of photos at The Atlantic showing the enormous scale of solar energy projects in China, which currently has 74% of all clean energy projects under construction worldwide.  Mountains, deserts, lakes, and industrial sites like the cattle feedlots are being covered with solar panels.  

Meanwhile the Trump administration is "Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry."