Artificial intelligence has allowed scientists to make significant progress in cracking a mysterious ancient text, the meaning of which has eluded scholars for centuries.
Origin
Early 21st century: a blend or portmanteau of subliminal and webmention.
Pronunciation
submention /ˈsʌbˈmɛn(t)ʃ(ə)n/
Related
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In a new book, 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts asses President Donald Trump's behavior. Do his impulses explain his decisions? The book's editor Dr. Brandy Lee and Tony Schwartz, co-author of Trump's "The Art of the Deal," join Lawrence O'Donnell.
Joy Reid is joined by actor and author Ron Perlman, and Columbia University professor of linguistics John McWhorter, on the bombshell statements and run-on sentences from Donald Trump’s recent New York Times interview.
Roughly speaking, an ergodic system is one that mixes well. You get the same result whether you average its values over time or over space. This morning I ran across the etymology of the word ergodic.
The man-shaming portmanteau undermines feminism’s message of equality
What happens when a perfectly innocuous phrase takes on a more sinister meaning over time?
Case in point, the expression "to call a spade a spade." For almost half a millennium, the phrase has served as a demand to "tell it like it is." It is only in the past century that the phrase began to acquire a negative, racial overtone.
Historians trace the origins of the expression to the Greek phrase "to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough." Exactly who was the first author of "to call a trough a trough" is lost to history. Some attribute it to Aristophanes, while others attribute it to the playwright Menander. The Greek historian Plutarch (who died in A.D. 120) used it in Moralia.The blogger Matt Colvin, who has a Ph.D. in Greek literature, recently pointed out that the original Greek expression was very likely vulgar in nature and that the "figs" and "troughs" in question were double entendres.
Pinker talking about his then new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, and doing what he does best: combining psychology and neuroscience with linguistics. The result is as entertaining as it is insightful.
Why is the president putting ISIS in the same category in which he places Rosie O’Donnell?
STAT asked experts to compare Trump's speech from decades ago to that in 2017. All noticed deterioration, which may signal changes in Trump's brain health.
STAT reviewed decades of Trump’s on-air interviews and compared them to Q&A sessions since his inauguration. The differences are striking and unmistakable.
Research has shown that changes in speaking style can result from cognitive decline. STAT therefore asked experts in neurolinguistics and cognitive assessment, as well as psychologists and psychiatrists, to compare Trump’s speech from decades ago to that in 2017; they all agreed there had been a deterioration, and some said it could reflect changes in the health of Trump’s brain.
Let's not forget to give credit where credit is due.
I rant regularly when people abuse Latin binomials by adding an unnecessary article in front of them, like people who refer to "the acanthomyops latipes". As I said at the time:
While I happily refer to the Skidelskys, I would never dream of calling them the Edward Skidelsky and the Robert Skidelsky. How hard is it to use a Latin name as a name?
Now I have a new term with which to beat people over the head. Thanks to a very informative article by Geoffrey K. Pullum over at Language Log (Glenn Frey and the band with the anomalous name) I now know not only that the band was called Eagles, not The Eagles, and also that such a thing -- "which takes no the" -- is called a strong proper name.
P.s. The comments on the Language Log post reveal that many bands, some of which I've even heard of, apparently have strong proper names, Talking Heads being my favourite.