rage-bait

Did you know that the Oxford Word of the Year 2025 was rage bait?

Do you know what rage-baiting is all about?

In a very long entry, Wikipedia tells us:

In internet slang, rage-baiting (also ragebaiting, rage-farming, or rage-seeding) is the manipulative tactic of eliciting outrage with the goal of increasing internet traffic, online engagement, and revenue, as well as attracting new subscribers, followers, or supporters.[1][2][3] This manipulation occurs through offensive or inflammatory headlines, memes, tropes, or comments that provoke users to respond in kind.[4][5][6][7]

For the most up-to-date and colloquial definitions, we can go to Urban Dictionary: rage bait

But what's the effect been? Here's a video looking at How Ragebait RUINED the Internet

And why is it happening? Here's a BBC report on What is rage-baiting and why is it profitable?

It's still very much in the news today.

From Maynooth University this week: The problems with coining terms like 'rage bait' and 'brain rot'

From Brussels two days ago: Rage-bait: Meet the influencers calling Brussels the 'worst city in Europe' just for views

And from Fordham University yesterday: When is Rage Bait Too Much?

Finally, is there the same use and interest in your own country?

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what is 'enshittification'?!

A recent piece in the New Yorker on The Age of Enshittification looked at an interesting word: “Enshittification” was named the word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2023 and by Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary in 2024. The embrace of the term reflected a sense of collective frustration.

And a recent piece on this blog also looked at the term: 6-7 or parasocial or enshittification - what makes a good word of the year?: “The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

Back to the very beginning and end of the New Yorker piece:

Sometimes a term is so apt, its meaning so clear and so relevant to our circumstances, that it becomes more than just a useful buzzword and grows to define an entire moment. “Enshittification,” coined by the prolific technology critic and author Cory Doctorow, is one of these. Doctorow came up with the phrase, in 2022, to describe how all the digital services that increasingly dominated our daily lives seemed to be getting worse at the same time. Google Search had become enshittified, showing ads and product links instead of relevant website results. TikTok had become enshittified, artificially “heating” specific videos so that some would go viral, inspiring copycats and goosing engagement while frustrating creators whose output didn’t get the same treatment. Twitter would soon become royally enshittified in its reincarnation as X, losing its status as a global town square, as it tipped into Muskian extremism and rewarded grifters and meme accounts over legitimate news sources. Spotify, iPhones, Adobe software, e-mail inboxes—it was hard to think of a platform or device that wasn’t seeing a decay in user experience. Wasn’t technology supposed to endlessly improve in the long run? ...

The book stops short of fully extrapolating enshittification to national politics, but the term is certainly also relevant in that realm. If the playbook Doctorow describes involves promising benefits to people only to erratically renege on, and degrade, existing services, then Donald Trump is the enshittifier-in-chief. Under his second Administration, scientific research, diplomacy, corporate watchdogging, and social services have all gotten worse. The beneficiary, of course, is largely Trump himself. Perhaps the worst outcome of enshittification is that it drives us to expect things to be bad, and to assume that they will only get worse.

Which is where the piece by the inventor of the word comes in, in a piece which Cory Doctorow wrote for the Guardian this week: Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again - or: The US president is weaponising tech, but his tariffs and Brexit provide a surprising opportunity to gain back digital control of our lives:

We adopted laws – at the insistence of the US trade rep – that prohibit programmers from helping you alter the devices you own, in legal ways, if the manufacturer objects. This is one thing that leads to what I refer to as the enshittification of technology. There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product to make it work better for its users (at the expense of its manufacturer). But the Trump tariffs change all that. The old bargain – put your own tech sector in chains, expose your people to our plunder of their data and cash, and in return, the US won’t tariff your exports – is dead.

With lots more here:

Enshittification - Wikipedia

'Enshittification' is coming for absolutely everything | FT [February 2024]

What Is Enshittification? Definition, Effects, Mental Health Risk [November 2025]

What Does 'Enshittification' Mean And When Does It Happen? | HuffPost UK Life [November 2025]

Finally, for a look at this from two years ago when the term first came out, see this piece: Jay Doubleyou: controlling ai - part two: how chatgpt is ruining the internet:

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metaphor is everywhere - and is the stuff of language

Using metaphor is a very good way to communicate.

For example, in how to give a 3 minute presentation we learn that winning speakers made use of metaphor and other verbal illustrations to simplify a complex idea.

If we accept that we are by nature multilingual, then it's good to have an understanding of how metaphor works and that it is central to how in fact language works.

We live by metaphors, as in clichés, pragmatics and how we use language to connect us beyond the actual words used:

Metaphors We Live By - Wikipedia [metaphor is a tool that enables people to use what they know about their direct physical and social experiences to understand more abstract things like work, time, mental activity and feelings.] and Metaphors We Live By: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson - YouTube [Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphors aren’t just poetry, but a fundamental part of our brain conceptual system. That is, they’re central to the way we perceive ourselves, others, and the world.]

It goes pretty deep, whether it's the language of money... the language of religion... the language of love...:

The Bible is peppered with the language of debt. Sin, forgiveness, reckoning, redemption - all of these words actually derive from the language of ancient finance. What's more, this seems to be true in all the great religious traditions - not just Judaism and Christianity, but Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam - all of their texts are filled with financial metaphors, many of which relate to issues surrounding debt... We tend to think of these religions as teaching us that we must repay our debts. But the truth is that the financial metaphors in religious texts are oddly ambivalent. The original translation of the Lord's Prayer from 1381 reads "Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors". But do we forgive our debtors? Actually, most of us don't.

[There is in The Merchant of Venice] the ironic weight the actors gave to all the financial metaphors that Shakespeare deploys in the love plot. Bassanio’s pursuit of Portia is first announced as his scheme “to get clear of all the debts I owe”, because Portia is rich. He refers to Portia’s famed “worth”, and calls her a “rich” “gem”. He marvels: “Look on beauty, / And you shall see ’tis purchas’d by the weight.” And while Shylock demands the fulfilment of the “bond” that Antonio signed, the pledged lovers twitter happily about “love’s bonds”, and Graziano speaks of the “bargain” of their faith. At the end, Portia tells Antonio that he is going to be Bassanio’s “surety”, to guarantee his faithfulness.

Or, to look at a BBC piece on the words that help us understand the world: 

We use them so much in everyday language that we often don’t even notice them, but metaphors and similes help us think more deeply – and make sense of the world around us...

And here's a fascinating piece on The Ubiquity of Metaphor from the perspective of a behavioural scientists.

So, it's more than just a bit of 'fancy' or 'flowery' language: language is metaphor.

Let's look at some philosophy and whether someone can explain structuralism to me like I'm 5;

1: Levi-Strauss reckoned that the way we think about things has been set in place already by cultural factors (mainly language) - so the individual is almost a base through which ‘society’ does its work. Think about it like this - language existed before we were, and will continue after we will be gone, but we think through it and it constrains our understanding. The language allows understanding by contrasting together concepts, like dark:light. Would you understand dark if you didn't understand light? Then language goes one step further, and uses metaphor (or, if you like, myth) to allow even deeper understanding of something. So dark is to light as order is to chaos as Man is to Woman. You understand the first concept much more richly by linking it to your understanding of the other contrasts.

2: We actually understand things only through metaphors. Every word was once a metaphor - 'muscle' for example, came through the German word for 'mouse', because muscles looked like little animals moving under the skin. This extends up how we act out concepts. When we speak of 'knowledge', for instance, we understand it to be a 'space'. We 'shed light on that' or 'find common ground', or 'another perspective'. We therefore exchange knowledge freely, because everyone can stand in that space. Other cultures, for instance the Maori of New Zealand, understand knowledge to be a treasure. They therefore DON'T share knowledge except with (male) descendants, and don't particularly care if it's actually right or not, because it was a gift from their ancestors. See how this metaphor language stuff shapes society and understanding?

And let's look at the magazine Philosophy Now and A Gentle Introduction to Structuralism, Postmodernism And All That:

Structuralism arose on the continent, in particular in France, in the early 60s. The first ‘big name’ was Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, who took on Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading French intellectual and philosopher of the time, and didn’t so much win, as went unanswered (which from Sartre’s point of view was worse). Here was France’s main philosopher, Sartre, who usually had something to say about everything, being attacked in Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind, and yet not replying! The implication was that he couldn’t reply, and the intellectual mood began to move towards Lévi-Strauss’ intellectual position, which he called structuralism.

A simple explanation of structuralism is that it understands phenomena using the metaphor of language. That is, we can understand language as a system, or structure, which defines itself in terms of itself. There is no language ‘behind’ language with which we understand it, no metalanguage to explain what language means. Instead it is a self-referential system. Words explain words explain words (as in a dictionary), and meaning is present as a set of structures.

Helpful?!

To finish, here's something a bit strange(r)...

Going further, malaphors are when we get our metaphors mixed up [as in "it's not rocket surgery" instead of "it's not rocket science"!]

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6-7 or parasocial or enshittification - what makes a good word of the year?

How do we add new vocabulary in English dictionaries? 

The problem is that the UK does not have an official language - nor does it have an official dictionary.

So, it's really a matter of choice as to what is put into dictionaries - or, rather, a matter of choice of those out there who are using the English language.

Looking at the online dictionary.com, it asks and answers the question: How Does A Word Get Into The Dictionary?

This is one of the most common questions we get—and it’s a great one.

The answer involves one of the most misunderstood things about dictionaries, so let’s set the record straight: a word doesn’t become a “real word” when it’s added to the dictionary. It’s actually the other way around: we add words to the dictionary because they’re real—because they’re really used by real people in the real world.

In other words, our lexicographers add a word to the dictionary when they determine that:

• It’s a word that’s used by a lot of people.
• It’s used by those people in largely the same way.
• It’s likely to stick around.
• And it’s useful for a general audience.

All four of these points are important. Our lexicographers look for use not just by one person, but by a lot of people. Of course, many words have different shades of meaning for different people. But to be added to the dictionary, a word must have a shared meaning (that is, it must communicate a widely agreed-upon meaning from one person to the next). If everyone used a word in a completely different way, we wouldn’t be able to give it a definition, right?

But what about how dictionaries claiming that x is 'word of the year'?

It's probably about marketing: getting the name of the dictionary out there. And it works! 

The Daily Mail says the internet is divided as Dictionary.com unveils its 2025 word of the year - or as The Independent tells us, ‘6-7’ is named 2025 Word of the Year: Here’s what it means...

Alternatively, as reported in the E L Gazette, the Cambridge Dictionary names parasocial as the Word of the Year.

This social media and Gen Z/Alpha derived vocabulary was critiqued in last year's choice, as reported in the Guardian: ‘What many of us feel’: why ‘enshittification’ is Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year:

“The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

Take your pick!

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algospeak: how social media influences the way we talk

As google AI tells us, in an easy definition of algorithms:

In simple terms, an algorithm is a set of step-by-step instructions for completing a task or solving a problem. These instructions are ordered and precise, like a recipe for baking a cake or the steps to making a peanut butter sandwich, and are used by computers and humans to achieve a specific outcome from a given input

Or, when it comes to algorithm: meaning in computer:

Sorting data: An algorithm can define the steps to sort a list of numbers in ascending order.

Finding a path: An algorithm can determine the shortest route on a map by calculating and comparing various paths.

Social media feeds: Algorithms in social media platforms analyze user data to recommend content, though these often involve heuristics (rules of thumb) rather than strictly correct solutions, as noted in Wikipedia.

What about algorithms and language?

Dale Shaw writes for the New World weekly magazine and has written a review of the new book  Algospeak, the language of the machine:

We invented algorithms to sort our words. Now the algorithms are teaching us how to speak

There is one meaning of this word Algospeak - Wikipedia:

In social media, algospeak is a self-censorship phenomenon in which users adopt coded expressions to evade automated content moderation.[1][2] It is used to discuss topics deemed sensitive to moderation algorithms while avoiding penalties such as shadow banning, downranking, or de-monetization of content

But it's also Algospeak (book) - Wikipedia:

Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language is a 2025 non-fiction book by linguist and content creator Adam Aleksic, known online as Etymology Nerd. It explores various linguistic phenomena on the internet, including algospeak, internet slang, and linguistic innovations driven by social media algorithms.[1][2][3]

The book primarily argues that the internet and social media are driving many of recent linguistic innovations, and even crossing over to the offline world.[4] The book covers how social media algorithms—the system that determines which content will be shown to the user—drive content creators to optimize their expression for greater reach.[1] Aleksic argues for an expanded definition of algospeak to encapsulate this new way of social media-influenced expression, going beyond its original definition of the use of coded expressions to evade automated content moderation.[1]

Here are a couple of book reviews (registration needed!

In ‘Algospeak,’ Adam Aleksic, a.k.a. Etymology Nerd, writes about the ways social media is changing language - The Washington Post

Two Savvy New Books Offer Hope For the Terminally Online - The New York Times

And here's a good list of more:

All Book Marks reviews for Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic Book Marks

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new vocabulary in english dictionaries

ADDING TO DICTIONARIES

The E L Gazette has just let it be known that more than 6,000 new words have been added to the Cambridge Dictionary

Here's their latest blog entry: New words – About Words – Cambridge Dictionary blog

Their rivals do the same, for example, the new word entries from Oxford.

But how do they decide what goes into their dictionaries?

This is a piece from the Guardian looking at how new words are born from 2016:

As dictionary publishers never tire of reminding us, our language is growing. Not content with the million or so words they already have at their disposal, English speakers are adding new ones at the rate of around 1,000 a year. Recent dictionary debutants include blog, grok, crowdfunding, hackathon, airball, e-marketing, sudoku, twerk and Brexit.

But these represent just a sliver of the tip of the iceberg. According to Global Language Monitor, around 5,400 new words are created every year; it’s only the 1,000 or so deemed to be in sufficiently widespread use that make it into print. Who invents these words, and how? What rules govern their formation? And what determines whether they catch on?

Shakespeare is often held up as a master neologist, because at least 500 words (including critic, swagger, lonely and hint) first appear in his works – but we have no way of knowing whether he personally invented them or was just transcribing things he’d picked up elsewhere.

Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing program - and can helpfully 'correct' or suggest words for the writer. In a piece from a couple of years ago, it asks who decides what words are added to the dictionary? - both as a general question but also with an eye on its product.

The Oxford dictionaries are the most authoritative - and so we should ask how they decide if new words should enter the dictionary.

NO ACADEMY IN ENGLISH

The history of how the Oxford language was put together shows ... how to put a dictionary together! Here's a look from someone interested in languages (including French!): The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester – My French Quest

The point is that there is no 'official authority' when it comes to determining what is 'correct' in the English language: it's all about recording what is actually used by English speakers.

That's why the English doesn't language have an academy.

Here's a linguist's discussion on the fact that the English language does not have an official Academy

And here's a historical look at why the British said No Thanks to the Academy.

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youglish

Quite a useful tool for learning languages:

Improve your English pronunciation using YouTube

 - and not just English!

"dass Kann Ich Nicht" | Pronunciation of "dass Kann Ich Nicht" in German 

Here's a review:

What is YouGlish and How Does YouGlish Work?

By Luke Edwards

 published 10 November 2023

Youglish helps you improve word pronunciation with useful YouTube video guidance

YouGlish is a great resource for learning to correctly pronounce words. As the name suggests, this is setup for English speakers and uses YouTube to deliver those guidance videos. But it goes beyond that to many language options.

Crucially, this uses native speakers of the language from which the word originates. This means you can hear how that word is pronounced by someone who can speak it naturally in the local tongue.

Since this uses YouTube as its source, videos are super simple to access and can be played across a host of digital devices. 

YouGlish is a very valuable tool not only for individuals, but also for teachers with ELL and ESL students. 

You can narrow down your search by the word, by class, by phrase class, or by context. The tool also provides tips on how to improve English pronunciation – written below the video. This includes the phonetic pronunciation as well as suggestions of other words that help with pronunciation. 

What is YouGlish and how does YouGlish work? | Tech & Learning

And here's a look at how to use it:

YouGlish for the Classroom - YouTube

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what is a synonym?

The songwriter Burt Bacharach gave us a good definition of a synonym:

"A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of."

Burt Bacharach - A synonym is a word you use when you...

Here are a couple of other definitions:

one of two or more words or expressions of the same language that have the same or nearly the same meaning in some or all senses

Synonym Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster

A synonym is a word that has the same meaning as another word (or nearly the same meaning). For example, beautiful and attractive are synonyms of each other because they both refer to someone or something that looks good.

Synonym: Definition and Examples | Grammarly

The problem is 'nearly'...

The Grammarly definition points to why it's a good thing to have synonyms in the sense that we need a better choice of words and we need to avoid using the same old vocabulary again and again (and again).

It then looks at the different types of synonym, starting with:

Absolute synonyms:

Grammarly says:

Absolute synonyms are words that mean exactly the same thing; there is no difference in meaning. You can use absolute synonyms interchangeably; one synonym can replace another without changing the message.

Examples: identical — indistinguishable... drink — beverage... insect — bug

The problem is that all of these examples have very different registers (ie, formality/informality)

Jay Doubleyou: register

Jay Doubleyou: high culture > popular culture --- high register > low register

So says this from a discussion forum:

The basic reason why absolute synonyms (or absolute anything, really) don't exist in natural languages is because whenever two forms have no differences whatsoever in register, meaning, or emotional value, someone is bound to exploit the unused form distinction so as to give it a register, meaning, and emotional value of their choice, and some of these choices will stick, producing non-absolute synonymy, or absolute non-synonymy -- though often only in certain speech communities.

english - Do absolute synonyms exist? - Linguistics Stack Exchange

There is no such thing as a synonym!

It's very handy to be able to use a thesaurus - or list of words with a similar meaning.

But:

It is only a fiction if one holds fast to the notion that synonyms must be exactly equivalent in their meaning, usage, and connotation. Of course, under this strict view, there will never be any “perfect” synonyms. No word does exactly the job of another...

Word for Word | Lapham’s Quarterly

You have to rely on more than just a list, though:

A thesaurus is a handy catalog of synonyms full of exciting (astonishing, flashy, lively!) words we can use in our writing. While it’s tempting to grab an electrifying word and go when we look for a synonym, this practice presents some pitfalls.
Every word in the English language has its own particular place, and it’s even possible to claim that there is no such thing as a true synonym.
Search for the word house in Thesaurus.com, and the options include not only home (which we all know has a cozier connotation than house) but also apartment, condo, mansion, and shack. Kennel and pigpen are there too. (Think of the trouble you’d get into if you chose one of these without knowing its definition … yikes!)
To select the best alternative to house, you have to rely on more than just this single listing in the thesaurus.

Is There Such A Thing As A True Synonym? - Dictionary.com

Finally, here's a good discussion from a Cambridge Dictionary forum:

There is no such thing as a true synonym in English. Discuss! - About Words - Cambridge Dictionary blog

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no language is set in amber

The French language "is not set in amber", says Marie le Conte:

There are now 300 million French speakers globally, across 106 countries and territories. Of these, 235 million speak it every day; of those, 59% live in Africa. It is both a very rigid language and a fundamentally elastic one.

When so many people across the world technically use the same words, they are bound to twist and change them as they see fit. If a Québécois went to Cameroon tomorrow, they would probably struggle to find their feet, at least for the first few days.

It is a diversity that should be celebrated, but it isn’t clear that French elites see it that way. Organs such as the Académie française often do their best to make sure that little changes, and that only the most classical of French is seen as correct...

The Cité Internationale de la Langue Française has just opened its doors... the new museum’s director, Paul Rondin, told Radio France International that “we are witnessing a real deterioration in the language. We’ve let ourselves be devoured by a globish that isn’t English […] The language has been transformed into an accumulation of signs, leaving little room for complexity and diversity, accelerated by digital technology where it’s not even quite Globish but pieces of Globish or of what used to be French.”

He isn’t entirely wrong, of course. There are things we lose by attempting to create languages that are spoken and understood by hundreds of millions of people, including many who did not grow up with them. There are nuances and a certain subtlety that must be sacrificed, and it is no small price to pay.

Still, there is joy to be found in bridging gaps between different countries and populations, and in bringing people closer by making sure they understand one another. Languages only die when they are not spoken; letting them evolve means giving them another lease of life.

This is why it is encouraging to see that at least some of the museum’s resources seem to welcome change. As one of their online exhibitions points out, “each speaker adapts the ‘language of Molière’ as he or she sees fit, according to his or her identity, heritage, needs and environment… This diversity is a guarantee of vitality!”

Perhaps most importantly, it treats French expressions from France as similar to phrases from, say, Gabon, Louisiana or New Brunswick. The director’s take may be old-fashioned, but the museum is forward-looking.

The French language is not set in amber - The New European

No language is set in amber:

Languages are constantly in flux. Changes in lexical meaning alter with each generation, even within the same culture or social group, and languages evolve as new words are developed in line with technology or are borrowed from other languages.

How Languages Change over Time - Creative Word

Every language has a history, and, as in the rest of human culture, changes are constantly taking place in the course of the learned transmission of a language from one generation to another. This is just part of the difference between human culture and animal behaviour. Languages change in all their aspects, in their pronunciation, word forms, syntax, and word meanings (semantic change). These changes are mostly very gradual in their operation, becoming noticeable only cumulatively over the course of several generations. But, in some areas of vocabulary, particular words closely related to rapid cultural change are subject to equally rapid and therefore noticeable changes within a generation or even within a decade. In the 20th century the vocabulary of science and technology was an outstanding example. The same is also true of those parts of vocabulary that are involved in fashionable slangs and jargons, whose raison d’être in promoting group, particularly age-group, solidarity depends on their being always fresh and distinctive. Old slangs date, as any novel or film more than 10 years old is apt to show.

Language - Evolution, Acquisition, Structure | Britannica

Language is always changing, evolving, and adapting to the needs of its users. This isn't a bad thing; if English hadn't changed since, say, 1950, we wouldn't have words to refer to modems, fax machines, or cable TV. As long as the needs of language users continue to change, so will the language. The change is so slow that from year to year we hardly notice it, except to grumble every so often about the ‘poor English’ being used by the younger generation! However, reading Shakespeare's writings from the sixteenth century can be difficult. If you go back a couple more centuries, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are very tough sledding, and if you went back another 500 years to try to read Beowulf, it would be like reading a different language.

Is English Changing? | Linguistic Society of America

There are many reasons why languages change, and I'll cover a few of them, but also: We don't entirely know why all changes happen! Sometimes changes are really well-documented over centuries—I'll share a few English examples—but other changes, especially pronunciation changes, are less well understood. It's easy to reflect on changes that have already happened, but basically impossible to predict what will change in the future.

Why Do Languages Change Over Time and Can Change Be Avoided?

What a linguistic looking at the long-term picture might perceive as changes can look to people living through them simply as errors. If you were writing an essay, you wouldn’t start sentences with prepositions, refer to authors whose books you’re referencing by their first names, use “gonna” or “ain’t” or describe an academic’s theory as “awesome”. But these things might all be normal for essay writers in a generation or two. The essays you write today would seem similarly error-laden if you had to submit them fifty years ago, when “fantastic” primarily meant implausible or otherworldly, “hello” was still used as an expression of surprise as well as a greeting, and middle-class children were discouraged by their parents from using an expression as slangy as “hi”.

5 Things That Cause Languages to Change - Oxford Royale

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why the urban dictionary is so good

There are different opinions on why crowdsourcing information is a good thing or not:

Jay Doubleyou: why wikipedia is so good

One place where information is crowdsourced is the online dictionary:

Wiktionary, the free dictionary

Urban Dictionary: online crowdsourcing

There  are lots of academic studies:

Urban Dictionary (UD) is a website where users of the website generate definitions to slang words and phrases, or alternative definitions to known words. Users also generate examples usages of the defined word. Additionally, other UD users can vote on how accurate they believe a definition is, by giving the definition either a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Frontiers | Mining a Crowdsourced Dictionary to Understand Consistency and Preference in Word Meanings

It is controversial in how it crowdsources its information:

"Urban Dictionary: Crowdsourced Appropriation" by Emma Rashes analyzes “crowdsourced appropriation” on the popular website Urban Dictionary, arguing that the site’s irregular algorithmic behavior, and its founder’s misunderstanding of African American Vernacular English, create pathways for anti-Black and misogynistic mis-definitions to circulate even as they produce profit for the company.

Urban Dictionary: Crowdsourced Appropriation | The Word: Tha Stanford Journal of Student Hiphop Research

Although there has been a response:

Urban Dictionary wipes offensive, racist definitions for 'aboriginal' | Mashable

Here's a good overview:

The Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced website that records new words and their meanings. It began life in 1999 as a parody of Dictionary.com but has since become an important resource on the Web. Indeed, judges in the U.K. famously used the site in 2005 to help them understand slang used by two rappers involved in a dispute.

Part of Urban Dictionary’s appeal is its informal approach, which allows both definitions and descriptions of words. It even allows opinions, which can sometimes be offensive. It captures new words quickly and registers many of the variations that emerge over time. A voting system allows users to show admiration or disdain, revealing words’ popularity.

Today, many millions of users rely on the site to keep them up to date with slang, common usage, and popular culture.Of course, Urban Dictionary has its shortcomings. In the absence of style guides, editors, and moderators, the content can be vague and inaccurate. Also, little is known about the people who post new words and whether the entries reflect real changes in the language or just those that affect a small subset of people.

So just how good is the Urban Dictionary at capturing new words, and how does it compare with more conventional approaches to producing online dictionaries?

Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Dong Nguyen at the Alan Turing Institute in London and a few pals, who compare the Urban Dictionary and its content with Wiktionary, another crowdsourced dictionary. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of Urban Dictionary at this scale,” they say.

Wiktionary is an interesting comparison because it takes a much more formal approach to crowdsourcing. This is a sister site to Wikipedia, run by the same Wikimedia organization. It records only word definitions and employs guidelines about how these should be compiled. It also guides users as to what constitutes a definition. Moderators edit the content, control vandalism, and aim to generate high-quality results. Unsurprisingly, Wiktionary has also become an important online resource, one that researchers increasingly use for natural-language processing and so on.

,,,

The Anatomy of the Urban Dictionary | MIT Technology Review

And here's another:

The Internet facilitates large-scale collaborative projects and the emergence of Web 2.0 platforms, where producers and consumers of content unify, has drastically changed the information market. On the one hand, the promise of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ has inspired successful projects such as Wikipedia, which has become the primary source of crowd-based information in many languages. On the other hand, the decentralized and often unmonitored environment of such projects may make them susceptible to low-quality content. In this work, we focus on Urban Dictionary, a crowd-sourced online dictionary. We combine computational methods with qualitative annotation and shed light on the overall features of Urban Dictionary in terms of growth, coverage and types of content. We measure a high presence of opinion-focused entries, as opposed to the meaning-focused entries that we expect from traditional dictionaries. Furthermore, Urban Dictionary covers many informal, unfamiliar words as well as proper nouns. Urban Dictionary also contains offensive content, but highly offensive content tends to receive lower scores through the dictionary’s voting system. The low threshold to include new material in Urban Dictionary enables quick recording of new words and new meanings, but the resulting heterogeneous content can pose challenges in using Urban Dictionary as a source to study language innovation.

Emo, love and god: making sense of Urban Dictionary, a crowd-sourced online dictionary | Royal Society Open Science

As to whether the Urban Dictionary is any 'good', it is a matter of opinion of course.

There's a lot of snobbery:

Is Urban Dictionary an acceptable source? - English Language & Usage Meta Stack Exchange

Maybe it's not the best place for young people - which will mean that young people will head to it:

Parent reviews for Urban Dictionary | Common Sense Media

Here's what a more 'controlled' crowdsourcing platform has to say:

Urban Dictionary - Wikipedia

Here's an article in praise of it, if a bit old:

In praise of urban dictionaries | Written language | The Guardian

And here's a look at how good the dictionary is:

16 Times Urban Dictionary Defined Words Better Than The Oxford Dictionary - Capital XTRA

But it does excite interest in words - for example:

Urban Dictionary: coffee

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trump and trumpery

From the Mirriam-Webster dictionary:

trumpery

a: worthless nonsense
b: trivial or useless articles : JUNK

Trumpery Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster

Here's the origin - and a graph which shows we're using it much more these days:

trumpery | Etymology, origin and meaning of trumpery by etymonline

And from the Urban dictionary:

Trumpery (noun): the use of outright lies, political smeers, bait and switch tactics, demagoguery, deflection, namecalling, political shell games, blameshifting, threats, fearmongering and any side show-con man methods to try to shield oneself from prosecution as a traitor, criminal, liar, fool, madman, and/or imbecile.
All the Trumpery coming from the White House is a threat to our democracy.
by Old Man On The Mountain May 13, 2017

Urban Dictionary: Trumpery

And so the words 'trumpery' and 'Trump' have come together:

Overcoming Trumpery | Brookings

Lexicographer Susie Dent looks at the language a little further:

OPINION

By Susie Dent

i columnist

Struggling to find the word to describe Donald Trump this week? The historical dictionary can help

In 1888 ‘trumpery’ was already well understood as a byword for something that may be extremely showy, but is also pretty worthless

May 12, 2023

In a glossary of words local to the West Country, “trumpery” is defined as “rubbish of any kind; weeds or any undesirable growth”. Lest we assume the word takes its inspiration from a certain US ex-President, who this week was found liable for sexual assault and defamation, the glossary was compiled in 1888, when “trumpery” was already well understood as a byword for something that may be extremely showy, but is also pretty worthless. It is a useful description perhaps for the state of a man who faces yet more legal troubles down the road but who continues to strut the political stage to the sound of ecstatic applause from supporters who are doubling down rather than backing away.
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If the current turbulence – even in already choppy waters – teaches us anything, it’s that Donald Trump’s base is resolutely immovable. Those who love Trump, love Trump, and nothing that their figurehead says or does is going to change that. While many of us struggle to fathom such arguably blind and bottomless loyalty, a historical dictionary will tell us that it is far from new, and that there is consequently a richness of words to describe it.
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Sequacity is a good place to start. In the 17th century, this described readiness to follow someone no matter what, without any independence of thought or judgement. Founded upon the Latin sequi, to follow, it is a sibling of “obsequious”, which immediately introduces the notion that many followers of a cause or individual are simply fawning flatterers, who may eventually look the other way should it suit them.

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Struggling to find the word to describe Donald Trump this week? The historical dictionary can help

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spell check poem

(Reportedly nominated for a Pullet Surprise)  
 
Eye halve a spelling chequer 
It came with my pea sea, 
It plainly marques four my revue 
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea. 
Eye strike a key and type a word 
And weight for it two say, 
Weather eye and wring oar write 
It shows me strait a weigh. 
As soon as a mist ache is maid 
It nose bee fore two long, 
And eye can put the error rite 
Its rare lea ever wrong. 
To rite with care is quite a feet 
Of witch won should bee proud, 
And wee mussed dew the best wee can, 
Sew flaw's are knot aloud. 
Eye have run this poem threw it 
Your sure reel glad two no, 
Its letter perfect awl the weigh 
My chequer tolled me sew. 
 
--Sauce unknown 

'Spell Checker Blues' - Anon

And also:

ZarOde.pdf

And:

Spell Checker Poem by Mark Eckman and Jerrold H. Zar

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what is 'woke'? part two

What does the word 'woke' mean?

Woke - Wikipedia

Woke Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster

Urban Dictionary: Woke

The word has become an ever-present part of the English-language landscape, with this piece from three years ago:

Jay Doubleyou: what is 'woke'?

The meaning and use of words changes over time:

Jay Doubleyou: the meaning and use of the word 'woman' is changing

And at the end of last year, the word 'woke' was being seen as one of the words of 2022:

The year woke broke: a brief history of a contested word - New Statesman

It has certainly excited a lot of interest as to where it came from:

Rod Liddle - The Feminist Roots of Woke: How The West Went Mad. THE NCF SMITH LECTURE 2022. - YouTube

Here's a look at the word by a historian:

Wokeness is a bad guide to history: An eagerness to put ourselves on the ‘right side’ is reassuring. But dragging the dead before a moral tribunal is pointless

Wokeness is a bad guide to history - The New European

DOMINIC SANDBROOK: Our history podcast is the most popular in almost every country on earth! | Daily Mail Online
Dominic Sandbrook, a writer for UnHerd

And this month, BBC Radio looked at the history of the word: 

Matthew Syed traces the history of a term that's now synonymous with our era of angry debate.

BBC Radio 4 - Woke: The Journey of a Word

Woke: The Journey of a Word - 5. Where Woke Goes to Die - BBC Sounds

It's a very hot issue in Florida, where the Governor wants to bring in a 'law against woke':

I’m a USF senior and here’s why I sued to stop Florida’s Stop WOKE Act | Column

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writing as a language learning tool

At the end of the week or at the end of a course, writing can be a very good way to revise, deepen and clarify any language.

Here are a few activities which can be done either alone or with classmates.

1: Take vocab from the week and look them up in a good dictionary: suggestion - Translation from English into German | PONS Then simply copy a sentence that makes sense for you and which will help you to remember how to use it.

And work on the pronunciation with voice recogntion apps! Google Translate

2: Take a text that you wrote during the week and add connectors to make it flow better: Connectives and Linking Phrases - Online Exercises - English Grammar and Connectors and linking words - exercises

3: Take a text that you wrote and that you know needs improving: ideally work in pairs or groups to correct it and give feedback. 

Here's a good place to go to help you correct a text: Grammarly: Free Online Writing Assistant

You could also create your own check-list: Edit and Improve Writing with this KS2 Checklist - Twinkl

What sort of things are you looking for? The CEF will show you what you need for A1 - C2 Common European Framework of Reference for Languages - Self-assessment grid

4: What about basic sentence structure, or syntax? The 4 Types of Sentence Structure | Grammar | EnglishClub and Sentence Structure (A Complete Guide for Students and Teachers)

But we can play a little more 11 Sentence Building Activities You Can Use with Your Students Today and Sentences Structure Games: Top 20 | Sentence Building Activities ESL

To finish, here are a few more things to do: Jay Doubleyou: writing activities for the esl class and beyond

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the origin of place names

There is a fascinating book just out which looks at the origin of place names:

Found In Translation — Duncan Madden

Found in Translation: The Unexpected Origins of Place Names | Stanfords

Here are a couple of excerpts, published in the i-newspaper:

Land of rabbits and the canoe – five amazing stories of how countries got their names

From one of our favourite holiday destinations to far-flung Australia, the names of countries reveal a fascinating insight to their history

By Duncan Madden

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While you may take the time to learn a bit about the country you’re off on holiday to, have you ever thought about its name – what it means and where it came from? The study of etymology and how places got their names is a treasure trove of extraordinary stories – invasions and rebellions, cultures and religions, adventures and disasters – that can tell us a lot about the countries we visit and the histories that shaped them.

Argentina – ‘silvery land’

Argentina’s naming is a story of adventure, misfortune and almost unfathomable derring-do. It concerns the travails of Portuguese conquistador Aleixo Garcia who, shipwrecked on the Brazilian coast in the early 16th century, became obsessed with the legend of a White King and his vast wealth hidden somewhere in the South American interior, most likely to be in the borders of the Inca Empire.

Garcia spent eight years planning his assault and building an army before marching into Inca territory and, amazingly, escaping loaded with silver booty. But on his journey home following the Río de la Plata, “river of silver”, into Argentina, Garcia was betrayed and killed by a supposedly friendly indigenous tribe. Those in his army who did escape survived to spread the story of the land of silver beside the river of silver.

The final linguistic twist in the tale comes from the switch in language – plata is Spanish but argentina is Italian for silver. For this we can thank the Venetian and Genoese cartographers of the time, whose Italian language maps became the mainstay throughout Europe and in doing so cemented Argentina as the name of the silvery land – much to Spain’s annoyance.

Spain – ‘land of rabbits’

Talking of Spain, the world’s second most popular holiday destination has one of the more curious meanings of any country, dating back to the time of the Phoenicians.

Arriving on the Iberian Peninsula around 1,000 BC, said Phoenicians were met with an unexpected sight – millions of rabbits running rampant across the landscape. Never having seen such critters before, they assumed them to be a type of hyrax, sphan in their language (a furry mammal native to their homelands in the Middle East), and so named the land for them, I-Shaphan, “island of the hyraxes (or rabbits)”. And yes, the Phonicians assumed, wrongly of course, that they had landed on an island rather than the peninsula of Iberia.

Despite the strange circumstances that inspired it, the empires and cultures that followed the Phoenicians stuck with their name, adapting it along the way until the Romans were using Hispania all the way up until the Spain of today.

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Land of rabbits and the canoe - five amazing stories of how countries got their names

Of course, there is lots more:

Place name origins - Wikipedia

The History and Origins of Placenames

The origins of place names

How to Navigate by Nostalgia: The Linguistics of Place Names - JSTOR Daily

Origins of Canada's Geographical Names

Diversity in New York Place Names | National Geographic Society

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what are the new words in languages around the world?

Every language is taking in or inventing new words all the time:

FRENCH:

From covidé (infected with coronavirus) to confinement (lockdown) and éco-anxiété (climate anxiety) to verdissement d’image (greenwashing), the pandemic and the climate crisis account for most new French words, Le Monde has concluded.

But if 28% of recent additions are essentially English, according to an analysis by the paper, nearly half are French coinages, demonstrating what it called the language’s “great suppleness, as well as the creativity and humour of its users”.

New words in French dictionaries show ‘great suppleness’ of language | France | The Guardian

JAPANESE:

The term “Temaedori” refers to buying food products close to their sell-by date for immediate consumption. It gained recognition through efforts starting in June 2021 to reduce food loss, helmed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries with local governments and business associations.

What are Japan’s top 3 ‘words of the year’ for 2022? – The European Sting - Critical News & Insights on European Politics, Economy, Foreign Affairs, Business & Technology - europeansting.com

Taipa, an abbreviation of “time performance,” was selected by dictionary publisher Sanseidō as its word of the year for 2022, reflecting young people’s desire not to waste a second.

No Time to Waste: “Taipa” Chosen as One of Japan’s Words of 2022 | Nippon.com

GERMAN:

A jury from the German Language Society (GfdS) has named Zeitenwende as the German word of 2022. The term, which can be translated as “sea change”or “era change”, was used by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a speech following Vladimir Putin’s February invasion of Ukraine. In his speech Scholz called the invasion, “eine Zeitenwende in der Geschichte unseres Kontinents” (“A sea change in the history of our continent.")

This is the German word of 2022

SPANISH:

Traditional Italian dessert 'Panettone' officially included in prestigious Spanish dictionary - Olive Press News Spain

REVEALED: The best new Spanish words added to the dictionary in 2022

RUSSIAN:

Russia bans the use of foreign words in the Russian language - Euro Weekly News

CHINESE:

Chinese buzzwords for 2022 unveiled - People's Daily Online

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what is the english word of the year?

Several dictionaries are saying different things as to what the 'word of the year' should be:

From 'Goblin Mode' to 'Gaslighting': Check out word of the year by different dictionaries

2022 Words Of The Year From Merriam-Webster, Collins, Macquarie, Oxford

Why 'Homer,' 'Permacrisis' and 'Gaslighting' have topped the 2022 Word of the Year lists | Euronews

Baseball, power and war - 2022's key words - BBC News

For example:

For the first time ever, the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) word of the year was left to the public to decide. Over 340,000 people participated, with ‘goblin mode’ receiving 93% of the total votes. The OED defines it as “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations”.

Merriam-Webster dictionary chose ‘gaslighting’, after a 1,740% rise in searches for the term this year. According to the OED it means “manipulating (a person) by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity”.

Dictionary.com crowned ‘woman’ as its word of the year, after a 1,400% spike in searches over 2022. The word was frequently searched as people explored what it meant amid debates over transgender rights.

Collins Dictionary describes ‘permacrisis’ as “an extended period of instability and insecurity”. The world has certainly faced a variety of crises this year, from the war in Ukraine to the cost-of-living crisis.

Japan’s kanji of 2022, decided by public vote, was the one denoting war or battle ‘戦’, the Guardian reported.

The 2022 'word of the year' according to different dictionaries | World Economic Forum

With a nice little English lesson from VOA:

What Is Your Word of the Year?

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