November 8, 2025
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are personal notebooks used to compile any information the owner finds interesting or useful. They can variously contain notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and other professional references. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century.
Entries are most often organized under systematic subject headings and differ functionally from journals or diaries, which are chronological and introspective. Continue reading →
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October 30, 2025
Linking R and intrusive R are sandhi phenomena (when the form of a word changes as a result of its position in an utterance) wherein a rhotic consonant (r-like sound) is pronounced between two consecutive vowels with the purpose of avoiding a hiatus, that would otherwise occur in the expressions, such as ‘tuner amp,’ although in isolation ‘tuner’ is pronounced the same as ‘tuna’ in non-rhotic varieties of English (those that skip some r sounds).
These phenomena occur in many of these dialects, such as those in most of England and Wales, parts of the United States, and all of the Anglophone societies of the southern hemisphere, with the exception of South Africa. In these varieties, /r/ is pronounced only when it is immediately followed by a vowel. Continue reading →
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October 21, 2025
Tipflation and tip creep are terms to describe the United States’ recent widespread expansion of gratuity to more industries, as opposed to being traditionally only prevalent in full-service restaurants. Occupations which are now widely requesting gratuities include rideshare drivers, food delivery drivers, and baristas. Tipflation’s origins are likely the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021–2023 inflation surge.
Touch-screen digital payment systems run by companies like Clover and Square include gratuity prompts that are often visible to nearby members of the public and the service worker. The social pressure created from such systems is often separately mentioned as guilt-tipping, and tipflation has also been seen as causing tipping fatigue, which is the resentment that American consumers generally feel from tipping culture. Continue reading →
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October 20, 2025
Bob’s your uncle is an idiom commonly used in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries that means ‘and there it is,’ or ‘and there you have it,’ or ‘it’s done.’ Typically, someone says it to conclude a set of simple instructions or when a result is reached. The meaning is similar to that of the French expression et voilà!’
The origins are uncertain, but a common hypothesis is that the expression arose after Conservative Prime Minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (Bob), appointed his nephew Arthur Balfour as Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1887, an act of nepotism, which was apparently both surprising and unpopular. Whatever other qualifications Balfour might have had, ‘Bob’s your uncle’ was seen as the conclusive one. Continue reading →
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October 9, 2025
Large language models (LLMs) cannot understand full sentences the way humans do — they need text broken into smaller, consistent chunks called tokens to handle any kind of input systematically and learn patterns that let them predict what comes next.
A glitch token is token that causes unexpected or glitchy outputs when used in a prompt. Such output may include the model misunderstanding meanings of words, refusing to respond or generating repetitive or unrelated text. Prompts that cause this behavior may look completely or mostly normal. Continue reading →
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October 6, 2025
Mar-a-Lago face is a plastic surgery and fashion trend among American conservative and Republican individuals such as excessive makeup, fake tans, fake eyelashes, dark smokey eyes, and full lips.
The trend has been described as a status symbol among Donald Trump’s inner circle, purportedly signaling wealth, privilege, and alignment with Trumpism. Some commentators and surgeons have described the look as engineered and overdone, and have linked it to the aesthetics and aspects of Trump-era politics. One cosmetic surgeon listed facial surgery, fillers, and cosmetic dental work among the procedures constituting the look. Continue reading →
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September 18, 2025
John Gall (1925-2014) was an American author, scholar, and pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book ‘General Systemantics’ (republished two years later as ‘Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail’).
Gall’s Law is derived from Systemantics and states: ‘A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.’ Continue reading →
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September 16, 2025
Fewer versus less is a debate in English grammar about the appropriate use of these two determiners. Linguistic prescriptivists usually say that fewer and not less should be used with countable nouns (e.g. apples or cars), and that less should be used only with uncountable nouns (e.g. water or happiness).
This distinction was first tentatively suggested by the grammarian Robert Baker in 1770, and it was eventually presented as a rule by many grammarians since then. Continue reading →
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September 13, 2025
The Groypers, sometimes called the Groyper Army, are a group of alt-right, white nationalist, and Christian nationalist activists led by Nick Fuentes. Members of the group have attempted to introduce alt-right politics into mainstream conservatism in the United States and participated in the January 6 United States Capitol attack and the protests leading up to it. They have targeted other conservative groups and individuals whose agendas they view as too moderate and insufficiently nationalist.
The Groyper movement has been described as white nationalist, homophobic, nativist, fascist, sexist, antisemitic, and an attempt to rebrand the declining alt-right movement. Groypers are a loosely defined group of Fuentes’s followers and fans. After him, there is no clear second in the Groyper hierarchy. Groypers are named after a cartoon amphibian named ‘Groyper,’ a variant of the Internet meme Pepe the Frog. Continue reading →
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September 8, 2025
Clanker is a slur for robots and artificial intelligence software. The term has been used in ‘Star Wars’ media, first appearing in the franchise’s 2005 video game ‘Star Wars: Republic Commando.’ In 2025, the term became widely used to discuss distaste for machines ranging from delivery robots to large language models. This trend has been attributed to anxiety around the negative societal effects of artificial intelligence.
Whereas AI slop describes low-quality output from artificial intelligence, clanker belittles the underlying robotic systems. While other science fiction media includes pejoratives for robots, such as ‘skinjob’ in ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘toaster’ in ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ clanker is believed to have gained popularity because its usage is intuitive and flexible. Continue reading →
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August 28, 2025
A data broker is an individual or company that specializes in collecting personal data (such as income, ethnicity, political beliefs, or geolocation data) or data about people, mostly from public records but sometimes sourced privately, and selling or licensing such information to third parties for a variety of uses.
Sources, usually Internet-based since the 1990s, may include census and electoral roll records, social networking sites, court reports and purchase histories. The information from data brokers may be used in background checks used by employers and housing. Continue reading →
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August 11, 2025
Slopsquatting is a type of cybersquatting. It is the practice of registering a non-existent software package name that a large language model (LLM) may hallucinate in its output, whereby someone unknowingly may copy-paste and install the software package without realizing it is fake. Attempting to install a non-existent package should result in an error, but some have exploited this for their gain in the form of typosquatting.
In 2023, security researcher Bar Lanyado noted that LLMs hallucinated a package named ‘huggingface-cli. While this name is identical to the command used for the command-line version of HuggingFace Hub, it is not the name of the package. The software is correctly installed with the code pip install -U ‘huggingface_hub[cli].’ Lanyado tested the potential for slopsquatting by uploading an empty package under this hallucinated name. In three months, it had received over 30,000 downloads. The hallucinated packaged name was also used in the README file of a repo for research conducted by Alibaba. Continue reading →
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