she was cuffed to the truth

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69436&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=public-universal-friend

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69436

Stephanie Farr, "The nonbinary Revolutionary leader who preached in Philly during the Revolution", The Philadelphia Inquirer 6/5/2025:

Sometimes when I walk the streets of Old City, I imagine the people of colonial times who walked those roads before me, before Philadelphia was Philly and before this nation secured its liberty and identity.

I mostly think about the smells folks had to endure before indoor plumbing, but I also wonder how those men and women traversed the cobblestone streets in their heeled shoes when I look like a wombat in flip-flips doing it in sneakers.

But the Revolutionary War was a revolutionary time, not just for this country, but for individuals who wanted to explore their own identity and the very concept of identity itself.

In celebration of Pride Month, the Museum of the American Revolution is debuting a new walking tour focused on one such individual, a nonbinary religious leader who called themself the Public Universal Friend and preached in Philadelphia during the 1780s.

You can learn more about the Public Universal Friend from their Wikipedia page. Farr's article explains:

Our walking tour started outside the museum at Third and Chestnut Streets, where Bowersox talked about the Friend’s early life, growing up in a large Quaker family in Cumberland, R.I.

“They’re born and named Jemima Wilkinson and they were identified as female at birth,” she said.

For the first 24 years, the Friend lived a pretty average 18th century life, but in 1776, they became ill with a fever (historians think it may have been typhus) and fell into a comatose state for days.

“They’re basically seen to be on the verge of death’s door,” Bowersox said. “Then all of a sudden they’re revived and when they come back to life on their own … they declare themselves basically no longer Jemima Wilkinson, but in fact, the Public Universal Friend.”

The Friend believed they were reborn as a genderless divine spirit whose mission was to preach God’s word — in buildings, churches, or outdoors — and they begin doing so within days of their revelation.

They rejected gendered pronouns and dressed in a long, black ministerial robe with a men’s cravat around their neck. Unlike women of the day, the Friend wore their hair down and often wore a men’s hat, according to Bowersox.

“When they’re asked about who they are and how they dress, they say, ‘I am that I am,’ which is kind of cool,” Bowersox said.

“Like Popeye!” I said.

The Wikipedia article explains that

The name referenced the designation the Society of Friends used for members who traveled from community to community to preach, "Public Friends".

This seems to be the same sense of public as in the idiom "public enemy", which the OED glosses as "An enemy common to a number of nations, a general enemy; a person considered as a threat to the community", and traces back to the 16th century.

But it's not clear to me why it's "Public Universal Friend" rather than "Universal Public Friend".

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69436&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=public-universal-friend

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69436

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69427&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=drama-at-the-national-spelling-bee

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69427

Faizan Zaki overcomes a shocking, self-inflicted flub and wins the Scripps National Spelling Bee
Ben Nuckols, AP (5/30/25)

Not what you would expect when the stakes are so high:

The favorite entering the bee after his runner-up finish last year — during which he never misspelled a word in a conventional spelling round, only to lose a lightning-round tiebreaker that he didn’t practice for — the shaggy-haired Faizan wore the burden of expectations lightly, sauntering to the microphone in a black hoodie and spelling his words with casual glee.

Here's what happened:

Throughout Thursday night’s finals, the 13-year-old from Allen, Texas, looked like a champion in waiting. Then he nearly threw it away. But even a shocking moment of overconfidence couldn’t prevent him from seizing the title of best speller in the English language.

With the bee down to three spellers, Sarvadnya Kadam and Sarv Dharavane missed their words back-to-back, putting Faizan two words away from victory. The first was “commelina,” but instead of asking the requisite questions — definition, language of origin — to make sure he knew it, Faizan let his showman’s instincts take over.

“K-A-M,” he said, then stopped himself. “OK, let me do this. Oh, shoot!”

Unbelievably, he told head judge Mary Brooks, "Just ring the bell," which she did.

“So now you know what happens,” Brooks said, and the other two spellers returned to the stage.

Later, standing next to the trophy with confetti at his feet, Faizan said: “I’m definitely going to be having nightmares about that tonight.”

Even pronouncer Jacques Bailly tried to slow Faizan down before his winning word, “eclaircissement,” but Faizan didn’t ask a single question before spelling it correctly, and he pumped his fists and collapsed to the stage after saying the final letter.

The bee celebrated its 100th anniversary this year, and Faizan may be the first champion who’s remembered more for a word he got wrong than one he got right.

“I think he cared too much about his aura,” said Bruhat Soma, Faizan’s buddy who beat him in the “spell-off” tiebreaker last year.

…

Although Bruhat was fast last year when he needed to be, he followed the familiar playbook for champion spellers: asking thorough questions, spelling slowly and metronomically, showing little emotion. Those are among the hallmarks of well-coached spellers, and Faizan had three coaches: Scott Remer, Sam Evans and Sohum Sukhantankar.

None of them could turn Faizan into a robot on stage.

“He’s crazy. He’s having a good time, and he’s doing what he loves, which is spelling,” Evans said.

Viewed from a larger perspective, this year's bee was a thrilling centennial:

After last year’s bee had little drama before an abrupt move to the spell-off, Scripps tweaked the competition rules, giving judges more leeway to let the competition play out before going to the tiebreaker. The nine finalists delivered.

During one stretch, six spellers got 26 consecutive words right, and there were three perfect rounds during the finals. The last time there was a single perfect round was the infamous 2019 bee, which ended in an eight-way tie.

An interesting coincidence, at least for me, was that the third-place finalist was named Sarva and the runner-up was Sarvadnya ("omniscient" in Marathi), both having the common element "sarva" — which means "all" — in their names.  This may be a reflection of the early aspiration of their parents for them to know all the words in the dictionary.

Including Faizan, whose parents emigrated from southern India, 30 of the past 36 champions have been Indian American, a run that began with Nupur Lala’s victory in 1999, which was later featured in the documentary “Spellbound.” In honor of the centennial, dozens of past champions attended this year and signed autographs for spellers, families and bee fans.

We have speculated on this striking phenomenon many times in the past, but have never come to a conclusion that convinces everyone.  One thing I will say this time is that the hard evidence of such an overwhelming preponderance of Indian finalists and champions tells us that there must be some reason(s) why this is so.

Selected readings           

• "It is that time of the year again" (6/3/24) — with lengthy bibliography
• "Spelling and intuition" (11/30/23)
• "Spelling bee 2022 — back on track" (6/4/22)
• "Spelling bee 2021 – Indian streak broken!" (7/9/21)
• "What happened to the spelling bee this year?" (10/21/20)
• "Spelling Bee 2019" (5/31/10)
• "The worldly sport of spelling" (6/2/18)
• “Spelling bee champs” (6/1/14)
• “Spelling bees and character amnesia” (8/7/13)
• “Brain imaging and spelling champions” (8/7/15)
• “Spoken Sanskrit” (1/9/16)
• "Once more on the mystery of the national spelling bee" (5/27/16)
• "Spelling bees in the 1940s" (7/10/16)
• "Yet again on the mystery of the national spelling bee" (6/5/17)
• "Dog bites man: Indian wins spelling bee" (6/3/23)

[Thanks to Ben Zimmer]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69427&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=drama-at-the-national-spelling-bee

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69427

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69408&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-agonies-of-an-abc-learning-chinese

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69408

As most readers of Language Log know, ABC means "American-born Chinese".  Depending upon how (in)sensitive their parents are, learning Chinese can be hell, and leave them scarred for life.

The actors in this video are brilliant and the tale it tells reveals so much about the trials and pitfalls of learning Chinese overseas.

If only little Paul's dragon mom had let him learn "xuéshēng" for "student" instead of 学生 or 學生, he would have been literate in Chinese within a month, rather than never.

Selected readings

• "Pinyin for ABCs" (6/14/20) — also brilliant! must watch!
• "Linsanity" (2/16/12)
• "Writing Sinitic languages with phonetic scripts" (5/20/16)
• "The Westernization of Chinese" (9/6/12)
• "Pinyin memoirs" (8/13/16)
• "Pinyin for the Prez" (10/25/18)
• "Pinyin in practice" (10/13/11)
• "The impact of phonetic inputting on Chinese languages" (12/9/19)
• "Pure Pinyin" (10/15/16)
• "Pinyin vs. Sinographs" (7/20/19)
• "Too tired to love: new set phrases in Pinyin" (12/23/19)
• "Pinyin for phonetic annotation" (10/27/18)
• "The uses of Hanyu pinyin" (5/22/16)
• "On not speaking Taiwanese" (12/2/18)
• "Receptive multilingualism" (11/27/18)
• "The future of Chinese language learning is now" (4/5/14)
• "Firestorm over Chinese characters" (5/23/16)
• "Backward Thinking about Orientalism and Chinese Characters" (5/16/16)
• "Chinese character inputting" (19/17/15)
• "Stroke order inputting" (10/30/11)
• "Cantonese input methods" (1/20/15)
• "Google Translate Chinese inputting" (1/27/13)
• "Creeping Romanization in Chinese" (8/30/12)
• "Chinese Typewriter" (6/30/09)
• "Chinese typewriter, part 2" (4/17/11)
• "Abandoning one's mother tongue" (1/6/17)

[Thanks to rit malors]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69408&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-agonies-of-an-abc-learning-chinese

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69408

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69410&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=buena

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69410

Following up on the issue of English spelling variation, this picture has been making the rounds on social media:

I thought of it when I was reminded that the New Jersey borough of Buena is pronounced /ˈbjuːnə/ — so that the first syllable is the same as the first syllable of beauty.

It's not clear how this (mis-)pronunciation got started — according to the Wikipedia article,

Buena was incorporated as a borough by an act of the New Jersey Legislature on September 1, 1948, from portions of Buena Vista Township. The borough was reincorporated on May 18, 1949. The borough derives its name from Buena Vista Township, which in turn was named for the 1847 Battle of Buena Vista during the Mexican–American War.

The "Buena" part of Buena Vista Township is also pronounced /ˈbjuːnə/, according to Wikipedia.

The other English words in which "ue" is pronounced /juː/ — at least the ones that I can think of — are all Germanic proper names, like "Bueller" and "Mueller". Maybe there are some non-proper-name borrowings as well? But anyhow, I'm not clear why mid-19th-century South Jersey folks (or their descendants) applied Germanic-borrowing pronunciation to an obviously Spanish word.

[Update — commenters remind me of a bunch of obvious non-proper-name parallels: Cue, rescue, fuel, imbue, …]

Elle Cordova chose the "i before e except after c" thing as the thematic "rule" in her 5/2/2025 Grammarian vs. Errorist skit, presumably because it's so well known. The raw statistics line up a bit oddly against the aphorism, and not only on bookstore sidewalk signs: the counts of relevant wordforms in (for example) CMUdict are;

ie  4324
ei  2238
cie  177
cei   41

There are no comparable couplets to help us with "ue" and "eu", although CMUdict has 1368 wordforms containing 'ue" and 630 containing 'eu', and there's plenty of variation in the letter-to-sound mapping…

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69410&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=buena

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69410

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69401&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=artificial-intelligence-and-its-evil-twin-darwinism

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69401

In Daniel Dennett's 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, the chapter titled "Chomsky contra Darwin, Four Episodes" ends with this provocative sentence:

The hostility to Artificial Intelligence and its evil twin, Darwinism, lies just beneath the surface of much of the most influential work in recent twentieth-century philosophy.

What Dennett meant by "Artificial Intelligence" in 1995 was no doubt rather different from what people take the word to mean now. Still, the intended meaning of his aphorism remains intact and relevant.

You need to start with his distinction between "skyhooks" and "cranes", described here by Wikipedia. And then read about how he learned that Noam Chomsky rejected Darwinism as  form of epistemelogical empiricism, i.e. a "crane" that learns in the genome rather than the neurome:

In March 1978, I hosted a remarkable debate at Tufts, staged, appropriately, by the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Nominally a panel discussion on the foundations and prospects of Artificial Intelligence, it turned into a tag-team rhetorical wrestling match between four heavyweight ideologues: Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor attacking AI, and Roger Schank and Terry Winograd defending it. Schank was working at the time on programs for natural language comprehension, and the critics focused on his scheme for representing (in a computer) the higgledy-piggledy collection of trivia we all know and somehow rely on when deciphering ordinary speech acts, allusive and truncated as they are. Chomsky and Fodor heaped scorn on this enterprise, but the grounds of their attack gradually shifted in the course of the match, for Schank is no slouch in the bully-baiting department, and he staunchly defended his research project. Their attack began as a straightforward, “first-principles” condemnation of conceptual error—Schank was on one fool’s errand or another—but it ended with a striking concession from Chomsky: it just might turn out, as Schank thought, that the human capacity to comprehend conversation (and, more generally, to think) was to be explained in terms of the interaction of hundreds or thousands of jerry-built gizmos, but that would be a shame, for then psychology would prove in the end not to be “interesting.” There were only two interesting possibilities, in Chomsky’s mind: psychology could turn out to be “like physics” — its regularities explainable as the consequences of a few deep, elegant, inexorable laws — or psychology could turn out to be utterly lacking in laws—in which case the only way to study or expound psychology would be the novelist’s way (and he much preferred Jane Austen to Roger Schank, if that were the enterprise).

A vigorous debate ensued among the panelists and audience, capped by an observation from Chomsky’s colleague at MIT Marvin Minsky: “I think only a humanities professor at MIT could be so oblivious to the third ‘interesting’ possibility: psychology could turn out to be like engineering.” Minsky had put his finger on it. There is something about the prospect of an engineering approach to the mind that is deeply repugnant to a certain sort of humanist, and it has little or nothing to do with a distaste for materialism or science. Chomsky was himself a scientist, and presumably a materialist (his “Cartesian” linguistics did not go that far!), but he would have no truck with engineering. It was somehow beneath the dignity of the mind to be a gadget or a collection of gadgets. Better the mind should turn out to be an impenetrable mystery, an inner sanctum for chaos, than that it should turn out to be the sort of entity that might yield its secrets to an engineering analysis!

Though I was struck at the time by Minsky’s observation about Chomsky, the message didn’t sink in. […]

That's the crux of the "evil twins" idea: maybe the mind is a collection of gadgets, evolved by learning in the genome, the neurome, and culturome, and suitable for analysis by engineering techniques.

After touching on John Searle, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Herbert Spencer, McCullough and Pitts,  B.F. Skinner, Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, and others, Dennett zeroes in on Searle, ending the chapter with the "evil twins" sentence:

According to Searle, only artifacts made by genuine, conscious human artificers have real functions. Airplane wings are really for flying, but eagles’ wings are not. If one biologist says they are adaptations for flying and another says they are merely display racks for decorative feathers, there is no sense in which one biologist is closer to the truth. If, on the other hand, we ask the aeronautical engineers whether the airplane wings they designed are for keeping the plane aloft or for displaying the insignia of the airline, they can tell us a brute fact. So Searle ends up denying William Paley’s premise: according to Searle, nature does not consist of an unimaginable variety of functioning devices, exhibiting design. Only human artifacts have that honor, and only because (as Locke “showed” us) it takes a Mind to make something with a function!

Searle insists that human minds have “Original” Intentionality, a property unattainable in principle by any R-and-D process of building better and better algorithms. This is a pure expression of the belief in skyhooks: minds are original and inexplicable sources of design, not results of design. He defends this position more vividly than other philosophers, but he is not alone. The hostility to Artificial Intelligence and its evil twin, Darwinism, lies just beneath the surface of much of the most influential work in recent twentieth-century philosophy, as we shall see in the next chapter.

If you're interested, you should read the whole chapter, and indeed the whole book.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69401&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=artificial-intelligence-and-its-evil-twin-darwinism

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69401

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69391&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-tricky-little-area-of-semantics

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69391

Elizabeth Ribbens, "How the use of a word in the Guardian has gotten some readers upset", The Guardian 6/4/2025:

‘Got’ was changed during the editing of an opinion piece, leading to correspondence lamenting a slide into American English. But language isn’t a fortress.

In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, a messenger breathlessly announces to the king that, “Jack Cade hath gotten London bridge”. Hold this late 16th-century text in mind as we fast forward to last week when Martin Kettle, associate editor and columnist at the Guardian in the UK, was seen to suggest in an opinion piece that, if King Charles has pushed the boundaries of neutrality, such as with his speech to open the new Canadian parliament, he has so far “gotten away with it”.

In a letter published the next day, a reader asked teasingly if this use of “gotten” – and another writer’s reference to a “faucet” – were signs the Guardian had fallen into line with Donald Trump’s demand that news agencies adopt current US terminology, such as referring to the “Gulf of America”.

Another, who wrote to me separately, had first seen the article in the print edition and expected subeditors (or copy editors, if you wish) would eventually catch up and remove “gotten”, which “is not a word in British English”. She was surprised to find the online version not only unchanged but with the phrase repeated in the headline.

FWIW, the cited opinion piece has now been edited to use got rather than gotten:

Geoff Pullum's comment:

David Crystal is quoted on the point that Am uses both forms, but he doesn't explain the contrast between them, because that would involve him in a tricky little area of semantics relating to the difference between actions (He has gotten away with it) and states (He has got a lot of nerve).

Or a minimal pair like

• Kim has gotten Parkinsonism.
• Kim has got Parkinsonism.

Of course the socio-morpho-semantics of got(ten) is more complicated than that — most of the issues are covered in the got, gotten entry in Merriam-Webster 's Concise Dictionary of English Usage. I'll leave it to the commenters to excavate further.

But in terms of socio-geographical evolution, Google Books Ngrams suggests that the British anti-gotten faction are losing — here's the plot for "British English", showing that has gotten started rising around 1980 and has now topped 14%:

The plot for "American English" shows has gotten has been rising since 1865 or ao, and is now above 46%:

Again, there are aspectual and other semantic choices as well as morphological preferences, but it's clearly true that there's a geographical issue, and a secular change in favor of the American (and Shakespearean) choice. (Although Google Books' geographical assignment of publications is far from perfect…)

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69391&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-tricky-little-area-of-semantics

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69391