The Game Awards 2025 sparked yet another round of indie discourse with Expedition 33‘s historical sweep causing many to ask what does it actually mean for a game to be “indie”?

The pain of semantic drift.

Interesting book. May read in the future.

via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pG8_bWpmaE

In mathematics it happens at times that one and the same concept is given two different names to indicate a specific perspective, a certain attitude as to what to do with such objects.

This is exactly why I refuted Paul Graham’s “Good Writing” post. Zombie facts poison discourse.

A nice linguistic principle, even absent of the post’s content:

we don’t have much conscious awareness of a lot of the patterns in our own speech, let alone much insight into the reasons for them

A joint linguistics blog by Mark Liberman and Victor Mair. Posts frequently on many different topics, but not for me, sadly.

via: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~myl/ via: Montell, Wordslut

To me there’s nothing powerful or subversive about this lexicon: it smacks more of a (literally) infantile fixation. Which makes it difficult to see why women would want to reclaim it.

When the research being promoted is about sex-differences, the soundbite/clickbait approach involves leading with some attention-grabbing statement about men and women that basically accords with most people’s preconceptions. The message is that Science has now confirmed the accuracy of a commonplace gender stereotype.

Compare genres, dialects, time periods; use AI; search by PoS, collocates, synonyms, and much more.

Useful linguistics database.

Semantic diffusion occurs when you have a word that is coined by a person or group, often with a pretty good definition, but then gets spread through the wider community in a way that weakens that definition. This weakening risks losing the definition entirely - and with it any usefulness to the term.

Very beautiful article, albeit a bit laggy because of all the particles. I think it’s helped me to realize that I’ve come to hate the word “democracy.”

A programming language for multilingual grammar applications

The author gets some stuff wrong, but they are principled and have a few good ideas (most especially highlighted comments).

Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the largest historical dictionary of English slang. Written by Jonathon Green over 17 years from 1993, it reached the printed page in 2010 in a three-volume set containing nearly 100,000 entries supported by over 400,000 citations from c. AD 1000 to the present day. The main focus of the dictionary is the coverage of over 500 years of slang from c. 1500 onwards.

via: Montell, Wordslut

My research is situated in the interdisciplinary field of sociocultural linguistics and takes a mixed-methods approach to the relationship between language, identity, embodiment, and social power. It also grows from a community-based agenda that centers the experience of transgender people, broadly defined. Major areas of investigation include the gendered characteristics of the voice, trans-inclusive language practices and linguistic activism, the discursive construction of “biological sex,” the changing status of singular ‘they’, and the relationship between gender and race in drag-related media.

via: Montell, Wordslut

Let’s explore the most unusual lexical syntax of popular programming languages.

Very neat programming linguistics article.

Interesting principle:

Normally when code is simpler for a computer to decode, it’s more difficult for a human to understand, and FORTH is proof of that.