Decimation was a punishment meted out by the legionaries of the Roman army on their own comrades in cases where an entire group of soldiers had typically been guilty of something like cowardice on the battlefield.
The Merriam-Webster editor Peter Sokolowski introduced the crowd of assembled nerds to the idea that a dictionary is not a static document but a living object, constantly updated and remade in response to how people write and speak. In a talk titled "The Dictionary as Data," Sokolowski emphasized that the editors at Merriam-Webster look to how the general public uses language to guide their work.
Some, though, are quietly stepping off the hype train. Whereas the steady stream of new programming languages once attracted all the attention, lately it's more common to find older languages like Ada and C reclaiming their top spots in the popular language indexes. Yes, these rankings are far from perfect, but they're a good litmus test of the respect some senior (even ancient) programming languages still command.
Evolution rarely invents entirely new solutions. Instead, it tinkers with existing systems, repurposing and refining them for new functions. Before our ancestors developed language, they already possessed sophisticated systems for controlling movement-reaching for objects, grasping tools, navigating space. These systems shared a common architecture: a motor planning component in the frontal lobes, a sensory target component in the temporal and parietal lobes, and a translation system connecting the two.
If you have spent time with an infant, you might recognize the scene: A child is wailing, inconsolable, and you, the parent, have to go to the bathroom. Or eat. Or attend to a pot that's boiling over. But someone needs to watch the baby. Such urgent situations often call for innovation. In modern times, we might negotiate schedules with our partners, seek out affordable child care, or purchase "baby-tainment" contraptions via our phones.
Skibidi is defined in the dictionary as 'a word that can have different meanings such as 'cool' or 'bad' or can be used with no real meaning as a joke'. An example of its use is 'What the skibidi are you doing?'.
The investigative journalist Diana Salinas referred to her craft as la filigrana, the filigree. I wouldn't have used the term in that context, and yet it struck me as perfect to describe the intricate, careful work that investigative reporting requires.
"What happens is over time, we have people come in and they bring a bit of a language they have here, so a lot of things that were Dutch have become Americanized, which means they lost some of the Dutch color," explained Mitchell Moss, a linguistics expert at New York University.
