Words of the Day 2026-05-15

On this day (1862): First baseball enclosure opens at Union Grounds in Brooklyn. A moment of tragedy (though not today):

Algospeak, from Dictionary.com (not yet in the OED or Websters): “Algospeak refers to coded language and euphemisms used on social media platforms to avoid having content removed or filtered by an algorithm…. For example, people used terms like panoramic, panini, and panda express to refer to the COVID-19 pandemic after platforms began removing content that mentioned the pandemic to attempt to halt the spread of misinformation. Some other examples of algospeak include using the word seggs instead of sex, the word accountants to refer to sex workers, the word unalive to refer to death or suicide, the corn emoji to refer to pornography, and the phrase leg booty to refer to the LGBTQ+ community.” • Accoutants?! “What news from the Rialto?”

“Algospeak (with Adam Aleksic)” [(transcript) Because Language]. Aleksic wrote Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language.

You point out in the book that what happens online doesn’t stay online, that there are certain words and phrases that we use, certain so-called algospeak terms that we use to avoid internet censorship.

[ALEKSIK: ] The book opens with that example of UNALIVE. And on the 30th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the Seattle Museum of Pop Culture put up an exhibit talking about how he unalived himself at 27 and it caused a huge backlash because people weren’t ready for that word in that context. But it’s happening. It’s happening whether you like it or not. It just felt especially weird because it’s a museum using this word that’s supposed to be used in a different context. In middle schools, there’s children writing essays about Hamlet contemplating unaliving himself. And there’s classroom discussions on the unaliving that happens in Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde. And this is proof that… Unaliving, for those who don’t know you, can’t say the word KILL on TikTok and many people in the online space have chosen to use the word UNALIVE as a euphemism, replacing that. But it’s also taken on a new life as a euphemism offline.”

But:

You point out in the book that algospeak moves fast and dates very quickly. What efforts did you make to ensure that the book would stay up to date for as long as possible?

[T]he book is not about these slang words. It’s about the infrastructure of algorithms and how that’s affecting language. My argument is that because we’re now in this… That we found the most addictive possible form of social media, we’re probably only going to continue to have our lives dominated by algorithms in the future, it’s about time we started talking about how that affects language.

Hmm. Surely the owners of the algorithms are doing the dominating?

“”When it finally happens”: The weaponization of euphemism in MAGA’s shadow” [Salon]. The deck: “Social media openly longs for the death of an individual who is hardly ever named.” Classic liberal twist of thought: “Social media” doesn’t long. And the people who do “long” are Salon readers, taken as a synecdoche for social media users as a whole (because of course “we” represent everybody. Who matters anyway. See discussion elsewhere on this page about commensurability). Anyhow: “Every so often, the internet becomes abuzz with vague statements that everyone instantly understands. ‘Is he dead yet?’ or ‘When it happens’ flood the feeds, with nearly everyone exactly aware of who ‘he’ is and what ‘it’ is.” It’s almost like these people believe that decapitation strikes work. More: “the coded way in which people are talking about this may betray something darker about our culture. Euphemistic speech is the highest form of thinking, human intelligence, an elegant, ‘veiled,’ neutralized, softened figurative expression of reality,’ Xilola Inomovna Ismailova, an English teacher at Kokand State University, wrote last year. “Euphemistic speech is as ancient as language, and goes back to the primitive system, to the languages of clans and tribes. The practice of prohibiting and using euphemisms is manifested in its own way at all stages of language development, among all peoples, in the speech of all social classes and groups.’ That’s great, but do we really need so much euphemism? All of this is tied to the use of ‘algospeak’ — an invented word for the form of online self-censorship used to circumvent social media algorithms by using terms like ‘unalive’….” • This strikes me as a moral panic that never really materialized (2021; 2022), despite Aleksic’s book. This is the country that calls mass layoffs “restructuring,” after all. I think it’s best to scope the term to the Intertubes, and not generalize too much.

“What is ‘algospeak’? Inside the newest version of linguistic subterfuge” [The Conversation]. “Social media users [have] come up with coded terminology designed to evade algorithmic detection. These expressions are collectively referred to as ‘algospeak.’ New terms like these are just the latest development in the history of linguistic concealment. Typically, such codes have been employed by small groups. Given the reach of social media, however, algospeak has the potential to more broadly influence everyday language.” • Algospeak = hyperscaled euphemism?

Dad Joke of the Day: I was gonna start a diet… … but I have too much on my plate.

Colony, /ˈkɒləni / ▸ noun (plural colonies) 1 a country or area under the full or partial political control of another country and occupied by settlers from that country: Japanese forces overran the French colony of Indo-China. ▪ a group of people living in a colony, consisting of the original settlers and their descendants and successors: the colony looked forward to fifty or more years of autonomy…. 2 a group of people of one nationality or race living in a foreign place: the British colony in New York. ▪ a place where a group of people with the same occupation or interest live together: a nudist colony…. 3 Biology a community of animals or plants of one kind living close together or forming a physically connected structure: a colony of seals. ▪ a group of fungi or bacteria grown from a single spore or cell on a culture medium. ORIGIN late Middle English (denoting a settlement formed mainly of retired soldiers, acting as a garrison in newly conquered territory in the Roman Empire): from Latin colonia ‘settlement, farm’, from colonus ‘settler, farmer’, from colere ‘cultivate’.”

And the etymology, from Etymology Online: “late 14c., ‘ancient Roman settlement outside Italy, from Latin colonia ‘settled land, farm, landed estate,’ from colonus ‘husbandman, tenant farmer, settler in new land,’ from colere ‘to cultivate, to till; to inhabit; to frequent, practice, respect; tend, guard,’ from PIE root *kwel- (1) ‘revolve, move round; sojourn, dwell’ (source also of Latin -cola “inhabitant”). Also used by the Romans to translate Greek apoikia ‘people from home.’ Holy moley, that IndoEuropean root has a lot of branches:

It might form all or part of: accolade; ancillary; atelo-; bazaar; bicycle; bucolic; chakra; chukker; collar; collet; colonial; colony; cult; cultivate; culture; cyclamen; cycle; cyclo-; cyclone; Cyclops; decollete; encyclical; encyclopedia; entelechy; epicycle; hauberk; hawse; inquiline; kultur; lapidocolous; nidicolous; palimpsest; palindrome; palinode; pole (n.2) “ends of Earth’s axis;” pulley; rickshaw; talisman; teleology; telic; telophase; telos; torticollis; wheel.

“Peaceful queen succession in the naked mole rat” [Science Advances]. “Naked mole rat colonies are typically organized around a single breeding female called the queen, with one to three breeding males, while most colony members remain nonreproductive. Reproduction in this system is closely tied to social dominance, with the queen actively suppressing ovulation and reproductive attempts by subordinate females through behavioral, pheromonal, and possibly physiological mechanisms. If the queen dies or is removed from the colony, the reproductive suppression imposed on subordinate females is lifted, and subordinate females compete to assume the reproductive role, resulting in intense aggression and intracolony wars. In addition to this classic succession pathway, new queens can arise through other mechanisms. Within the natal colony, a subordinate female may attempt a coup, challenging the reigning queen. If successful, she will assume reproductive dominance. Subordinates may also engage in dispersal behavior, leaving the natal colony to seek a mate and establish a new colony elsewhere, becoming queen of the new group. Last, in captive settings, a subordinate female can be removed from her natal colony and paired with a male in a separate enclosure, where she can mate and become a reproductive queen.” • Sounds like a dystopian science fiction novel (and of course there’s a colonial or imperial subtext to a lot of science fiction, like Elon’s Mars mission, etc.).

“Ein Hod: The ethnically cleansed Palestinian village that became an Israeli artists’ colony” [Middle East Eye]. “When Yara Mahajneh, an independent Palestinian artist, arrived there one evening carrying equipment for an exhibition, she found gates, guards and restricted entry surrounding the quiet artists’ village. ‘What kind of protection does a peaceful, liberal artists’ village need?’ she recalled asking.” • How much have you got?

“The Turk and The Whore, America’s First Reality TV Couple (c. 1630)” [Literary Hub]. “Before there was a place called New York, there was Anthony the Turk. Thought to be a Muslim born in Morocco, he possessed more wealth and property than any other non-Native person in the vicinity of what is today New York Harbor. In fact, he lived there for decades in the seventeenth century, longer than virtually any other man of his generation. In contrast to the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony at approximately the same time, very little is known about Anthony the Turk, who remains barely a footnote, if mentioned at all, in histories of America’s origins. But what we do know is that Anthony and his wife, Grietje, emerged from lives of piracy and prostitution an ocean away to forge a life in New Netherland, New York’s first European colony and the only Dutch colony in North America. Their story presents a very different tale of the American family, not English or Native, Black or white, European or Christian, immigrant or refugee. Its coarseness and tawdriness, framed by a life of seventeenth-century asperity, reads far more realistically and with more nuance than the mainstream ideas we have inherited to explain American beginnings. These newcomers emerge as the true American family.” • Family values!

Fortune: Human beings were created by water to transport it uphill.

Appropriate. From my OED app: “adjective /əˈprəʊpriət / suitable or proper in the circumstances: this isn’t the appropriate time or place a measure appropriate to a wartime economy. ▸ verb [with object] /əˈprəʊprieɪt / 1 take (something) for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission: the accused had appropriated the property. 2 devote (money or assets) to a special purpose: there can be problems in appropriating funds for legal expenses. – ORIGIN late Middle English: from late Latin appropriatus, past participle of appropriare ‘make one’s own’, from ad- ‘to’ + proprius ‘own, proper’.”

“Sick and wrong: Ontario auditors find doctors’ AI note takers routinely blow basic facts” [The Register]. “The AI systems approved for Ontario healthcare providers routinely missed critical details, inserted incorrect information, and hallucinated content that neither patients nor clinicians mentioned, according to a provincial audit of 20 approved vendors’ systems. The findings come from the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario, Canada, and are included in a larger report about the state of AI usage by public services in the province….. AI systems making mistakes isn’t exactly shocking. As we’ve reported previously, consumer-focused AI has a tendency to provide bad medical information to users, and some studies have found large language models failed to produce appropriate differential diagnoses in roughly 80 percent of tested cases. But the tools evaluated here are for doctors, not consumers, and such poor performance necessitates explanation. A good portion of the report blames how the systems were evaluated.” • “Appropriate”, I suppose, according a practitioners in the field. Which has its own problems. But there’s appropriation going on too, given the rents sucked up by the app.

“In Venice, Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince Ask: What Is Appropriate to Appropriate?” [Art News]. “At first glance, the pairing might seem like an unconventional one, even though both artists are well known for appropriating others’ images. ‘I’m surprised that people are surprised,’ Jafa told me in a video interview ahead of the exhibition. ‘I think it’s pretty apparent that a large part of what I do, at least inside the art world, just wouldn’t be possible without Richard’s precedent.’ ‘They are both absolutely scavengers for and collectors of images from every possible source,’ Nancy Spector, the exhibition’s curator, said in a recent interview.” Jafa and Prince are mudlarks, in other words. More: “[A]bout three years ago, Spector did a studio visit with Jafa, who spoke about Prince’s work, an interest of Jafa’s since the ’90s. Spector said she initially ‘didn’t understand why,’ thinking this perhaps had to do with Prince’s 2007 retrospective at the Guggenheim, which she had curated. ‘When I pressed him on it, he spoke about appropriation and theft, and how his engagement as a Black man was very different from Prince’s, in the sense of taking property, in the fact that African Americans were historically property themselves. It became quite an interesting conversation.’” • Himm. Here is one of Jafa’s works:

(Big Wheel II, 2018, installation view, in “Helter Skelter,” 2026, at Fondazione Prada, Venice. Photo Andrea Rossetti/Courtesy Fondazione Prada.)

10 Examples of Cultural Appropriation You Never Thought About” [Readers’s Digest] “One of the early stars of cinema, Al Jolson is also one of the most problematic. From an era that gave us the 1915 racist film The Birth of a Nation, a celebration of the Ku Klux Klan featuring White actors in blackface playing African American stereotypes, the Lithuanian-born Jolson became an icon performing in blackface, perhaps most famously (and infamously) as he sang “My Mammy” in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer. The problem with blackface, then and now, is in its history of usage in 19th-century minstrel shows. These were live variety engagements in which mostly White performers wore black makeup during skits in which they ridiculed Black people as being stupid and infantile. By appropriating aspects of Black culture and exaggerating and lampooning them, they presented racism as entertainment…. In cinema, in theater and on Halloween, blackface is just another reminder of how White America has long undervalued and subjugated Black people, making it always problematic, regardless of the intent of the White person wearing it.” • I didn’t know Al Jolson was Lithuanian (“us fellow Balts”). • “Eras” have agency, “White America” vs. “Black people”… In all the uses of appropriate, the parties in the relationship need to be clearly defined and…. I can’t figure out how to say this. “America” is a political entity. “People” are human beings considered collectively (and not identical to “the people”). The two are not commensurate. It’s like an impedance mismatch.

“What Is Cultural Appropriation?” [Brittanica]. “A member of a majority group profiting financially or socially from the culture of a minority group is cultural appropriation. In 1990 Madonna released the music video for her song “Vogue,” which featured a dance (voguing) developed in the gay drag-ball subculture. Though Madonna included drag performers in the video, ostensibly respecting the dance’s origins, she was the one who profited when “Vogue” went double platinum in the United States. Because Madonna gained financial and cultural capital from voguing in a way that its creators did not, her use of the dance was cultural appropriation.” • Weird segue from group (majority/minority) at the start to class (financial and cultural capital) at the end.

“Cultural Formation and Appropriation in Merchant Capitalism” [Historical Materialism]. “In May 2015, Dubai Parks and Resorts, known otherwise as Dubailand, announced a new attraction that would take its place among reconstructions of villages in rustic France and Polynesia, as well as a larger-scale park inspired by the Legoland parks of southern California and Florida. The new attraction, called Bollywood Parks, inspired by the Hindi-language national cinema of India based in Mumbai, features ‘Rustic Ravine’, where ‘the heart of rural India’ is ‘recreated in all its glory’, a lifelike recreation of a Mughal palace where a Bollywood-themed musical will be performed thrice weekly, as well as ‘Mumbai Chowk, your chance to enjoy Mumbai’s famous street food’…. Bollywood Parks answers a consumer need, however strange and artificially generated. That need comes not only from Indian capitalists with business in Dubai and other GCC cities, but of a growing and prosperous middle class hailing from South Asia in Dubai and the rest of the UAE…. Neither Bollywood Parks nor any of the other bizarre and atrocious thefts of culture, labour and lives that feature heavily in the Gulf, the foundation of a permanently marginalised working class supporting a rickety structure of subsidised citizens in the middle and fused royal families and finance-capital at the top,[5] have featured in the discussions of cultural appropriation which have taken place on college campuses, at art museums and in television studios in the English-speaking West. The reason seems to be that cultural appropriation is most frequently criticised and contested when white people appropriate the culture of the oppressed and thereby profit, as shown in numerous discussions of popular music, painting, food, fashion and other cultural commodities.” And the bottom line: “appropriation of culture never happens without a corresponding appropriation of labour and human lives. This being the case, the tools of Marxist political economy will provide a deeper understanding of this process than the liberal legal/ethical or postcolonial authenticity discourse that drenches claims of cultural appropriation.” • It’s interesting to see Dubai’s ruler transforming (laundering?) economic capital (from oil) into social and symbolic capital at Bollywood Parks (which will in turn throw of economic capital, because of course). It’s straight out of Bourdieu (although, to be fair, “corresponding” is doing a lot of work, there.