HUMAN INTELLIGENCE NEW WORDS ON THE BLOCK

HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

NEW WORDS ON THE BLOCK

By Hunt Lyman

Hunt Lyman

The word “slop” has taken on a new meaning: the drivel that Artificial Intelligence produces when it’s inaccurate or useless.

This new definition echoes the older meaning of the word— food for pigs— and similar to how spam, originally coined by Hormel Corporation to refer to spiced ham, now predominantly signifies unwanted email, following its comedic use in a Monty Python skit.

The emerging lexicon of artificial intelligence also includes terms like AI, chatbot, and the phrase “stop generating,” which has been humorously adopted in conversation to halt a torrent of words or a seemingly unending story.

As a lover of language, I have marveled at how dramatically my own vocabulary has expanded to encompass technology that didn’t exist during my childhood, when a mouse only referred to a small rodent scurrying in my kitchen, and software might have been mistaken for pajamas or a worn pair of blue jeans.

The technological lexicon emerges in many ways. Some new words are compounds (smartphone, blockchain or cybersecurity). Some represent existing words with new meanings (firewall, streaming). Others are portmanteau words formed by combining and clipping (electronic mail becomes email, wireless fidelity becomes wifi, web log becomes blog, and international network becomes internet).

And other new words are created from the initials of several words as an acronym (universal resource locator becomes URL and Virtual Reality becomes VR).

For linguistic purists, these additions signal a deterioration of English, a pollution of words with no traditional pedigree or new uses of words that overshadow their original meanings.

However, anyone familiar with how languages change understands that this process is as constant and inevitable as the tides. In the past, purists decried the use of contact as a verb, or even earlier, the adaptation of broadcast for anything other than scattering seeds by hand.

A retrospective of linguistic change in English over the past century reveals countless examples of new words being generated. Greenhouse is a compound, smog is a portmanteau of smoke and fog, scuba is an acronym for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, and TV is an abbreviation of television.

As an English teacher with four decades of experience, I appreciate the necessity of enforcing certain language rules. I teach standard written English in my classes and insist on conventions such as capitalization, proper sentence structure, and standard spelling.

Yet I also celebrate the many instances when English has been rejuvenated by writers like Mark Twain, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Zora Neale Hurston, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison, among others. All experimented with unconventional uses of language, particularly the vernacular used by common folk. These authors remind me of a favorite quotation from Walt Whitman:

“Language, be it remembered, is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.”

This living, evolving nature of speech and writing is not just a tool of communication but a reflection of our collective human experience, dynamically adapting to a world that is always changing. By embracing the new words and uses that arise, we participate in the ongoing evolution of the English language, ensuring it remains vibrant, relevant, and interesting.

Hunt Lyman is Academic Dean at The Hill School.