Language Log

"Japan announces new name for days over 40C after hottest summer ever", by Ruth Wright, Euronews (4/20/26)

They have words for it.  The one that's taking the online media by storm is kokushobi  酷暑日.  That literally means "harsh / cruel + hot days".  I can attest to this characterization of scorching  days in Japan.  I remember one summer in Kyoto, which I wouldn't think of as a particularly hot city, when I stood on the sidewalk and was getting ready to cross the street, the pavement of which seemed to be melting under the shimmering heat waves.

The cited article gives other currently popular words for dog days (7/3/25-9/11/26 in America this summer) in Japan.

A note from Ambarish S.:

There’s an ongoing controversy in India with Prime Minister Modi being accused of blackface during an election campaign in the south, where people have darker skin on average. The Alert (a Hindi news website of unknown reputation) had the following Hindi sentence on it’s X:

तमिलनाडु रैली में मोदी जी का लुक वायरल!

where only the postpositions (में and का) and arguably the honorific जी are Hindi! तमिलनाडु and मोदी are proper nouns, while रैली, लुक and वायरल are respectively “rally", “look" and "viral”. The whole thing translates to “Modi Ji’s look at Tamil Nadu rally viral”.

I never dreamed that I would be subjected to an MRI or a CAT scan or other sophisticated diagnostic system that enables medical specialists to see detailed tomographic images from inside your body.

For both of these devices, the patient lies on a flat surface and is inserted in a tube-like scanner.  They both make conspicuous noises all the while you are inside of them, and that is a normal part of their function. The CAT scan makes clicking, buzzing, humming, and whirring sounds.  The MRI is stranger.  You feel like you're going in a long winding, curving tunnel.  The one I was in made me think it had white brick walls interspersed with red glazed bricks.  I was a bit afraid that I would go so deep inside that I might never come out.

My rehab roomie has an unusual habit when speaking.  He randomly inserts the syllable "way" in his phrases (seldom finishes a complete sentence) and often repeats it multiple times.  Some examples:

I way

I way way

My wife way

My son way

I want way way way to toilet way.

Bed way

Following up on "Bro!", I've discovered a useful coinage from Canada: Matthew Urichuk and Verónica Loureiro-Rodríguez, "Brocatives: Self-reported use of masculine nominal vocatives in Manitoba (Canada)." In It’s not all about you: New perspectives on address research,  2019:

This study focuses on nominal vocatives that have been traditionally associated with male speakers and addressees (familiarizers in Leech’s terminology, 1999), and which we will call ‘brocatives’.

On walkways around Penn's campus, I'm hearing bro more and more often. Especially common, or at least especially striking, is a monosyllabic response meaning something like "You're kidding!"

A: So then they [blah blah]…
B: Bro! 

…which I'm hearing as often among groups of female students as male students (though I admit that the added surprisal in that context might leave me with a false estimate of frequency).

From Barbara Phillips Long:

In a cooking competition show that I was watching as an antidote to all the political news I read, the chefs were assigned canned ackee as an ingredient. I hadn't thought about ackee before; I mostly recognize the word from a song by Harry Belafonte that refers to ackee:

Down at the market you can hearLadies cry out while on their heads they bearAckee rice, saltfish are niceAnd the rum is fine any time of year.

Because there are so many excellent entries of interest to Language Log readers in various fields, I am including all of those in this extensive list;

• "Genetic History of Scythia." Andreeva, Tatiana V. et al. Science Advances 11, no. 30 (July 25, 2025): eads8179. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads8179. Updated 27 March 2026.
•  
• "Decoding Parrot Duets: Complex Communication in Yellow-Naped Amazons." Dahlin, Christine R. et al. Journal of Avian Biology 2026, no. 1 (February 12, 2026): e03552. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jav.03552.

Or maybe "initialism lengths"? Wiktionary defines initialism as "a term formed from the initial letters of several words or parts of words, which is itself pronounced letter by letter"; while some (fussy) people argue that the term acronym should be reserved for words like laser (= "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation") or NATO (= "North Atlantic Treaty Organization").

Acronyms/Initialisms are (mostly) words, under any reasonable definition. But this category has the special property that most items have multiple specific and distinct senses, generally known to small groups and/or used in very special circumstances.

For example, American linguists know that LSA stands for "The Linguistic Society of America" — but the LSA didn't act in time to lock up https://lsa.org, which belongs to the "Louisiana Sheriffs' Association". And Acronym Finder gives 123 interpretations for LSA, including the linguists but (curiously) not the sheriffs.

Sylvain Farrel is a student nurse from Indonesia.  He came to America four years ago and speaks perfect English.  I asked him how that is possible, how did he learn English so quickly?

Sylvain said that he studied English during his elementary and middle school education.  His national language is Bahasa (Indonesia), i.e., Indonesian.

By ethnic heritage, Sylvain is Chinese, Hokkien / Fujian on one side, and I think Hakka on the other side, but I'm not sure.

Following up on "Meadow writing", I thought it might be interesting to look at LOTR-associated word frequencies, using the the "weighted log-odds-ratio, informative dirichlet prior" algorithm Monroe, Colaresi, and Quinn 2009, "Fightin' Words", as discussed in seven previous LLOG posts. In particular, I thought I'd compare The Fellowship of the Ring to 16 of Charles Dickens' works.

At BMR, the first thing the doctors, nurses, and techs ask patients when they interview them is "Do you feel any pain?"  And they want you to quantify it on a scale of 1-3-5 / small-medium-big.

What is pain?  Physical, mental?

I tend to think of it rather as Sanskrit duḥkha (/ˈduːkə/ दुःख) than as English "pain", because the former is more all encompassing (corporeally, spiritually) than the latter, which I feel is more physical.