"I am using [the word 'scam'] more liberally than I think other people do. On purpose, because I think it’s funny."

Says Alex Falcone, who makes videos in a series called “Is It a Scam? Yep," quoted in "Alcohol. Manliness. Flushable Wipes. Since When Are These ‘Scams’?" (NYT gift link).

I like this expansion of the word. It is, as Falcone says, funny. 

Watch his videos on YouTube here.

Example:

ADDED: Once you start using the word "scam" this way, you quickly progress and will, I predict, get to "life itself" in less than 15 minutes. It's more light-hearted than calling everything "bullshit." It's reminiscent of Holden Caulfield calling everything "phony."

AND: There are quite a few things I've blogged about over the years that reflect an opinion that I could express with this broad use of the word scam — journalism, tourist travel, flying on a plane, manned space travel, the 2 major parties, calls for civility....

Talking crossword.

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"If 'lore' is in part a word about treating fiction as a set of discoverable facts, it is also a word that imagines the hard facts of real life as part of a grand story...."

Writes Mitch Therleau, in "A Simple, One-Word Trick to Turn Everyday Life Into Grand Fantasy" (NYT gift link).

“Share a piece of lore about yourself,” goes one perennial prompt post on X.... The responses these kinds of posts elicit are not unlike the fun facts you might be prompted to share in an icebreaker activity.... Calling these unfun facts “lore” perhaps blunts the pain of the original experiences, rhetorically placing them in misty antiquity and sarcastically puffing them up into arcane secrets.... “Does your brand have lore?” asks Advertising Week... “Lore” is a hinge word, a threshold word. Fiction passes through it and becomes tangible fact; facts pass through it and become part of a grand story. Its ultimate trick is to make knowledge not embarrassing or useless, but a form of dark magic.

ADDED: This makes me think of the old Mothers of Invention song about becoming a hippie:

First I'll buy some beads
And then perhaps a leather band to go around my head
Some feathers and bells
And a book of Indian lore....

It doesn't take much these days to be considered "formal."

I'm reading "Think It’s Cool to Wear Fancy Sneakers to Work? You Might Be Old. After years of office casual, young people are embracing loafers, derbies and oxfords" (NYT gift link).

Earlier this year, Esquire described the trend as the loafer’s “big generational shift,” describing how younger consumers “were bypassing sneakers in growing numbers.” And in January, The Times UK deemed 2026 “the year of the loafer.”...

The surging interest in formal footwear fashions has simultaneously been a boon for both high-end luxury retailers and heritage brands with classic shoe offerings, like Allen Edmonds, the Wisconsin-based retailer. Nick Wooster, the brand’s consulting creative director, said that they have “absolutely” seen a recent increase in interest in their handmade leather loafers and derbies among younger customers. 

Even sneaker brands are trying to be more dressy.

The hotness.

Magazine array at my hairdresser's.

I was struck by People's limited vocabulary. Is "hot" all they can come up with anymore? Does does word connote sexiness anymore? Or just popularity. Also, that Wisconsin bride is so glum. Aren't brides suppose to glow with happiness? I don't think a bride's magazine would ever do a cover story on forced marriage or even grim golddigging. Too bad she didn't find that "hottest billionaire." And, in case you are curious, I did not arrange the magazines to emblazon "Charles Manson Was My Grandfather" across her chest.

Bison man speaks.

The 65-year-old man who was flipped eight feet in the air by a bison this month at Yellowstone National Park shared his story from his hospital bed. Carl Isom-McDaniel broke his femur in four places, had surgery and is now recovering at a Montana hospital.

“They move faster than… pic.twitter.com/oJnnVrWbzu

— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 21, 2026

My tag for bison is "buffalo." Sorry. I know it's a bison. I searched for "bison" in my tags, but all that came up was "Roy Orbison." Hmm. Good idea for a purple category in the NYT game "Connections." 

ADDED: Back in 2012, we went to Yellowstone, and I wrote a post, with photographs, titled "Buffalo in the Mist." In the comments, I wrote these 2 things:

1. "Driving into Yellowstone, Meade and I had a conversation about whether we preferred to say 'bison'" (the technically correct term) or 'buffalo' (the colloquial american name for the beast). We decided on buffalo. It's more American and it's just a cooler word."

2. Responding to a commenter who warned me: "Careful, Althouse. Though they look gentle, they're still wild animals and should be treated as such." I wrote: "We were on a boardwalk that is about 2 miles long. You can't go any other way (unless you go back). You can't walk on the ground. We were just trying to get back out to the parking lot, and the buffalo was right there. I was scared, but I had to walk past it. There was no other way to go. I am not one of these people who go up to the animals. I'm about photographing the landscapes."

"You left them to pack their suitcase and they brought three pairs of pants.... 'Choose your battles...' Forgetting pants isn’t catastrophic."

"Tell your teens, 'It’s my holiday too, and the things that will make it feel like a holiday for me are not having to hassle you all the time, being able to read my book on the sun lounger, and not being the dogsbody doing all the work.'"

I'm reading The London Times — "How to have a holiday with your teenager — without arguments/Sun, sea… and sulking? Teens can test your patience when you go away. The psychologist Dr Beth Mosley gives her advice" — so I need to be on the lookout for Britishism. 

Sometimes they're not so obvious. I was all, what's wrong with 3 pairs of pants? Too many pants — right? — so maybe there aren't enough shirts? But, no, "forgetting pants isn’t catastrophic"? How has the kid forgotten pants if he brought 3 pairs of pants? How long is this vacation? Oh, I get it...  pants. When they say "pants," they mean underpants.

"Dogsbody" you can see is something they must say that we don't say, but "pants" flew under the radar.

"I'll have got used to being a dog's body," wrote T. E. Lawrence in 1922.

"Like many terrible things, we can blame therapyspeak on America’s stupidest decade: the 1970s."

"Back then, it was called psychobabble.... The concept survived the hedonistic ’80s, the grimy ’90s, and the low-rise aughts only to reemerge in the social media age with a new name and a more sinister purpose.... Isn’t it odd... that the most selfish people you know always seem to be the ones who are armchair diagnosing their friends and family with personality disorders? I’m reminded of the minor scandal that erupted a few years ago when an A-list actor allegedly wrote private messages to his then girlfriend telling her that if she needed to post photos of herself in a bathing suit, he was not the right partner for her. Elsewhere he wrote, 'I’d love to know before the premiere so I’m not put in the position of publicly flaunting our love if my boundaries are going to be continued to be disrespected. That would be hurtful and triggering for me.' The girlfriend was a professional surfer...."

From "You're Not a Therapist. Stop Talking Like One/Please respect everyone else's boundaries by keeping your psychobabble to yourself" (Vanity Fair).

This is an important general issue, but if you're interested in the A-list actor part of it, here's a Newsweek article from 2023: "Jonah Hill, Sarah Brady Text Messages—Full Transcript." It's really long and a massive invasion of privacy. Why did Newsweek publish all that? Or maybe the better question is why do people have their arguments via text? Why would anyone want to leave a cold record for the whole world to read? And this was a man concerned with "boundaries."

"La la la la."

That's the call from the press as Trump arrives at Versailles Palace. 

Is that how reporters try to get a leader's attention in France? I don't think so. I think they would normally use "Mr. President." So is "La la la la" like shouting "Hey!"? No, I don't think that's the case either. I'm understanding "La la la la" as a more random filler sound. I consulted Grok: "'La la la la' functions more like rhythmic, attention-grabbing noise or an extension of the French interjection "Oh là là!" (often elongated for emphasis)."

Are you "upset" or just unsettled?

I'm reading "Are You 'Triggered' or Just Upset? This popular term is often misused, experts say, which may cause more harm than good" (NYT).

When people use the term trigger instead to refer to everyday things that incite annoyance or offense, they run the risk of conflating traumatic experiences or mental health struggles with everyday challenges, several experts said.... Using triggered to describe negative everyday experiences may also cause people to misinterpret discomfort as danger. They may start to think that bothersome experiences or everyday challenges are harmful, rather than seeing them as opportunities for learning and growth, Dr. Needle said.... 

Sometimes, the word trigger can also be used sarcastically or dismissively, Dr. Needle said — as in, “Oh, you’re just triggered” — to minimize someone’s legitimate negative reaction to a comment or action. “It is basically a way of saying your response is a ‘you problem,’ a sign of weakness or oversensitivity, rather than acknowledging that something genuinely hurtful was said or done,” she said.

I love the name Dr. Needle. She's a clinical psychologist, Rachel Needle.

The headline suggests that the word "upset" is a good substitute for "triggered" when you're not talking about having a flashback to a trauma. But isn't "upset" also pretty dramatic, if we take the dying metaphor seriously? Have you been knocked over, capsized, overturned? 

I've noticed recently that political writers are turning to the word "unsettling." There was the very conspicuous NYT headline: "Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall 'Unsettling' Behavior." 

"In an open schoolyard... the researchers instructed participants to roam at will.... Within seconds, 80 percent of people were moving in a counterclockwise direction."

"'It’s not a gradual drift but rather a bias that emerges almost immediately,' Dr. Echeverría-Huarte said. Dr. Echeverría-Huarte and his colleagues wondered if the behavior might be emerging collectively, similar to how pedestrians split into two opposite-moving lanes on crowded sidewalks. But when they tested participants alone, 75 percent still moved counterclockwise, suggesting that the tendency is individual."

From "Nearly Everyone, Everywhere, Veers Left When Walking/Researchers are at a loss for why people across cultures and ages, regardless of their dominant hand, have a natural bias toward wandering in a counterclockwise direction" (NYT).

The words "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" suggest that clockwise is the more natural tendency. "Counterclockwise" sounds like going backward. But the clock had to go to the right when it was a sundial (in the northern hemisphere), and that established the tradition. 

The words "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" did not emerge until the 19th century. What did people say before that? I think they used the strange word "deasil" (or "deiseal"), which the OED traces back to 1771 and defines as: "Righthandwise, towards the right; motion with continuous turning to the right, as in going round an object with the right hand towards it, or in the same direction as the hands of a clock, or the apparent course of the sun (a practice held auspicious by the Celts)."

If it is indeed auspicious to circle to the right, then why do we naturally circle left? One thinks of the etymology of "sinister."

"An online debate has been simmering for years over what constitutes an acceptable date, especially if it’s your first as two singles."

"Some people embrace the idea of a cheap date, like a walk in the park or a chat over coffee, to build connection. For others, it’s dinner or nothing — preferably with a $200 minimum spend.... Riding bikes side by side through the city, [said Chester Martin, a 33-year-old musician in Brooklyn], is a 'slightly more elevated version' of going on a walk. And in case his date isn’t in the mood to ride her own bike, he doesn’t mind putting in extra work. 'The person I’m dating now is of the size where she can comfortably sit in the Citi Bike basket,' he said. 'I’ll just grab a bike, she’ll sit in the basket and we’ll go literally from, like, Brooklyn to Manhattan and just talk the whole way.'"

From "Would You Go on a Bike Date? Celebrities have recently been hitting the bike lane with their beaus, but the 'Bicycle Boy' was once branded a type to be avoided" (NYT). 

1. The Citi Bike rental agreement says "You may not exceed the maximum weight limit for the Bicycle (260 pounds) or the basket (17 pounds), and You may not otherwise use the basket improperly.... You understand the basket is not a child seat." But do you understand that it's not a woman seat? And how much does this teeny tiny woman weigh? More than 17 pounds I bet, but who knows?

2. "Once upon a time there was a woman who very much wanted to have a little tiny child.... so she went to an old witch.... 'Oh, we can manage that," said the witch, "there's a barleycorn for you!...'... [T]he woman... went home and planted the barleycorn; and very soon a fine large flower came up.... 'That's a charming flower,' said the woman, and gave it a kiss on its pretty red and yellow petals. But just as she kissed it the flower gave a loud crack and opened. You could see it was a real tulip, only right in the middle of it, on the green stool that is there, sat a tiny little girl, as delicate and pretty as could be. She was only a thumb-joint long, so she was called Thumbelina...."

3. Now, I don't know how well Thumbelina would do in Chester Martin's Citi Bike basket:

4. Be careful, Thumbelina! Shouldn't the musician take better care of you? Is this merely a "slightly more elevated version" of something else you shouldn't be doing? Don't you deserve a bigger "spend"?

5. Do you like "spend" as a noun?

"After testing six AI models, the researchers found consistent favoritism for words coming from Latin and French over those with Germanic etymologies..."

"... even more than you would typically encounter in the English language. This bias appears rooted in the preference-learning stage, when the models are trained to align with human expectations about language. This process poses an inescapable problem: that you need real people to make sure the machine is aligned, but the human workers are ironically biased as well. As annotators click through sample texts, for example, they are probably subconsciously disposed to approve those that sound confident and incisive. This new finding could help explain why large language models like ChatGPT and Claude seem to have a distinctive writing style. Previous research has found that AI chatbots tend to overuse words like 'meticulous' and 'commendable,' creating a kind of linguistic uncanny valley that sounds similar to how you speak, but ever so slightly off. Perhaps the ghosts of Latin and French haunted these words during preference learning, leading human workers to reward more prestigious-sounding sentences. Of course, the Germanic versus Romance distinction is a simplification of a messier etymological reality. The notoriously overrepresented word 'delve' is actually Old English in origin...."

Writes Adam Aleksic, author of "Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language," in "Do these words make you sound smarter? The bias is spreading. English speakers love the Romance vocabulary. AI noticed" (WaPo).

The "Germanic versus Romance distinction" = "We’ll use more Latin terms when we want to speak formally or authoritatively; we’ll use Germanic words to sound crass or casual." That's how Aleksic puts it.

That made me think about what Jorge Luis Borges said about English: English is a "far finer language than Spanish," and one reason is that "English is both a Germanic and Latin language."

"For any idea, you have 2 words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example, if I say 'regal,' that is not exactly the same thing as saying 'kingly.' Or if I say 'fraternal,' that's not the same thing as saying 'brotherly.' Or 'dark' and 'obscure' — those words are different. It will make all the difference speaking, for example, of a Holy Spirit. It will make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or the Holy Ghost, since 'ghost' is a fine dark Saxon word, while 'spirit' is light —it's the Latin word...."

"Democrats really, really like Platner in Maine but the Republicans f***ing love him … if Maine wants an asshole with a Nazi tattoo on his chest, they get him."

Said John Fetterman, quoted in "Graham Platner 'sexted women.' Senior Democrats fear voters won’t care/Sexually explicit texts have piled pressure on the candidate for Maine. Long-serving party insiders say it’s a test of the tolerance for scandal" (London Times).

I'm getting my American news from The London Times this morning. For this post, I was charmed by the description of Fetterman as "the Democrats’ most unbiddable member in the upper chamber."

I think it's funny to call the Senate "the upper chamber," and I have to go talk with AI to get a handle on what "unbiddable" means. Once you see the root, "bid," as the "bid" in the phrase "do as you are bid," it's easy to see the meaning of "unbiddable." You can't tell Fetterman what to do.

I spend some time musing about the word "bid" — looked it up in the OED, read the very lengthy etymology, and scanned the quotes. Here's one from a 1984 book called "Country Voices," which is a collection of oral histories from rural England: "You didn't go to a funeral unless you were all in mourning, and you didn't go unless you were what they called ‘bid.' When anybody had died, there'd be a young man come round to bid you to the funeral..the joiner's lad."

Do you see why it would be the joiner's lad? And would you like that approach to funerals? You don't just decide for yourself should I go or not.

"Luminous," a reminder.

The NYT has a piece called "Luminous New Historical Fiction," so let's review the history of "luminous" on this blog.

I've said it all before, and I've summed it up before. So I will simply republish this post of mine from September 27, 2022:

Squelching, Part 2.

Having already written a blog post called "Squelching" this morning, I feel compelled to show you this London Times article: "Mumbling, [squelching] and the danger of badly captioned TV subtitles/Half of the nation like to watch with words appearing on screen. For most people, it’s not that they can’t hear":

[S]ubtitles can be worse when they get it right, especially during a sex scene. No one wants to be sucking peppermints with their Aunty Pam when the words, “Yes! Yes! Harder!” and “Is that good for you, baby?” pop up on screen. Descriptions of sound effects can be quite appalling, such as “[groans of pleasure]”. Or just “[squelching]”. In Stranger Things there was once a caption reading “tentacles undulate moistly”, though I don’t think it was describing sex, mercifully....

"On a recent afternoon at the Venice Biennale, I walked into a bright blue portable john and peed for art."

"Just outside the booth, a naked woman was submerged in a huge water tank, breathing through a scuba mouthpiece. My urine was about to pass along a tube from the toilet through several filtration systems, before topping up her glass chamber’s water level. The performer, who would stay in the tank for at least four hours, was essentially living in other people’s waste. And she had plenty of donors. The toilet is part of a presentation called 'Seaworld Venice' by the choreographer and theater-maker Florentina Holzinger that is undoubtedly the biggest talker of this year’s Biennale, which opens to the public on Saturday and runs through Nov. 22."

From "These Toilets in Venice Have the Art World Aflush/Undoubtedly the biggest talker at this year’s Venice Biennale is the Austrian pavilion, where visitors can make their own contributions to the work on show" (NYT).

I clicked on that link for "Seaworld Venice" and was confronted with big red letters saying "I live in your piss."

This is the kind of degradation of women that feminists used to rail against, but, here, the artist is female, so I guess we're not supposed to notice. The message is purportedly environmentalism. Also the artist puts herself out there: "Part of the performance at the pavilion involved Holzinger swinging her body from side to side inside a metal bell attached to a crane to make it ring out." Video at the link. Holzinger is naked. A commenter over there notes that she risks deafness, performing as a bell clapper.

ADDED: I don't remember ever seeing "talker" used to mean the thing being talked about: the show is "undoubtedly the biggest talker of this year's Biennale." I understand "talker" meaning a person doing that talking, but not This show is a big talker, meaning it's what everyone's talking about. I guess it's like the use of "-er" in "looker" used to refer to someone people look at and not the one doing the looking.

The OED defines "talker" only as the one doing the talking. An example from Jane Austen (from "Emma"): "I am rather a talker; and now and then I have let a thing escape me which I should not." 

And then there's that Shakespeare adage, from "Richard III": "Talkers are no good doers." I think we don't use that one too much. We're more likely to go with: "All talk and no action," "Actions speak louder than words," "Talk is cheap," and "Walk the walk, don't just talk the talk." 

"[B]reast reduction and implant-removal procedures have surpassed enlargements for the first time. This is amid a cultural shift away from 'exaggerated curves'..."

"... to a smaller, lighter, more 'delicate' shape, aka 'ballerina boobs,' also known as 'yoga tits.' Well, this is all great to know. I look forward to hearing this kind of talk applied to male appendages.... But may I also say that I suspect much of this might be a load of balls? Could the well-endowed women who are having reductions simply be sick of having back pain and two grooves on their shoulders like a workman’s ditch? Could the women having their implants removed simply have realised it’s hard to get clothes to fit and they don’t want to hoik two silicone jellyfish everywhere with them that may at some point leak?"

Writes Carol Midgley, in "Now is no time to have a voluminous bosom (and M&S won’t measure you)/It turns out that big ones are over and the ‘ballerina boob’ is in" (London Times).

I like that word "hoik." It has an interesting array of meanings. According to Wiktionary:

"Plants depend on carbon dioxide to perform photosynthesis — but that doesn’t mean they grow better when there’s more carbon in the air, scientists say."

"A sweeping survey of changes among 32 compounds in 43 crops found that nearly every plant that humans eat is harmed by rising CO2 levels. 'As a scientist, it’s really interesting,' said Sterre F. ter Haar, an environmental scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the survey, published in November. 'As a person … you don’t want to see such a shift, because it’s so negative.' For the past several years, ter Haar and her colleagues have worked to compile a database of all existing research on nutrient changes linked to rising CO2.... Next the team used their dataset to calculate the nutritional densities of each crop under different carbon dioxide levels — and to predict how their composition could continue to shift in the future. On average, they found, nutrients have already decreased by an average 3.2 percent across all plants since the late 1980s, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million...."

From "Carbon pollution is making food less nutritious" (WaPo). That's a gift link, so you can figure out the science and whether this is a case of lying with statistics.

It occurs to me that percentages of nutrients would change if plants just contain more water, but a plant composed of more water might be more appetizing, so just eat a bit more of it. I'm always suspicious of articles that stir up climate-change anxiety.

"In different cultures and historical eras, pitch polarity was not designated as 'high' vs. 'low' but rather..."

"... by 'light' vs. 'heavy' (Kpelle people in Liberia), 'sharp' vs. 'heavy' (ancient Greek music theory), 'small' vs. 'large,' used in Bali and Java, as well as among Kpelle and Jabo in Liberia...), 'young' vs. 'old' (Suyá people of the Amazon basin...) or 'weak' vs. 'strong' (the Bashi people of central Africa...). Often, pitch vocabulary seems to derive from specific cultural practices. For instance, pitch classification for the Shona mbira (Zimbabwe) includes the opposition of 'crocodile' (low pitch) with 'those who follow crocodiles' (high), and 'stable (person) who holds the piece together' (low) vs. 'mad person' (high), as well as 'old men’s voices' (low) vs. 'young men’s voices' (high), 'men’s voices' vs. 'women’s voices,' and 'thin' (low) vs. 'thick' (high).... In the Gbaya xylophone (Central African Republic), notes are arranged genealogically, and include (from low to high) grandmother, mother, father, son and daughter...."

From the delightfully named "Beethoven’s last piano sonata and those who follow crocodiles: Cross-domain mappings of auditory pitch in a musical context" (Academia) by Renee Timmers.

I got there via a discussion with Grok that began with my question "Why is it that the most emotional part of a melody is always (almost always?) a move to a higher note?" The answer shouldn't be because in real life heights are exciting/scary/magnificent.  

Imagine thinking about a melody in terms of crocodiles and those who follow crocodiles!