most other two-digit numbers had no meaningful trend over that period (12. 891)

For its WotY, Dictionies.com has selected “6-7” from its list of contenders for terms capturing the Zeitgeist of language and culture over the past twelve months, not just about confusion, neologism or popularity but moreover as a socio-linguistic mirror to visage. In the shortlist of other reference authorities, the meme, phrase and accompanying hand gestures from a nonsense lyric in a song by Philadelphia rapper Skrilla, titled “Doot Doot (Six-Seven).” And while grammarians have tried to apply several interpretations as to its meaning and etymology—from a reference to a street in the artist’s hometown or police code, which despite being incorrect have increased its rather enduring lore as opposed to recent marketing campaigns by fast food franchises and rumours that the next AI model will be called GPT-6-7 (surely a sign the trend is about to plummet)—it is genuinely a meaningless phrase though positive among cohorts who can share it together. The Wikipedia entry for the much older, fourteenth century English idiom to describe a situation in disarray—“at sixes and sevens”—from the proto-version of gambling dice game craps called hazard has not been updated to reflect this new phenomenon.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the events that inspired The Wicker Man (with synchronopticæ), an ancient amulet discovered, a thousand days of the war on Ukraine, shifting through default video titles plus Mister Plow (1992)

twelve years ago: digital footprints 

thirteen years ago: market bubbles 

fourteen years ago: in for a penny, in for a pound 

fifteen years ago: free-range exoplanets 

sixteen years ago: preppers and doubters 

10x10 (12. 889)

trip hop: frustrated with his limited role in Massive Attack, Tricky embarked on his independent project Maxinquaye  

chud atlantis: more regional car-dealership rococo from McMansion Hell  

linguistic zombie hunting: a revival of the old prescriptivist superstition against ending a sentence with a preposition and the grammarians that support it 

state capture: the revolving door between government and industry creating the post-democratic world order—via Quantum of Sollazzo 

♾️ series: visual proofs that 1/4 + 1/16 + 1/64 + 1/256… yields ⅓  

circlesquare: filmmaker Jaron Albertin’s rather disturbing music video for “Seven Minutes” 

artful dodger: Victorian mugshots of juvenile offenders—via Nag on the Lake  

stay puft: some facts all about marshmallows sealab: project Tektite and experimenting with submerged human habitats  

giscardpunk: Fifth Republic techno-futurism reimagined—see previously 

synchronoptica

one year ago: farming by lottery (with synchronopticæ) plus assorted links to revisit

twelve years ago: coded correspondence

thirteen years ago: Thanksgiving salutations  

fourteen years ago: Bretton Woods and monetary unions 

fifteen years ago: privacy and Google Maps plus trade unions and Ricardian economics

parasocial (12. 888)

A term from academia coined by sociologists back in the mid-1950s observing how viewer formed very much unrequited bonds with television personalities—particularly soap opera characters but also news anchors and any regular guest hailing from TV land—the word chosen as Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year (previously) remained a clinical one until recently, having in the past few years entered into popular parlance thanks to social media fandom. The paramour phenomena not just restricted to following, the confessional nature of podcasts and AI chat is also forging confidants in hosts and bots alike—see also. Driven by look ups alone with no judgment passed on the healthiness of such a one-sided connection, as surrogates for actual friends and family, learn more about the term’s provenance that pre-dates publication by centuries at the link up top.

baud rate (12. 883)

Reading about the last remaining telegraph stations in China closing a few months ago, we were excited for another look at the topic from the angle of the challenges overcome to adapt sinographs to telegraphy and more broadly to mechanical reproduction—ironically having invented the printed word but challenged with technology made for alphabetic encoding and decoding.

To overcome or work within the conventions of Morse code, the four-corner system (四角號碼檢字法) was put in place for characters based on cardinal shapes as an ununqiue identifier but winnowing it down (0000—9999) to a contextual range of possibilities that operators could interpret and pass along. This shape-based method (with help of gun-boat diplomacy and special entrepôts) declined with the reliance on telegrams but has seen a revival in numerical texting shorthand to limit the range of possibilities with natural word order. Much more from Language Log at the link above.

book and backmasking (12 .882)

Calling to mind this wonderfully laugh out loud and still arguably the only legitimate use of LinkedIn that matches the names of CV-holders to pop songs, Futility Closet directs us to an earlier effort scouring the telephone directory of Toronto’s 1977 white-pages choosing entries to approximate the lyrics to nursery rhymes (as published later in anthology of recreational linguistics and onomastics). One example cobbling together of the Roud Folk Song #19626 of disputed historical meaning:

Merrie Merry Quaint Caunt Ririe
Howe Dussiaulme Garden Groh
Witt Silver Belson Cockell Schells
And Pretty Mayes Allin Arro

Whist predating Mary Tudor and Mary Queen of Scots, despite popular associations, scholars believe the English traditional poem is an allegory for Catholicism with pretty maids representing nuns, the sanctus bells and the cockleshells as the pilgrimage badges of the Way of St James. Click through at the link above for more examples plus a 1963 television show that assembled a live studio audience to the tune “Inda Good Old Somerstein.”

synchronoptica

one year ago: the first human-non-human organ transplant (with synchronopticæ) plus polls open for the OED Word of the Year

thirteen years ago: alternate search engines, International Day of Philosophy plus more flea market finds

fourteen years ago: the myth of unlimited growth 

sixteen years ago: a visit to Coburg 

give into the vibes (12. 866)

Coined this February by OpenAI Andrej Karpathy as a machine-aided solution for those wanting to create a bespoke programme yet never learned the basics of coding—which admitted on a certain level is the sort of in-group jargon that keeps the out-group out but are also instructions that computers understand—allowing users to become transcendental and forget that the underlying code even exists, vibe coding was selected by Collins Dictionary as their WotY for 2025—see previously. As with other forms of rocket-surgery, going with one’s untempered intuition and trusting the machine does not always achieve the desired outcome and the requester would not have the skills to edit or debug something that came close. Other terms on the shortlist included Henry, an acronym for “high-earner, yet not rich,” micro-retirement for a work sabbatical, aura farming, clankers and broligarcy.

9x9 (12. 865)

amor fati: Fredrich Nietzsche’s philosophy (previously) of passing on engagement can break the cycle of polarisation without becoming disengaged and nihilistic 

the memes of production: the internet reacts to Zohran Mamdani’s mayorial win in New York City  

unpaving paradise: an urban greening game to optimise replacing parking spaces in Berlin with trees  

№: why number is English is abbreviated n-o 

no springs: a hypnotic video of manufacturing robots politely waiting their turn in the assembly process—see also  

alive internet theory: a seance with the vibrant web and all its expressive artefacts against the countervailing argument it has become overrun by bots—see also—via Waxy 

gathering wool: online apparel retailers in China employ oversized hangtags to curb high return rates  

hatch act violation: US federal judge rules administration overstepped its bounds by inserting partisan blaming into furloughed government employees’ out-of-office autoreplies  

bleak outlook: astronomical survey deposits galaxy could be riddled with the artefacts of long dead alien civilisations that could avoid destroying themselves—we suppose that depends on what sort of religion they develop—see also, see previously—via MetaFilter

synchronoptica

one year ago: a monument to the Armenian diaspora (with synchronopticæ), the Carrington count, backstage customs plus US presidential numbering

fourteen years ago: food and drink prohibited plus Inventors’ Day

rare, obc. (12. 861)

Futility Closet directs our attention to a volume first published in 1974, with multiple reprintings over the decades of some eighty thousand entries of preposterous and over-specialised English nonce words—though uncommonly, sometimes only once (see above) glossed in accessible corpora, that is at least outside the fandom of committed logophilia—compiled single-handedly by one Josefa Heifetz Byrne. The author was also a renowned concert pianist, taking her married name from her husband Robert Byrne, an expert pool player and instructor of billiards as well as a prolific humour columnist and civil engineer.  The book covers some of our old favourites, like ucalegon and anatiferous (an arguably useless word), as well as a treasury of terms new to us like foraminous, full of holes (see previously here and here), the Scots word groak for to look fixed at a party eating in anticipation of receiving food, anemocracy, a metaphorical term for governed by the changing winds and quaquaversal, going off in all directions. Click through at the link up top to check out a copy from the Internet Archive and adopt something you see that needs returning to common-parlance.

13x13 (12. 845)

norwalk platform: architect Jackie Ferrara ends her life, aged 95  

antedating: lexicographers talks lexicography through canonical form  

spoiler alert—some counties pronounce it as rhyming with stone: further exploration on British toponymy

index of multiple deprivation: UK office of government statistics releases its deciles of the most under-served  

willy and the poor boys: Creedance Clearwater Revival (previously) released their third studio album on this day in 1969 

loss-leader: an image editing tool on par with Adobe makes itself freely available to appeal to non-professionals  

holy war: Trump readies troops for action in Nigeria to protect Christian popular despite a paucity of evidence for persecution 

perfectly al dente: a research roundup of scientific investigations nearly overlooked 

body horror: biopolitics, the body politic and David Cronenberg  

police brutality: Sting and company release their debut album Outlandos on this day in 1978 

county stripes: visualising US demographics and distribution—see also 

anthimeria: the verbification of mystery writers—see previously 

first woman of fluxus: Alison Knowles passes away, aged 92—see more, see also

c’est l’halloween (12. 841)

Reported by Stop Podcasting Yourself’s Dave Shumka, we learn about the greatest French language seasonal song ever, written by language immersion teacher Matt Maxwell in Halifax to teach his young pupils about the then mostly exclusively Anglophone tradition and acquire some vocabulary in a fun way. Notwithstanding thematic and lyrical similarities to the Jack Skellington number from The Nightmare Before Christmas, a more modern carol but still losing out in terms of popularity—according to recent and perennial polling to Monster Mash among Americans at least (like “Dominick the Donkey” for the latter holiday), it’s still of a shouty banger. Although a word of foreign origin, the Office Québécois de la Langue Française still prescribes adding an article which leads to elision and a silent h.

neurodiversity (12. 835)

Whilst the term seemingly entered popular parlance with the COVID lockdown and gradual reemergence addressing the range of ways that people cope and adjust, neurodivergence originated in the late 1990s coined by then high school student Kassiane Asasumasu who went on to become a champion for autism rights and recognition, using in her AOL email signature line in forums for the autistic community. Not a clinical term, though often mistaken for one—as it also conflated with the title word, like the hapa-haole descriptor applied, unbidden, to her own multiethnic heritage that was imposed by Christian missionaries in Hawaiʻi uncomfortable with all the people who did not fit into their categories—it filled a lacuna that the above understanding of being within spectrum of dominant norms fell short of addressing, including those who deviated from accepted social bounds. Advocating for acceptance and pushing back on the idea that some outsiders have that such populations need to be readjusted, Asasumasu also later came up with the phrase caregiver benevolence to reframe best-intentions.

11x11 (12. 833)

krasnaya polyana: luxury Black Sea ski resort under development linked to Aleksandr Lukashenko—the town makes a good name for the Russian asset in the White House 

bride of frankenstein: tour guide uncovers unknown grave of silver screen legend and horror icon Elsa Lanchester decades after her death 

parlour of prestidigitation: a visit to Hollywood’s Magic Castle in 1978 with tour guide Orson Welles  

kunstformen der natur: the discovery of microscopic marine life informed one of the most influential illustrated books published in the work of Ernst Haeckel  

heptarchy: the realm of the Anglo-Saxons could have just as easily turned out being called Sexland  

🌀:potentially unprecedented in terms of strength and destruction, Hurricane Melissa makes landfall on Cuba and Jamaica  

open house: the real estate industry has entered the era of AI slop for virtual tours

turing patterns: the hypothetical evolutionary mechanism that might explain the emergence of complex geometries in Nature 

fiend without a face: a 1958 scifi horror feature 

if you are a werewolf—and very likely you may be—for lots of people are without knowing: a comedy of manners about a coven of witches is considered a classic of early feminist writing 

neunundneunzig luftballons: Lithuanian forces shoot down dozens of balloons invading their airspace dispatched by Belarus

7x7 (12. 816)

east wing: for a nation that’s precious about conserving its precious little history, there’s not much outcry over Trump’s extensive remodel of the People’s House—see more  

west bank: US vice president and secretary of state angry over a bill advanced in the Knesset to annex the larger of the two Palestinian territories against Trump’s twenty-point plan  

parallax view: a glasses-free three-dimensional mapping demonstration 

fairytale of new york: a tribute to the recently departed Alfa-Betty Olson and her Sin City Fables  

schleicher’s pie: revisiting the constructed Proto Indo-European apologue—see previously  

yerkökü və çubuq: Russo-American summit in Budapest is cancelled and a raft of new sanctions are imposed on Moscow 

arc de trump: plans drawn up for a triumphal arch over the Potomac

7x7 (12. 789)

snaggletoothed landfill goblins: a journey into the heart of the Pop Mart economy—via Web Curios  

battle-rattle: a Wikipedia-style directory on camouflage—via ibīdem   

urgent fury: revisiting Grenada and arguably the only modern foreign war that the US ever won  

lahaina noon: twice annually objects in the between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn lose their shadows  

my life of the ptsd list: Kathy Griffin—don’t call it a come back—via MetaFilter  

yclept: a gloss on the Old English term that is still in common-parlance—via Strange Company

the niña, the pinta and the santa maría: Trump issues a declaration ahead of the US federal holiday to re-enshrine the myth of Columbus’ discover and the settlers’ conquest   

spreekwoorden (12. 788)

Having a passing familiarity with how the artwork of Pieter Bruegel the Elder could be read as an illustrated catalogue of Flemish proverbs and idioms to puzzle out, we appreciated this bit of art history presented,
via Web Curios, as an interactive canvas to explore each interpretation of the 1559 painting originally titled The Blue Cloak for the striking bit of contrast in the lower middle of the ensemble with the Max Rebo-looking figure representing a cuckold—Zij hangt haar man de blauwe huik, literally another proverb of pulling the wool over his eyes to hide her deception and faithlessness, see above. There are a hundred or so to parse and figure out one’s native equivalent.

9x9 (12. 784)

readme.txt: an experiment to assess whether AI can parse the drastic downfall of the United States and pen near-term speculative fiction that forecasts the next four years based on the daily news cycle—via Web Curios  

citation needed: famous cognitive truisms that fail replication 

take the a-train: a data-driven tribute to the New York City subway  

peso convertible: despite US government shutdown impasse and soaring inflation, the US is bailing out the Argentinian economy  

out of all the clergy, why did ice target the hot priest: minister scoured with pepper ball ammunition rebukes US administration’s narrative about lawlessness in Chicago  

dead reckoning: quantum sensing of the magnetic field of the Earth’s core could prove to be a more reliable method of aerial navigation in the age of GPS spoofing and jamming, see also—Via Clive Thompson’s Linkfest  

rezagado: Trump suggests ejecting Spain from NATO for their failure to show commitment snail’s pace: a sculptural statement on the frenetic everyday  

coo-coo-ca-choo: birds across all species seem to understand the universal cry of warning of predatory nesters  

babystar: a cautionary influencer tale with echos of The Truman Show

aura farming (12. 777)

A meta-analysis of Google search terms reveals America’s most queried slang terms for 2025, the majority of which were an enigma to me, though was happily pleased to find the rather more traditional term mogging (from to decamp) overtaking the sense of looksmaxxing and we’ve encountered clanker previously as a derogatory word for robot. Huzz as a term of endearment rather than an insult is also an interesting development.  With some other AI slop inspired words on the list and AI overlays dominating search results we wonder how many neologisms might be left out by dint of a lack of association and fossilised by outmoded context with less non-synthetic material to scrape and might yet influence common-parlance in a retrograde way.

hooked on phonics (12. 766)

Incredibly after a run of forty-one years, the Chicago Tribune announced on this day in 1975 that it would be revising its style guide and discontinue the editing standards in place since January of of 1934 of offering simplified, phonetic spellings (see previously) of about eight common words, conceding that the newspaper was not making the grade when it came to came to English language conventions of putting words in print (both in headlines and copy) and wanted to cause no further confusion in the classroom, particularly for young pupils. While holding out that sanity and prescription might one day come to orthography, going forward, the paper agreed to no longer publish thru, tho and thoro for through, though and thorough—as well as rime for rhyme, fantom for phantom, sofomore for sophomore, etc.

synchronoptica

one year ago: sea birds in a hurricane (with synchronopticæ) plus a Schoolhouse Rock!-style explainer for Project 2025 

twelve years ago: punctuation marks that failed to catch on plus downplaying the climate catastrophe 

thirteen years ago: real life raiders of the lost Ark plus the debut of Star Trek: TNG (1987)

fourteen years ago: austerity measures for the German economy plus biometric punch-clocks

fifteen years ago: the reckoning of Iceland’s financial crisis 

mittelwihr, ostheim, beblenheim (12. 763)

Heading back to Alsace after several years for a camping holiday—the last of the season we think—we noticed that the city limit signs were no longer bilingual, reflecting the German and Swiss cultural influences on this region in la Grand Est on the upper Rhein (Rhine, Rhin) but rather in French with a sub-caption acknowledging the Alsatian dialect (im Elsàss, from the German Elsaß—strongly informed by the neighbouring Swabian way of speaking) with Saint Hippolyte rendered as Sàmpìlt, for example.

First conquered by Caesar, a subject of the Holy Roman Empire, in the Realm of the Franks, traded to the Carolingians as part of Lotharingia, annexed by the kingdoms of France and Germany and later ceded to the Deutsche Reich before returning to France after World War II, this land protected by the Vosges mountains, making conditions ideal for wining and mining, has retained its character and charm and has been relatively nonplussed over all these changes, becoming a model of religious tolerance during the Reformation, unlike the rest of France and embracing a mosaic of Catholic and Protestant congregations within the same communities, the central governments of neither ruling powers wanting to impose a faith or language for fear of antagonising the population.

Though not the most flattering of terms, the Latin form of the name of Alsace entered legalese in English courts in the seventeenth century (stemming from dated perceptions at the time) as Alsatia, referring to a lawless place or one under no judicial oversight, and in extended use sanctuary and a customary marketplace protected by tradition and the independence of patrons.

  

synchronoptica

one year ago: hotel darkrooms for hobbyist photographers (with synchronopticæ), a very short papacy plus Dawn: A Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (1976) 

fourteen years ago: Das Boot 

fifteen years ago: substituting the flag of Chile for the flag of Texas

seventeen years ago: lost and found

 

8x8 (12. 751)

crybaby: the myth of the maternal instinct and what infant distress tells us 

i’ve been waiting twenty years for this meeting: Trump issues dangerous medical advice, linking acetaminophen, childhood vaccines with autism  

interflug: vintage Eastern European destination labels 

filtered for birdsong and catnip: the animal internet and archaeo-acoustics  

my dinner with skinner: the Steamed Hams version of My Dinner with Andre—see previously, see also—via Meta Filter 

novelisation: retro book jackets from modern classic cinema—see previously   

justice serviced: Trump ramps up pressure to pursue political enemies through a weaponised department  

non-linear vocal phenomenon: the distracting power of baby cries and dog barks may be overrated

synchronoptica

one year ago: a 1974 tour of Fort Knox (with synchronopticæ) plus assorted links to revisit 

thirteen years ago: a ban on GMO crops in Europe, charted flights plus a superb dragonfly

fourteen years ago: faster-than-light physics 

fifteen years ago: the unbearable whiteness of anti-intellectualism