Depends on the context

“Recent research has revealed a number of expressions that have entered everyday use since Brexit started. Terms like “Article 50”, “no deal”, “hard border” may now seem just part of life but they were seldom, if ever, used before Brexit.

New and interesting phraseological patterns have also arisen around some of these words. For example, treaty articles didn’t used to get “triggered”. Instead, they were “invoked”. But we now take as obvious that Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union is “triggered”. In linguistic terms, this is known as a “collocation” – the idea that words are commonly used together. So, just as in English (but not in some other languages) one brushes one’s teeth rather than cleans them, one now “triggers” Article 50 in stead of “invoking” it. These patterns show that language is a system of conventional habits of expression more than a system governed by strict, logical rules. After all, there is no strict rule that says you can’t use the word “activate” or “invoke” before “Article 50”, and yet hardly anyone says that.

These new patterns have entered the grammar of English and need to be part of speakers’ linguistic knowledge if they wish to discuss Brexit (although some of these patterns might well fall into disuse once we talk about Brexit less). This shows that language can change very fast if required, despite the fact that the traditional view of language change is that grammatical patterns take hundreds of years to change.

Forced to pick sides

Language is also often far from neutral. With “trigger” becoming the usual verb to pair with Article 50, speakers are nudged into a metaphor that might well influence not only how they talk, but also how they think about this matter. This works via linguistic relativity and its conscious deployment is sometimes referred to as framing. Once something is triggered, it cannot be untriggered – the outcome is final. Compare with the invoking of something, which leaves the option of revoking it, or the activation and deactivation of something.”

“Horrible”, “horrifying” and “horrific” describe negative experiences. So do “terrible” and “terrifying”. But “terrific” is used positively.

… the relation between signifié and signifiant is arbitrary and conventionalised (de Saussure) … [and sometimes „terrific“ (me)]

There isn’t another one.

Now it is social distancing. 

Be like a wug and #stayathome. 

March 15 2020 - Dutch sign language interpreter telling people to stop panic buying, or “hamstering“ as it’s called in Dutch.

We say “English doesn’t make any sense” because saying “English is unusual in that, when it borrows vocabulary from other languages, it tends to partially retain the morphology of the originating language group rather than adapting the word in question to English morphology, which is why we have twelve different ways to construct a plural” takes too long.

— pickup lines with Noam Chomsky (via hippotatomi)

This is a Venn Diagram of the overlap between the Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets.

We should combine them all into one Ultra Orthography that is, however, somehow mysteriously an abjad