Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

The American Dialect Society's word of the year for 2023 is "enshittification."

Also, in second place for euphemism of the year, "artificial intelligence: computerized simulation of human intelligence that is not actually intelligent."

Someone posted last week about long, unpronounceable generic names for drugs. This morning I found, via vass, a WHO website about choosing those names, including the meanings of a large assortment of stems (things like -micin and -mab). Some of the entries are things like "-tredekin (see -kin)" followed by an explanation of what the longer stem means.

The handbook also says to avoid the letters H and K, and use I instead of Y, to make pronunciation easier in various languages. That makes sense, and also reduces the number of possible names.

I am reminded here of "Exxon," a name carefully chosen not to mean anything in any language. If I recall correctly, there's only language that uses "xx" in words, Maltese, and "is 'exxon' a word in Maltese" was relatively easy to answer, compared to something like "is 'mitepunac' a word in any of the languages spoken anywhere we might be doing business?"

Elsenet, someone mentioned that the weirdest coronavirus symptom she'd read about was chilblains. So I went to the merriam-webster website to look up "chilblains," because I hadn't seen the word used lately and am hoping their bots will notice people looking it up. (Silly, I know.)

Since I had been led there by the "trending lookups" part of their webpage, I looked at the current list--the most recent entry is "quacksalver." https://www.merriam-webster.com/news-trend-watch/quacksalver-spikes-from-cbs-report-20200426

The lists are practically a running commentary on the news: the next-most-recent entries after it are "sarcasm/sarcastic," "disinfectant," "livedo," and "de minimis."

It's reading things and talking to people and going places that cause me the most trouble. Also listening to stuff and looking at stuff and doing stuff. Nouns, really. Nouns are a lot of trouble. Also verbs. Prepositions are mostly safe: aboard about above across after against along among...gosh. I remember more of the list Mrs. Stalker made us memorize than I thought.—mrissa, in a friends-locked post.

cattitude just walked in with kitty litter, a gallon of milk, and "Non-ultra joy." So he said, and so the package proved to be labeled (though they capitalized the J.

It's dishwashing soap. Calling dishwashing soap "joy" is an absurdity I'm used to, but "non-ultra" is new.

Infra dishes it shall be.

Does anyone here have a book containing Dylan Thomas's "Notes on the Art of Poetry"? We're trying to sort out both the actual text--some of the versions we've found online have strings of commas, others have more normal ellipses--and copyright information.