Exploring slang, AI ghost words, and language change, with Heddwen Newton
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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty. And today I'm here with Hedwin Newton, who is an English teacher and translator in Germany, who was raised in a bilingual Dutch-English household and is fascinated by contemporary English and the way English changes.

She also runs a Dutch website that helps Dutch people find English translations for difficult-to-translate words. But she's on the show today because I absolutely love her email newsletter called English in Progress, which comes out like every couple of months or so and is filled with fascinating words, mostly new words and slang. Edwin, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Thank you. It's so nice to be here.

Yeah, so you have your finger on the pulse of language change. And my first question is, where do you generally find all this Gen Z, Gen Alpha slang that you include in your newsletter? Yeah, so it's a great question. And the answer is definitely not from my own lived experience, because as people can probably see and as people can probably hear, I have like the wrong accent and the wrong age.

to be busy with slang at all. It's just, it's my fascination, but I like making people cringe by saying things like, I was yapping with my bestie about new slang being so slay. You know,

I am not the right person for this. So I do not get it from what I see and hear around me. So I really get it from other people. I have a 17-year-old nephew who is gold. He lives online and he's really fascinated with language. So every time he hears about a new interesting word, he will WhatsApp it to me and send it to me and let me know. And I have Google Alerts.

set up for anything you can think of that might have to do with slang. So every time anybody writes a list with the 10 slangy words that your teenagers say, but you don't understand them, here they are explained. So I basically read every single one of those articles. They usually just regurgitate the same words again and again, but every now and then there'll be a new one there. Yeah, and there's just other people who...

keep a much better eye on slang than I do, like John Kelly, who writes the new Merriam-Webster slang page, which is great. It's brand new. I advise everybody to go take a look. And Kelly Wright, who does the words of the year for the American Dialect Society. So, yeah, those are my sources.

I basically steal other people's work. That 17-year-old sounds very valuable. And I welcome all our young listeners to cringe and feel free to mock us because we're going to talk about, ooh, this slang word, ooh, that slang word. And I know it's cringy. Exactly like that. Yeah.

But, you know, I was going through some of your older newsletters, the more recent but older newsletters, to look for some especially fun words to talk about. And this one actually is Victorian slang. This is one of my favorites. So it's not all just Gen Z. Podsnappery. I love this. Podsnappery, which is actually Victorian slang, meaning...

the belief that everything you do is right and everything everyone else does is wrong. And obviously we need to bring this back because it's so useful. But can you talk about where that comes from? Yeah. So it's an etymone, which means it comes from a name. And the name is John Podsnap, who was a character in Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. And

And this character did that, right? So he thought that he was always right and everybody else was always wrong. And I love this because it just goes to show that what young people do is they take their slang or their ideas for slang from what is cool at that moment. And nowadays, that's like hip hop videos or like edgy internet forums and

But it used to be Charles Dickens, right? He was cool and hip and edgy in his day. So I'm also an English teacher, as you said in the intro. So this kind of stuff always also just gets my heart beating faster, you know.

Dickens. Yes, exactly. I mean, in this pod snappery, it's in the Oxford English Dictionary now. So some slang fades away, a lot of slang fades away, but some of it makes it into the everlasting reference books.

What are some of your favorite words that you've encountered recently? Yeah, so I really like the ones with a sense of humor. So when a young, I keep saying young person, but let's keep doing that. I don't know. When a young person wants to say, I'm not lying about this. I'm telling the truth. Mostly nowadays they say no cap. That tends to be the standard now. But another way of saying it is fax, no printer.

That's no printer. Yeah. So it's a joke on the word facts as in information that is true, but facts as in the machine that, you know, these guys only know from films and television anymore. They haven't actually used one ever in their life, which makes me slightly depressed. But yeah, so they think it's hilarious to say, I'm telling you the truth. Facts, no printer. Yeah.

That's hilarious. That's like if we had said telegraph, no phone. Then that doesn't play on the word fact. Yeah, there's no pun there, but yes. That's how long ago it was. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Every once in a while, I have to use a digital fax and I'm still just like, who does this? It's crazy. My doctor still uses them and I'm like, what? What are you doing? Yeah. It's a security thing, I think, but it's just so outdated. Yeah. Okay. What are some more? So I also really like main character energy. Say, oh, that person, she has main character energy, meaning she's like the main character in her own film. She's really rocking it.

Yeah, this sort of aligns with, we recently talked about the word lore. And it was one of the words of the year. And John Kelly was a guest on the show and how people, you know, literature, you know, characters in literature have lore. And now people are starting to talk about their own lore. So that's another way of thinking about yourself as...

sort of a character in a story. That's so interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not, apparently, so the internet tells me that people also say it about themselves. That seems a bit weird to me. Would you say about yourself that you have main character, like, like I have main character energy. I would never say that about myself. It makes me think of the, um, I mean, so much of posting pictures of ourselves, like, you know, I feel cute, might delete later, just sort of,

I mean, it's not the same thing, but we do project an image of ourselves as a character sometimes on social media. So I can kind of see how that filters into how people talk about themselves. Yeah, I suppose so. And the other one which might come back later is actually from LGBTQ culture, from drag performances, which is She Ate and Left No Crumbs. So when you did something really, really well, oh yeah, she ate and left no crumbs.

And that is now so popular that it has been shortened to she ate or she ate that, which means, oh, you did that really well. And that's actually one that's so popular now that I've even I have heard it in the wild. So it's really going into the just the normal regular lexicon.

Cool. No, I haven't heard that one yet. That's interesting. Eight. Yeah. Eight. And then I saw one in your newsletter. It was four plus four means good, which I was like, where does that come from? And that's exactly it because four plus four equals eight. Therefore, she ate that four plus four. Oh.

Amazing how it's transformed so much. It reminds me of Cockney rhyming slang in a way. It is a little bit similar, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. The way it takes like two steps forward.

from what it actually wants to say to say what it wants to say. Yeah. Yeah. So do you know how do you use four plus four? Is that something like you text back when someone does something good? Yeah. Yeah. I would say that's exactly it. Yeah. Okay. But don't ask me these questions. I only know the words and the definitions.

And then I have to, I like getting things right. I like getting them right in my newsletter. So what I also very often do is I go on Reddit and I actually ask people, how do you use this? How do you actually put it in a sentence? Which is fun with the word skibbity because nobody knows what it means and nobody knows how to put it in a sentence. And I just asked just the other day and I didn't really get particularly good replies. It's just, it seems to be very ambiguous and very strange sometimes.

But you said one of your kids still uses it all the time. No, one of my kids used it once. Once in her life and it shocked me to my core. But then she never did it again and I keep waiting. I keep waiting. Is she going to do it again? But no. I'm surprised that one has stuck around for as long as it has. It has, yeah.

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So what more? Those, oh yeah, and I have because I also in my newsletter, I don't only do slang, I also do neologisms. So new words that have not been brought into society by young people per se, but maybe by scientists. And I really like the little word anthrobot.

which is a little teeny tiny robot made out of human cells. And I'm not sure if they've got it to work really well yet, but the idea is that the human body won't reject it. So you can send these little robots up into your body to fix things, fixing neural things in your brain, I think is the idea. But what I like about it is it's such a nice robot

word because of that anthro, of course, means human in ancient Greek, which you can see in a word like anthropology, which is the study of humans. So anthro-bot. And I just think whichever scientist who probably usually does biochemistry or whatever, I think he or she did a really good job to think of that. Yeah, it's an elegant word. Yeah, it's nice. Elegant word.

Yeah. So one of the things I thought was interesting that you pointed out in your newsletter is the word nosh. I thought it was interesting that that had a different meaning, slightly different meaning in British English and American English. Yeah. So I am going to be very interested in what you tell me because these are the things that I find. And as you can hear, I am British. So for me, what nosh means is I think about 50 years ago, people would have

used it as a normal word nowadays it's more of a joke word because it's old-fashioned but if somebody said hey shall we have some nosh um i would take that as dinner like that would be a warm meal on a plate so what does it mean to you is that the same

I think I would use it more to mean a snack. Yeah. Like a cheese board, cheese and crackers or something like that. Yeah, that would never be nosh to me. No, it has to be something preferably like mashed potatoes with sausages or something like that. That would be nosh. Yeah. You're making me hungry. Yeah.

So another interesting entry you had was about tarnation, which you said is American for eternal damnation. But most Americans don't actually know that. And I can confirm that I am American and I did not know that. So tell me more about that word.

Yeah. So what's great about that word is not the word in itself, but the fact that people think that the Looney Tunes character, Jossamite Sam, said this all the time. So I think he's the one with the big cowboy hat and the red beard. I would say that he's Yosemite Sam. Oh!

There we go. See, American English. It is something I don't speak. Yosemite. Yosemite is a national park. Of course it is. Yeah. Oh, that's adorable.

I think I have been saying Yosemite for a long, long time. That is great. I love that. Okay. I love that so much. Okay. So everyone thinks Yosemite Sam said that, but he didn't? He didn't say it very often. So I think a certain language scientist actually went in and watched all

the cartoons and found it like twice but not at all like you'd expect it to be like at least once every episode and he hardly ever said it

This is called the Mandela Effect. It's when lots of people in the world think that something cultural was a certain way, but actually it's not. We just all made it up. The other famous example is that the Berenstain Bears – now, am I pronouncing that right?

I'm not sure. I'm not culturally literate enough to know about the right bears. So the Berenstain bears, they were never very popular in the UK, but I gather they were popular in America. My children have a few of their books.

And it's actually spelt beer and stain bears with an AI. But everybody, if you ask them to write it down, they will write it with an E-I. And then when they see that it's actually with an AI, they're like, no, that's not right. That's not what it was.

But it was, and it's the Mandela effect. And the other nice example, I think, is, well, I can ask you, the Monopoly man. So the elderly gentleman with the top hat on the Monopoly game. Does he have, how can I say this, glasses or an eyepiece?

Oh, I think he has a monocle. Yeah, so he actually doesn't. So if you look at that, everybody thinks he has a monocle. And when people dress up as him, they put a monocle on. But actually, if you if you look at Monopoly, the game, he doesn't. He just has two eyes. He's not even wearing glasses.

The Mandela effect I'm aware of is about the word dilemma. So lots of people, including me, think they were taught in school to spell dilemma with an N. So D-I-L-E-M-N-A. But it's spelled with two

two M's and nobody's ever been able to find proof that any school book or cartoon or anything anywhere ever taught it with an N. But lots and lots of people think they were taught to spell it with an N. I've talked to people from my high school and they also think they were taught to spell it with an N. We all do, but there's just literally no proof anywhere that this ever happened. That is so fascinating. I'd never heard that one before. Yeah, it's wild. Yeah.

So tarnation is one of those. Yosemite Sam never said it. And actually, I have to say, I feel bad now. I corrected your pronunciation and I always say that's rude, but I was just so delighted. I was so thrilled and delighted to hear the cute way you were saying it. I didn't mean it in a bad way. No, no, please, please do. And do you know what? So maybe this is my, I'm not sure if this is my own little Mandela effect, but

I have heard the word Yosemite, of course, in films and series. And I have read the word for me, Yosemite, and it never clicked with me that it was the same place.

There's another name that just blowed my mind. Those I think are called misles because it's when people read a word and learn it that way and don't recognize the pronunciation with the spelling. So it comes from the word misled. So people think that the word it's misled, M-I-S-L-E-D. Yeah. People think the word misled is misled.

because they've only read it and they've never heard it pronounced out loud in conjunction with reading it. And so they think it's, it's misled instead. And it's, there's a whole class of words that people mispronounce that way because they've only read them. It's so interesting. And it just goes to show it's people who read a lot, right? People who read a lot as kids as well. I was telling my son, one of my favorite books when I was little was The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis. It's the first book in the Narnia series.

series. And I remember reading that and thinking it was Magic Ian.

And I read the whole book thinking that this word was Magic Ian, the Magic Ian's nephew. So did you think Ian was a name, like the Magic Ian? No, I thought, no, a Magic Ian is somebody who does magic. I mean, I was only eight, probably. And yeah, and then I think probably two years later, I heard magician pronounced. And as I was reading it, and I was like, oh.

Oh, yeah, that's a misal. But then also, actually, it reminds me of a mondegreen, too. So, yeah, there's a famous poem where someone talks about...

and I forget what it's about, but the line is, and laid him on the green. It's about someone who died. And the woman is a child who I think eventually became a famous writer, interpreted it as Lady Mondegreen. And so she imagined this dramatic lady dying. And that's where we get another word for these kind of mishearings or misunderstandings. Yeah, such fun. So much fun with words. So much fun. Yay! Cool.

Another one of my favorite words from your newsletter was, oh, personality hire. So I thought this was fun. Someone who is hired just because people like them and not so much for their skills. I don't know how often this happens.

I heard this one and I immediately started thinking of a few people in my office where I thought, ooh, they might be personality hires. Because I think it does make sense, right? You do want a few people in the office who create a good atmosphere. Everybody's just kind of...

grumbling to each other, it's no good and nobody gets any work done. So yeah, personality hire is one of those new HR words and HR, human resources, is one of those areas that give the world a lot of new words.

Yeah. And some of them stick and some of them don't. But yeah, HR is very productive. One I still remember and we used jokingly from probably 20 or 30 years ago now and from consulting agencies, they talked about counseling someone out as firing them. They were counseled out. Yeah.

We still use that in my family. Oh, do you want to get counseled out? But then what would that mean exactly that you have like deep conversations with somebody and tell them to leave? Yeah, I think it just means you're fired. Yeah.

Maybe you were canceled out. Maybe you had a meeting about it if you were lucky. Yeah. Oh, goodness. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to decide if personality hire is meant positively or negatively when it's used in the world because I could see that being used as sort of a euphemism for someone who doesn't have any skills or is bad at their job, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a really good point. So, when I came across it, it was a positive word. I think I came across it in like an article by HR people saying this is maybe something you should do. You should get a personality hire. But yeah, if I'm in the office and Fred from next door and he sent a stupid email again and I say to my colleague, oh yeah, he's just the personality hire.

Yeah, I can imagine it, totally imagine it being used that way. Another one, this one, heaven help us, because I will never do this, but fridgescaping? Yeah. Fridgescaping. Yeah. Oh, that one made me go, oh dear, I hope nobody ever looks at my fridge. Yeah, so it's from landscaping. Now, apparently, I didn't even know this, but landscaping had already been used to also make the word tablescaping, which is to make your table look

really nice for Christmas dinner maybe to make it look lovely, which I can understand. That's something that I actually do. But then fridgescaping is apparently to make your fridge look really nice and to make sure that everything in there is colour coordinated and I don't know,

put from large to small in some kind of aesthetically pleasing way. And yes, I don't want anything to do with it. No, no, I guess, I guess I imagine it must come from, you know, Instagram influencers, people who are doing cooking video. I hope, I hope those are the only people spending effort on that. I think I have seen that there are indeed FridgeScaping influencers who will

show you their fridge and say, look at these special plastic boxes that I have that make the colours of the strawberries inside look just so. And oh, God. I'm glad that hasn't made it into my algorithm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not my cup of tea, definitely.

Another one that I just loved was plogging. So this is picking up trash and recycling while you are jogging. And you said it was the Swedish word plåka, which means to pick. And tell us more about plogging. Yeah. So apparently it's a lawyer in Chile who does it with his dog and aunt.

I'm not sure how come we know about him. I very much assume he's been filming himself and putting himself on YouTube. I'm not actually sure about that. But yeah, plogging. So picking up litter while jogging. So I think that's great. This is much better than fridgescaping. Let's all do plogging. Come on.

Yeah, let's spend our effort picking up recycling and trash instead of making the inside of our refrigerators look better. One thing I loved about the article about the plogger is he tracked not only the miles that he was running, but the amount of trash he picked up.

You know, so there's, you know, we're all so much about tracking everything we do now, our steps and our miles and everything. I thought, that's a good thing to track, the amount of garbage you pick up and, you know, making the world a better place, a cleaner place. Yeah, it's really cool.

He even trained his dog to bring him cans and bottles. So he trained his dog to bring him recyclables that were lying on the ground. I knew there was something with the dog. Thank you, Mignon, for remembering what it was with the dog. Yes. Yeah, it's brilliant. Yeah. And then to finish up the main segment, you wrote a piece about AI ghost words that I thought was really fascinating. Can you talk about how you discovered AI?

AI ghost words and what they are? Yeah. So as I said at the top, I work with Google Alerts to help to alert me to new words and new slang. So I have a Google Alert set up for the word neologism. So if anybody writes an article and posts it online and it has the word neologism in it, then Google will send me an email to alert me. And for a while there,

Probably sort of mid last year, I was suddenly getting a ton of fake articles about fake words. And the one that really stood out to me was lurstjerk. And the reason I'm pronouncing it like that is because it's an unpronounceable word. So the beginning of it is just a string of consonants. So it's L-R-T-S-J-E.

which you can't say. So I was quite clear that this is not a real word.

But then I found one article that said, this is a new kind of fitness regime. And another article that said, this is a new kind of linguistic phenomenon. And oh, I think seven more articles with seven different meanings for this word. And I thought, what is going on? And then when I took a better look at it, what I realized was that all of these articles had been written by AI, right?

Now, I read a lot of stuff written by AI and after a while you sort of start recognizing it. How do you recognize an AI written article? I mean, Mignon, you know way more about this than I do because I just love your newsletter AI SideQuest, which taught me so much.

So you can't recognize it with AI checkers, which as an English teacher hurts my heart. But unfortunately, there's no way to put it into software and to have the software tell you this was written by AI or this was written by a human. So the only thing I can say, yeah, it's AI texts are terrible.

They're a bit too frilly and they're a bit too much about nothing, I would say. And they've got lots and lots of headings in between the paragraphs. And it's just so much fluff. I'm not sure if a human being could ever manage to write so much fluff. And I mean, we're calling it slop nowadays, right? Which I think really hits the right mark. Right.

So, yeah, so what is happening is that people are just pumping out articles for the internet

I imagine they're doing this for ad revenue. I'm not actually 100% sure if that's true, but they're just taking anything that people are searching on Google and just saying, okay, apparently people are searching this, so let's just pump out articles. Let's just have AI write 100 articles about this. And my theory about these words, because it wasn't just language,

Lurtz jerk, but there were quite a few words like this where it just wasn't a word, but there was still an article about what this thing was, is that these are typos that people are making when they are searching online. And, you know, they're just maybe mashing their keyboard and pressing enter. And these lists of things that people have been searching online are maybe being sold and people are having AI write articles about them.

And at the time, I thought, oh, dear, this is dangerous, because if a young person with maybe not such a big lexicon yet reads this, then they're going to believe it because it comes across as completely true. However, this article that you saw of mine was about a year old now, I think.

Google is doing a good job. So I don't know what they do, but I have noticed that Google is incredibly good at filtering between human written stuff and AI written stuff and that these articles, which are just complete gunk, Google Alerts, for example, isn't sending them to me anymore. So they are managing to filter something.

Which makes me happy. That's great news. Yeah, I've been very concerned about the pollution of the information sphere from so much AI slop on the internet. And it used to show up in search. Yeah. So nothing, I never saw anything with Lertjerk. So now there's even, because I was researching this just before this podcast, and there's even Lertjerk.com. Yeah.

And if people want to see what I mean when I say AI slop and just hundreds of articles being pumped out, then do go to LurtzJerk.com. It won't hurt you. I didn't see that there wasn't any dangerous ads or anything like that. It's really just, I don't know why it exists. I don't know. But it's completely fake from top to bottom, like nothing about it.

has anything to do with humans. It's amazing. Yeah. That's fascinating. I think your theory makes a lot of sense though, because I can imagine when the cost of producing content goes to almost zero with, with AI, if people can turn out a thousand articles a day and you get into that, you get into that long tail, right? Like,

In the past, people maybe were looking at the most searched terms, and now they're looking at all searched terms and trying to create blog posts that will attract just minuscule amounts of traffic for half a cent of ad revenue. And so you get nonsense. Things that, you know, someone's cat walked across the keyboard and typed something into the Google search box. That's really what it seems like, yes.

Amazing. Now I've not heard that before. That is fascinating. Hedwin, thank you so much. If you're a Grammarpalooza subscriber, stick around because actually in the bonus segment, we're going to talk about Hedwin's translation work, translating difficult to translate words, and we'll have her three book recommendations. And it's going to be fascinating for the main segment listeners. This is the end of the show. And thank you so much for listening. Hedwin Newton, where can people find you? At

So I have a newsletter. It's on Substack. It's called English in Progress. So just Google English in Progress or English in Progress Substack. That is probably the best place to find me. I am reasonably active on Blue Sky and I want to become more active on Threads, but I'm not quite there yet. So Blue Sky or Substack are the places to go. I'll give you a warm welcome. And we'll put those links in the show notes. Thank you so much.

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