Words of the Day 2026-05-26

Patient readers, if there are words you would like me to look into, please request with a comment or the contact form. —lambert

On this day (1963): EMI rush releases The Beatles’ album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in London and select markets in the UK, goes to #1 for 22 weeks in the UK and 15 weeks in the US. “I read the news today oh boy”:

Earbud. From my OED app: “/ˈɪəbʌd / ▸ noun (earbuds) a very small headphone that is worn inside the ear.” • Not a lot of distributaries here.

“Take your AirPods out” [Molly’s Substack (oh the virality; “earbud here, but I went to the source)]. “AirPods in. World off. On the train, a woman asked me a question. I didn’t hear her, my headphones were in, but she had already gotten my attention so I looked up. We made eye contact. Warm eyes. On the older side. Cute glasses. One AirPod out. ‘Were you just traveling?’ ‘Yeah I was!’ AirPod back in. Back to my phone. She said something else. I was confused because I had already answered and, in my mind, that felt like a clear end to the conversation. I looked up again (both AirPods still in) and she repeated herself. ‘Where did you go?’ One AirPod out. ‘I was in Spain.’ Her eyes lit up with this childlike wonder that reminded me of my grandma - one of my favorite things about her, the way she still sees the world with so much possibility. ‘Spain? I’ve never been to Spain but I’ve always wanted to go. Was it amazing?’ Something about the way she said it made me take both AirPods out and put them in my case. She had my full attention. ‘Yeah,” I said. “It was really good. I travelled for work.’ And just like that, we started talking.” And: “My mind was racing a bit. I’m 27. I’ve been lucky enough to travel without anxiety and freely for years. She’s 81, still wanting to see everything, still figuring out how. I said: “This sounds crazy since we don’t really know each other but if you ever want to go somewhere, I’d be happy to fly with you.’ I meant it. She looked at me - she knew I meant it. We kept talking. We’re having dinner next week.” • Aww!

“The Haters Guide To Post-Modernism” [Ian Welsh]. “To be read while listening to the Beastie Boys, Sabotage, at full tilt. Speakers, not earbuds you nit-wit.” • If they took their g*ddamned earbuds out, they could hear me yelling at them to get offa my lawn!

“Wired Earbuds Are Back. Here Are 6 of the Best Pairs to Buy Right Now” [Rolling Stone]. “Ear tips: All of the wired earbuds we’re recommending have gummy ear tips, which means they create a tight seal around your inner ear. The insulation improves their bass performance, prevents sound from leaking out, and reduces the amount of sound from the outside world from coming in. Wired earbuds don’t have active noise cancellation, so passive noise cancellation performance is important. All of our recommendations come with multiple ear tips, so you can find the set that fits best in your ears.” • Gummy ear tips? I dunno….s

Dad Joke of the Day: “Sir, I’m afraid your DNA is backwards.” And?

Text. From my OED app: “/tɛkst / ▸ noun 1 a book or other written or printed work, regarded in terms of its content rather than its physical form: a text which explores pain and grief. ▪ a piece of written or printed material regarded as conveying the authentic or primary form of a particular work: in some passages it is difficult to establish the original text. ▪ [mass noun] written or printed words, typically forming a connected piece of work: stylistic features of journalistic text. ▪ [mass noun] Computing data in the form of words or alphabetic characters. 2 [in singular] the main body of a book or other piece of writing, as distinct from other material such as notes, appendices, and illustrations: the pictures are clear and relate well to the text. ▪ a script or libretto. 3 a written work chosen or set as a subject of study: too much concentration on set texts can turn pupils against reading. ▪ a textbook: an organic chemistry text. ▪ a passage from the Bible or other religious work, especially when used as the subject of a sermon. ▪ a subject or theme for a discussion or exposition: he took as his text the fact that Australia is paradise. 4 an electronic communication sent and received by mobile phone; a text message: just give us a call or send us a text. 5 [mass noun] (also text-hand) fine, large handwriting, used especially for manuscripts. ▸ verb [with object] send (someone) a text message: if she was going to go she would have texted us. – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old Northern French texte, from Latin textus ‘tissue, literary style’ (in medieval Latin, ‘Gospel’), from text- ‘woven’, from the verb texere.” • Woven indeed!

“The Golden Age continues?” [Mark Liberman, Language Log]. From Liberman’s 2011 Henry Sweet lecture: ‘Our telescopes and microscopes, our alembics and Pneumatical Engines, are today’s vast archives of digital text and speech, along with new analysis techniques and inexpensive networked computation. However, the scientific use of these new instruments remains mainly exploratory and potential. There are several critical problems for which we have at best partial solutions; and like our 17th-century predecessors, we need to unlearn some old ideas on the way to learning new ones.’ For the author’s speech at the forthcoming Speech Prosody 2026 conference, this interesting bit of foreshadowing: “There has also been some theoretical progress, including especially greater freedom from bad theories promoted by political methods.” • Fireworks to come!

“Their Phones Were Stolen in London. Then the Threats Started” [New York Times (via)]. “The crime Alex Pikula reported to the police was one they had heard before: An e-bike rider had zoomed past as Mr. Pikula left a theater in London’s West End, ripping his phone from his hands. It was frustrating, Mr. Pikula thought, but that was that. He was wrong. His mother soon started receiving strange text, claiming to have her son’s emails and bank information. Then she received a video of a man brandishing a gun. Then came threats of sexual assault and death. ‘I know who you are and where you live,’ read one, full of obscenities and typos. ‘I’ve killed or far less than a phone before,’ it went on. ‘We will see if you value your life over this phone.’ All of the messages wanted her to do one thing: unlink her son’s Apple ID from his stolen phone.” • YIkes!

“Orange you glad I didn’t say emoji” [Six Colors]. “The other night, using Messages on my iPhone to send a good-night text to my spouse and older child, off on a brief getaway to the coast, I noticed that orange highlighting had invaded my message! I text a couple of friends: ‘Have you seen this before?’ One had not; the other remembered it vaguely, but had no idea why it had occurred. Some googling later, I discovered that Apple had added the feature recently…on the geologic scale. This feature, which I’ll explain in greater depth, first appeared in iOS 10, released in fall 2016.” • It turns out that the oranga highlights allow you to select text to replace it with emojis.

All of which reminded me (via) to download the latest edition of the venerable BBEdit text editor (“It doesn’t suck.®”) (via), which promises “Total Control Over Text.” • Total? Would it were so!

Fortune: “Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time. —Mark Twain, “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar”

Retrenchment . From my OED app: “/rɪˈtrɛn(t)ʃm(ə)nt / ▸ noun [mass noun] the reduction of costs or spending in response to economic difficulty: this period of retrenchment will see companies shed staff [count noun] closures and retrenchments have become the order of the day. ▪ Australian English / South African English the action of making an employee redundant: he ordered the retrenchment of 420 civil servants. ▪ formal reduction in the extent or quantity of something: the retrenchment of the welfare state.

“In shift, Trump announces deployment of 5,000 US troops to Poland” [Military Times]. “Trump, following a war of words with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, announced a retrenchment of the American military footprint in Germany. The Pentagon initially said in April that it would pull roughly 5,000 troops out of the country, but Trump intimated that a substantially bigger drawdown was under consideration.” • So all we did was move 5,000 troops closer to Russia? (Not sure how you “retrench” a “footprint,” but never mind.

“”Faithless and Foolish.” How a Young George Washintgon Failed Upward Into an Unpaid Internship” [Literary Hub]. “[Conrad] Weiser recorded the conversation in his journal. ‘Tanacharisson, otherwise called the Half King, complained very much of the behaviour of Col. Washington to him (though in a very moderate way, saying the colonel was a good natured man but had no experience), saying that he took upon him to command the Indians as his slaves and would have them every day upon the out scout and attack the enemy by themselves, and that he would by no means take advice from the Indian.” And: “Fortunately for Washington, the Indians’ opinions weren’t heard or heeded in Williamsburg. Yet even while the burgesses commended Washington, they broke up his regiment, as part of imperial retrenchment. The parts that remained were commanded by captains. If Washington wanted to stay in the militia, he’d have to accept a demotion. He didn’t and so resigned. He resumed civilian life. But not for long. When he learned Braddock was coming, with force to accomplish what he had failed to, the twenty three year old former colonel wanted back in.” • To be fair, I don’t recall taking advice from anyone at 23. xs

“The case for Manchesterism” [The New Statesman]. “Brett Christophers has documented the rentier transformation of the British economy: the conversion of essential infrastructure into asset classes optimised for stable, inflation-linked, monopoly returns with minimal capital expenditure. JW Mason has traced the investment strike at the heart of mature financialised economies: capital managing its claims financially rather than building productive capacity. Isabella Weber has shown how systemically significant prices controlled by private actors cascade shocks through the whole economy in ways monetary policy cannot contain. Gøsta Esping-Andersen named the principle the welfare state instituted at the demand side – decommodification – that has yet to be applied to the supply side. The picture is consistent: in mature financialised economies, the structural features of private ownership of essential sectors systematically subordinate provision to extraction. The retrenchment of public control has created an economy with a particular pathology. It extracts where it should invest. It fragments where it should coordinate. It prices for profit where it should provide for use. The result is a compounding crisis – of living costs, productive capacity, and public finances – that is at root a supply-side crisis.” • If I understand all this correctly, the extraction of profit vs. the extraction of rent is contested (after all, the rent has to come from somewhere). That said, if you sell your labor to survive, you’ve got to reproduce your ability to do that, and that seems to get more and more difficult. Hence “affordability” crisis. Maybe the abundance pundits should watch their entrenching tools?