In its bid to become the most poorly run city on the West Coast, Los Angeles extended its eviction moratorium once again this time because of the seasonal flu.
A fun way to mark the time, certainly more fun than by watching the lame word of the year features from English-language dictionaries that last week’s Word of the Week covered, is to keep a running list of new words you learn. The typical 2-year-old will have picked up a thousand words and will have begun to figure out pronouns. By 5, he or she will have expanded that vocabulary to some 10,000 words.
Scientists have sounded the alarm about artificial intelligence for years and with good reason. The increased dependence on automation, whether it comes in the form of a self-driving vehicle or a tactical robocop, raises important questions about whether a machine can do the job of a human and whether we should even let it try.
The number of empty jobs employers are trying to fill has fallen from a record-high 11.9 million in March to 10.3 million. Good progress, but that is more than twice the 5 million job openings that were normally available pre-pandemic.
It’s getting to be that time of year when we try to think back about what this orbit of the sun all meant. That means looking back for some. And for dictionaries, it means the word of the year. Merriam-Webster’s word of the year runner-up a decade ago was a former “Word of the Week”: malarkey. In 2012, then-Vice President Joe Biden used the charmingly old-timey term, later to be part of his primary campaign sloganeering, in his debate with Paul Ryan. 2022’s word of the year from Merriam-Webster (and another previous “Word of the Week”) is a synonym to malarkey (or at least a related concept): gaslighting. According to the American dictionary publisher, “in this age of misinformation of ‘fake news,’ conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time. A driver of disorientation and mistrust, gaslighting is ‘the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.’”