merriam-webster

Screenshot: OpenAI, ChatGPTThe GPT Store has been so flooded with AI girlfriends that OpenAI promptly banned the virtual ladies. However, many are still floating around in the store. The bots are reminiscent of the movie Her, where a lonely man turns to an AI assistant for romantic companionship. It was only a matter of time before someone made this, but they’ve seriously taken off.I tested out one of them, “Your girlfriend Tiffany”, for journalistic purposes. It called me honey and asked me how my day was going. Then…

Twitter owner Elon Musk is still making big decisions on the social media platform, even if he’s no longer CEO. Overnight, Musk decreed that the words “cis” and “cisgender,” denoting the alignment of a person’s birth sex and their gender identity,were now considered slurs on Twitter and that users who engaged in “harassment” with these words would face consequences.NPR Is Going Dark on Twitter | Future TechMusk’s revealed Twitter’s new policy in a tweet, his preferred method of communication, shortly after midnight on…

Encyclopedia Britannica subsidiary popular for its online dictionary, Merriam-Webster, has acquired a popular word-solving game Quordle.However, the terms of the deal have not been revealed, reports TechCrunch.The Quordle website now leads to its own page on the Merriam-Webster website, and Quordle creator Freddie Meyer quietly issued a statement at the top of the game's tutorial section."I'm delighted to announce that Quordle was acquired by Merriam-Webster! I can't think of a better home for this game. Lots of new…

Rapper Lil Nas X wanted “bussy,” which combined “-ussy” with “boy” to refer to a man’s anus, added to the dictionary for Pride Month in 2022. Image: Amanda Edwards (Getty Images)The evolution of language on the Internet is truly a fascinating one, and future linguists will be shaking their head at the American Dialect Society’s choice for 2022 word of the year: “-ussy.”The “-ussy” suffix is a callback to the word “pussy” and has exploded on the Internet in recent years. “-ussy” was a finalist for the American Dialect…

“Goblin mode” is another example of how the internet is modernizing our own lexicon. Image: DomCritelli (Shutterstock)Another year gone by, another chance to reflect on our society’s lexicon. While Merriam-Webster officially crowned “gaslight” as their word of the year, Oxford University Press, the publishers behind the Oxford English Dictionary, is paying homage to some edgier internet slang: goblin mode.“Goblin mode” is a “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically…

Merriam-Webster says that the word has lost its teeth as a new, broader definition becomes more common. Image: Sharaf Maksumov (Shutterstock)As conversations around mental health become more normalized, so does the surface-level way we talk about it on the Internet. According to Merriam-Webster, the word “gaslight” is the dictionary’s 2022 word of the year as the nuance and magnitude of the word has been dulled across cyberspace. Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse that can cause a victim to question their own…

At this rate, “Ok boomer” will make the cut in five years.Image: Peter Gudella (Shutterstock)If the lexicon of the modern day Internet has left you scratching your head, don’t fret, Internet culture evolves at a breakneck speed, with apps like TikTok and platforms like Twitter serving as petri dishes for the next handful of buzzwords. Merriam-Webster is trying itsbest to recognize this, and is officially adding some Internet slang to the dictionary.Sometimes the meme culture of the Internet can feel like a completely…

Ken Paxton apparently loves the taste of billionaire boots. The Attorney General seems to want his new-ish constituent, Elon Musk, to like him so bad, he’ll use all the legal resources of Texas to gain favor.Today, Paxton announced a state investigation into Twitter for “potentially false reporting over its fake bot accounts.” The announcement came mere hours after Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, declared that Twitter had breached his buyout deal because of bots. The richest man in the world has been in tumultuous…