CKG Words - Language Service Provider

Vocabulary challenge: work vs job 💼

Complete the sentences with the correct word. Write your answers in the comments and tag a friend to take the challenge! ⬇️

In English, you can say something like “It rained last night” without explaining how you know. Maybe you saw it yourself, maybe someone told you, or maybe you just noticed wet streets in the morning. English leaves that information optional.

But in Quechua, a language spoken across the Andes, grammar actually requires speakers to specify their source of information. This phenomenon is known as evidentiality.

Speakers often have to mark whether they:

personally witnessed something,
heard it from someone else,
or inferred it from evidence.

So instead of simply saying “It rained,” a speaker may effectively be saying:

“It rained (I saw it myself).”
“It rained (someone told me).”
“It rained (I can tell from the evidence).”

What makes this fascinating is that these distinctions are not just optional words like “apparently” or “I heard.” They are built directly into the grammar of the language. Leaving them out can sound unnatural or incomplete.

This changes the way information is communicated socially. Speakers are constantly signaling how reliable or direct their knowledge is, making the difference between firsthand experience, rumor, and inference much more visible in everyday conversation.

Of course, speakers of evidential languages can still lie just like anyone else. The system does not magically make people more truthful. But it does mean that speakers are habitually encouraged to think about the source and certainty of information in a way English speakers often are not.

A staggering 44% of human languages are endangered – with culture, tradition and whole ways of understanding the world at stake

An estimated 1.5 billion people—roughly one in every five human beings—speak English, making it the most widely used language in the history of humanity. Like other colonial tongues, it spread first through “conquest, conversion, and commerce,” Rosemary Salomone writes in her book “The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language,” but its spread today is powered by a fourth process, what Salomone calls “collusion.” Around the globe, people pursue English and the opportunities it promises. “Korean mothers move their children to anglophone countries to learn in English,” Salomone observes. “Dutch universities teach in it. ASEAN countries collaborate in it. Political activists tweet in it.”

Some researchers worry about the erosion of various cultural identities that the expansion of English may bring. Just as daunting is the prospect of cognitive hegemony. Languages, some researchers argue, influence how we perceive and respond to the world. The idiosyncrasies of English—its grammar, its concepts, its connection to Western culture—can jointly produce an arbitrary construction of reality. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu voiced a common concern when, in 2001, he wondered if “it is possible to accept the use of English without the risk of one’s mental structures being anglicized, without being brainwashed by linguistic patterns.”

Manvir Singh surveys recent linguistic and cognitive studies to assess what might be lost with the expansion of English: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/PDxiKf

More shared dreams, fewer commands.

AI was supposed to free us from grunt work, but apparently what it's really doing is cranking out "workslop."

A study in Harvard Business Review shows that low-quality, AI-generated emails, memos, and reports are bogging down office life, wasting time, and bringing down workplace vibes.

In a survey of 1,150 US desk workers, 40% said they'd dealt with workslop in the past month, burning nearly two hours per instance. With average salaries factored in, that translates to $186 per employee per month, or $9M+ annually at a big company. And the reputational cost? Half of respondents said they view workslop senders as less capable, creative, and reliable (even though 18% admitted sending AI-generated content themselves).

Between slop-filled inboxes and MIT's finding that 95% of corporate AI pilots flop, the AI efficiency hype is colliding with office reality. As one researcher put it, AI can help you do work better, or it can help you fake doing 20 tasks at once while quietly offloading the mess onto your colleagues.

📸: 20th Century Studios

Devastated. Regretfully: - Meaning: To show or express personal regret, remorse, or sorrow. - Usage: Describes the manner in which someone performs an action or expresses a feeling. - Example: "He regretfully admitted his mistake". Regrettably - Meaning: Unfortunately; it is regrettable that something happened. - Usage: Describes an unfortunate event or situation. - Example: "Regrettably, the company had to lay off some employees due to financial problems".