![]() ![]() that causes a delay in reading time,” Syrett said. “If I say to you, ‘Jane walked into the living room, Jane picked up a book, Jane started to read the book’ . . . This is a cognitive phenomenon, part of the way human minds process language. What makes these substitutions so sublime? Kristen Syrett, a professor of linguistics at Rutgers University, told me that people are instinctively drawn to second mentions because of a well-documented concept called the repeated-name penalty. “He compares himself to Moses, makes car noises and praises the cartoon porker.” “Hands up anybody who’s been to Peppa Pig World?” he asked, before then describing her as “a pig that looks like a Picasso-like hair dryer.” “PM accused of losing the plot,” the Metro wrote. “ ‘Porcine,’ ‘bovine,’ ‘ovine,’ all those kind of descriptors.” She runs the account with her husband, and added that he “really likes when animals are called, like, ‘porker.’ ” He was delighted by a recent “porcine” twofer that happened when the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, suddenly lost track of his notes during a speech and started talking about Peppa Pig. “You’ve got animal ones, and sport ones, food ones,” she read out. Her eyes went into a kind of deep, glassy focus, on Zoom, as she scrolled down a long list. The anonymous admin told me that, in her near-decade running it, she has developed a fledgling system of taxonomy for second mentions. The moon, described by the Mirror, as “ the tide-changing rock.” The Sun describing a sex doll as a “ lust vessel.” The account has become what linguists would call a corpus, a living repository of language. The second mentions often border on poetry. “the former Fresh Prince”).Īnd although the account deals, on the surface, with journalistic excess, it’s really a deeper celebration of language. “ the ubiquitous particles”), the social-media-centric, video-based online platform NowThis News (a swan that blocked a police car was “ the feathered obstacle”), and the British news channel Sky News (Will Smith . . . “ the annual tradition”), Radio France Internationale (Microplastics . . . A few examples from the past weeks drew from the Boston Globe (St. The two admins and founders of the account told me that they must remain anonymous, because one currently works at a national media company in London, and is thus very much tweeting from inside the house. It is crowdsourced from its readers, or from proud writers themselves. Unlike some other journalism-adjacent language-based accounts-for example, New New York Times, which tweets when a word appears in the Gray Lady for the first time-Second Mentions is not a bot. Some greatest hits: the Times of London describing “tea” as “ the bitter brown infusion.” The Guardian describing a fox who ran onto a soccer field as “ the four-legged interloper.” The New York Times describing Grumpy Cat, the Internet meme, as “ the sourpuss with the piercing look of contempt.” (In the cat’s obituary, no less.) Even this magazine, last year, describing electric scooters as “ the long-necked, flat-bottomed machines.” Cheese, if you are saying “cheese” too much, can be “ the popular dairy product.” A “pair of armadillos,” who, for some reason, were put on a diet? “ The oval-shaped duo.” The account is addictively funny, and its discoveries are-variously-charming, insane, perfect. (A “second mention”-also known as a second reference-is the account’s name for these ways of avoiding repetition.) Take, for example, Adele, who is frequently “the singer Adele” on first mention, and then maybe “ the Tottenham soul-pop titan” on second mention. The account tracks the ways that writers strive to express the same thing differently, with examples taken mostly from newspapers and magazines around the world. News writing, by necessity, brings you up against repetition as an occupational hazard, and the account was shown to me by an editor, who shared it with a self-aware, nerdy, professional glee. I first encountered Second Mentions in 2017, when I was working as a reporter in Sydney, Australia. ![]() Since 2013, the preëminent collector of variation has been a Twitter account, run by a British couple, called Second Mentions. Variation, and how to achieve it, has obsessed people across languages and cultures-the thesaurus has been cashing this check for centuries. In English, this impulse was termed “elegant variation,” in 1906, by the legendary style guru and pedant H. W. ![]() The poets of antiquity, who were constantly reciting their heroes’ names, made sure to have elaborate alternatives: “the son of Peleus” for Achilles or the “man of pain” for Odysseus. Something in the nature of the human ear makes repetition sound strange, or off-in writing, it can look like a mistake. The idea that it’s bad to say the same thing twice has been around for a long time. ![]()
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