Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this installment, Sy Montgomery recounts her poultry husbandry journey, showing us that the “chickenverse” is a deeper and more interesting place than we imagined.

augury

“The word ‘augury’ comes from the Greek word meaning ‘bird talk’, for to understand the language of birds was to understand the gods.”

Montgomery’s chickens communicated with her and each other through elaborate noises that conveyed specific meanings. For more on how birds communicate, check out Barbara Ballentine and Jeremy Hyman’s Bird Talk: An Exploration of Avian Communication.

crop

“When Peanut was a year and a half old she developed a blockage in her crop–the muscular compartment where birds store and soften their food.”

The average chicken’s crop can hold about an ounce and a half of food.

ermine

“There was the skunk, and another time a mink, another time a neighbor’s dog and once an ermine. The tiny ferocious weasel in its snowy winter coat had slipped through our barn’s foundation and decapitated one of our hens.”

Keeping live chickens is an invitation to meet the local predators and Montgomery encountered plenty of wild animals eager for chicken dinners. The ermine (also called a stoat) is a common visitor to chicken coops across Europe and North America.

overpet

“Then it starts all over again, until the hen has had enough and has reached what we call “overpet.” She fluffs her feathers, shakes, and, fortified by affection, strolls off to continue her chicken day.”

Many animals have less-patient responses than chickens to overstimulation (sometimes called sensory overload).

sex crouch

“And just as the hens always do with me, she assumed her distinctive squatting posture. This is a well-known chicken behavior usually directed at a member of her own species. It is actually known as a “sex crouch.” It’s a position that a chicken normally uses to make it easy for a rooster to mount her.”

Hens will begin showing this behavior (called lordosis in mammals) when they are mature enough to start laying. When chickens see a human they know, they might squat in this position, hoping to be picked up or petted.

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this book, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, two of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023, explain how AI works (and why it often doesn’t), explore AI’s limits and risks, and outline where AI is a useful tool and where it’s not just empty hype but actually harmful.

algospeak

“To appreciate how common it is for regular users to try to evade content moderation, consider algospeak: words or phrases that are widely understood and adopted by social media users as a way to avoid being mistakenly penalized by fickle content moderation algorithms.”

Neologism researcher Brianne Hughes has created a Wordnik list of “Algorithm Avoidant Inventions” to collect algospeak examples.

cliodynamics

“One ambitious effort is the theory of cliodynamics by Peter Turchin, which applies mathematical models to populations.”

The ‘clio-‘ of ‘cliodynamics’ comes the name of the muse of history in Greek mythology.

criti-hype

“Researcher Lee Vinsel called this phenomenon criti-hype—criticism that tends up portraying technology as all powerful instead of calling out its limitations.”

Vinsel created the word ‘criti-hype’ in a 2021 Medium post titled “You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype“.

deep learning

“In 2011, Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton decided to take a crack at the ImageNet competition using neural networks, which by then had been branded “deep learning” because of the key insight that having more layers (depth) improves accuracy.”

Neural networks, despite the name, are not intended to realistically model the behavior of actual neurons.

shadowbanning

“Instead of removal, the post can be slapped with a warning, or, if it is a “borderline” policy violation, it might be silently shown to fewer users than it otherwise would. This is a notable development in the last few years known as downranking or demotion, or, colloquially, shadowbanning.”

Rich Kyanka, the creator of Something Awful, claims that the term ‘shadow ban’ was created on that forum. A 2018 explainer from Vice, “Where Did the Concept of ‘Shadow Banning’ Come From?” highlights similar practices, including ‘twit bit’, ‘bozo filter’, and ‘toading’.

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this book, Vogue culture writer Emma Specter writes about her struggles around diet culture, eating disorders, and learning self-acceptance doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Night Eating Syndrome

“Night Eating Syndrome (NES) is classified as its own eating disorder, one that affects about one in ten people who have obesity.”

NES as an eating disorder that can be comorbid with anxiety, depression, and insomnia in adult men and women. More information and help can be found on the Sleep Foundation’s website: Night Eating Syndrome: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatments.

SMILF

“Frankie Shaw’s SMILF ran for two seasons on Showtime, and while the series wasn’t perfect on screen or off … the story that endeavored to tell about women parenting, class, addiction, and food was profoundly ambitious.”

Slang for “single mom I’d like to fuck,” though in some cases the “S” stands for “step” or “soccer”. In the context of the television show, the “S” represents South Boston.

fat icon

“Yes, today’s teenagers have fat icons like Paloma Elsesser, Barbie Ferreira, and Aidy Bryant to look up to, but representation can go only so far and do only so much.”

Specter posits that a handful of representatives have little influence against the global institutions selling the idea that weight loss and thinness are the only routes to happiness.

meta-shame

“I now know that what I was experiencing was what Sonia Renee Taylor refers to in her 2018 book The Body Is Not An Apology as meta-shame, or the state of feeling shame for feeling shame about our bodies.”

Specter shares that the roots of body-shaming have been difficult to eradicate, especially when she hasn’t felt she has been able to find self-acceptance in the “correct” way.

terror management

“In times of stress or fear, people focus more than usual on the things they believe they can control, this is called terror management.”

Specter discusses that during the COVID pandemic, quarantine allowed people to scrutinize their eating and food consumption (often in disordered ways) as a means to feel agency in their own lives.

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this book, Deb Chachra, Professor of Engineering at Olin College of Engineering, helps us explore the hidden beauty and complexity of the infrastructure we take for granted, and outlines how we can transform and rebuild it to be not just functional but also equitable, resilient, and sustainable.

bioswale

“It also likely means unbuilding structures, whether that’s relocating buildings away from shorelines facing sea-level rise and higher storm surges, or taking up the concrete around urban river and replacing it with bioswales, vegetated channels that absorb stormwater, preventing floods while removing pollutants.”

The Portland Nursery offers a PDF listing plants you can use to create bioswales (or rain gardens) in your own yard.

exogenous

“A graph of the total exogenous energy usage of humanity (that is, energy from all sources outside our own bodies) over time is flat until about 1800, after which it becomes roughly exponential, starting slowly and then rising more and more steeply.”

The word ‘exogenous’ comes ultimately from Greek roots meaning ‘born’ and ‘outside’.

externality

“Externalities, to economists, are values or costs that aren’t accounted for by the market, because they accrue to someone who isn’t part of the transaction and therefore often has no choice in whether it happens or not.”

This sense of the word ‘externality’ was first used by Alfred Marshall, a British economist, in Principles of Economics, published in 1890.

ultrastructure

“While talking through what we had seen over the course of that weekend, Charlie and I landed on the term “ultrastructure” to describe this web of social structures, all of the cultural, political, regulatory, and other systems that shape and govern infrastructure.”

Chachra talks in more depth about the idea of ‘ultrastructure’ in this interview in the excellent Scope of Work newsletter.

veneriforming

“If terraforming is taking an uninhabitable planet like Mars and changing the atmosphere to make an ecosystem capable of supporting life, we are instead taking our perfectly habitable planet and veneriforming it, transforming our terrestrial home into our other planetary next-door neighbor, suffocatingly hot Venus.”

The word ‘veneriform‘ exists in another Venus-related sense: having the shape of the shell of the Venus clam.

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this book, Ingrid Robeyns, the Chair in Ethics of Institutions at the Ethics Institute of Utrecht University, outlines the principle she calls limitarianism—the need to limit extreme wealth.

stagflation

The story that most economics professors will tell is that, in the early 1970s, Keynesian economics lost ground when the world’s developed economies experienced stagflation—a combination of high unemployment, slow economic growth (stagnation), and rising prices (inflation).

kleptocracy

“Kleptocracy literally means “rule by thieves” (from the Greek kleptes, ‘thief’, and kratia, ‘power’ or ‘rule’)—we’re talking here about heads of state and political leaders who loot their own countries.”

chumocracy

“Putin’s Russia and Berluconi’s Italy are two particularly memorable examples, but we would be prudent not to assume that widespread state corruption only happens somewhere else—just think of the UK’s ‘chumocracy’ scandal in 2020 or of Donald Trump’s attempt to rig the 202 presidential election in the US.”

degrowth

“Still other proposals for a new economic system argue that we should start by replacing our obsession with GDP growth with an ambition for sustainable prosperity, sometimes known as ‘degrowth’.”

affluenza

“As the granddaughter of a former president of General Motors, [Jessie] O’Neill is herself from the third generation of a wealthy family, and has also worked as a therapist. She coined the term ‘affluenza’ to denote the harmful psychological effects of extreme wealth, especially on children.”