Making Science Public: A blog on science, language and culture
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Timelines we live in: A linguistic investigation
At the beginning of the year, I was browsing my timeline on Bluesky* and came across sentences like this: “The absolute dumbest possible timeline. That’s what we live in.” “I know we all say ‘this is the stupidest timeline’ a lot but seriously this is the stupidest timeline”; “What a sh!tty-ass timeline to live in”;…
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From sloppers to slopocalypse: The lexical productivity of AI slop
At the end of last year, I wrote a blog post in which I dissected the word ‘enshittification’, a staple of AI slang. At the beginning of this year, I want to do the same for enshittification’s conceptual friend ‘slop’. As the MIT Technology Review said in its overview of AI words you couldn’t avoid…
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Metaphorical genres in science communication: From gothic discovery to domestic intervention
I was idly scrolling Bluesky for some news that was not depressing when I chanced upon an article by Roger Highfield dealing with a recent advance in gene editing. It reminded me of two previous posts I had written, one back in 2016 on “Precision metaphors in a messy biological world” and another in which…
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Making Science Public 2025: End-of-year round-up of blog posts
This year has been quite a year! First, I had to move the blog to a new independent home after the University of Nottingham shut down their blogging platform (I wrote two posts about this, one reflecting on the past and one on the future). Second, there was a lot to blog about, from wildfires…
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From symbolist poets to science communication: Exploring an invisible thread in my academic life
Years and years ago, I had an Academia profile in which I mentioned that when I began studying French literature in the mid-1970s I fell in love with Baudelaire and Rimbaud. I no longer have access to Academia, but somebody must have seen that sentence and recently sent me an email asking how I got…
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Metaphors for AI: Three blog posts and a summary
Over the last few weeks I have written a trilogy of blog posts about metaphors for AI, trying to survey emerging metaphors as well as those studying those metaphors, and calling for a metaphor observatory. Three posts is a lot to read. For those who want to have a quick overview, here is one. I…
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Observing shifts in metaphors for AI: What changed and why it matters
In my previous two posts I have made the case for an AI metaphor observatory and surveyed the recent academic landscape of studies dealing with metaphors for AI in the sense of GenAI and LLMs. In this post, the third and last in my ‘trilogy’, I’ll attempt to review recent trends and shifts in metaphor…
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Parasocial Relationships: Problematic Practice or Public Promise?
This year’s Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year is “parasocial”—spurred on by growing concerns over our love affair with AI chatbots. ••• This is a quick guest post/repost by Andrew Maynard. Andrew first published it on his Substack “The Future of Being Human” on 19 November, 2025. I read it while waiting for the dentist…
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Metaphors for AI: An overview of recent studies
In my previous post (part 1 of a trilogy) I called for an AI metaphor observatory to watch how people make sense (and sometimes nonsense) of generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI, through metaphors. I was pleased to see that many scholars are now collecting AI metaphors and studying them systematically and I provided a rough…
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Making the case for an AI metaphor observatory
Between 2023 and 2025 I have written various posts on GenAI, Large Language Models and metaphors: one where I went out hunting for metaphors; one where I had a chat with ChatGTP about metaphors for itself, metaphors that turned out to be rather magical; one focusing on food or culinary metaphors for AI; some dealing…
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