LingDuels?

Mayur Naik has invented "MathDuels: A Self-Play Benchmark That Grows": … in which models occupy dual roles: each authors math problems under adversarial prompting and solves problems authored by every other participant. A generation pipeline produces and filters the problems, and a psychometric model jointly estimates solver abilities and problem difficulties, from which author quality […]

English adjectives as adverbs?

Some of the comments on "Filthy comfortable" (10/9/2026) related to the issue of an adjective being used as an adverbial intensifier, which is a fairly common though always irregular development. We can start with very, for which Wiktonary gives the etymology From Middle English verray, from Old French verai (“true”), from Early Medieval Latin vērāgus, […]

Victor Mair and Benjamin Franklin

Wikipedia’s article on Benjamin Franklin starts this way: Benjamin Franklin was an American polymath active as a physicist, philosopher, statesman and inventor. The article goes on to list (some of) his other achievements, including his role as a writer, and as the founder of institutions such as the American Philosophical Society and what became the […]

Grace Wu's tribute to Victor Mair

I spent yesterday afternoon at the Memorial Service for Victor Mair, where many of his relatives, friends, students, and colleagues told stories about Victor and his influence on their lives. Because Grace Wu was not able to attend, she sent me a tribute to read on her behalf, which I've reprinted below. I have always […]

"Filthy comfortable"

A linguistically striking ad:  There's another one here, and the slogan alone also appears in text form. The relevant linguistic history starts in the 16th century, when William Tyndale chose the phrase filthy lucre to render Greek αἰσχροῦ κέρδους in his bible's translation of Titus 1:7 and 1:11, and similar phrases in Timothy 3 […]

Thank you for visiting WordsMatter.softville.com

  —  Bob Ray