April linkstack

An AI glossary, new word games, a racy steakhouse ad, and more.

Hello and welcome — or welcome in, as younger greeters are wont to say — and especially warm salutations to all you new and newish subscribers. For those who wonder: Linkstack is a monthly feature in which I round up a bunch of my favorite links for your delectation. Missed an installment? Here’s the March linkstack, and here’s my entire Substack archive back to August 2023.

A reminder: This newsletter remains 100 percent free for all. I do not accept advertising or affiliate links. I do, however, accept and appreciate donations through the Buy Me a Coffee platform. You can even sign up for monthly contributions.

The ABCs of AI

From Card Catalog, a new-to-me Substack dedicated to “teaching how to think like a librarian in the age of AI,” a helpful glossary of 31 AI terms, from machine learning to hallucination to alignment. While you’re there, check out this post about Google’s secret reference desk (hat tip: Jodi Ettenberg, who publishes a terrific newsletter herself called Curious About Everything).

The return of “On Language”

After a 15-year lull, the New York Times Magazine has revived this much-missed weekly feature, originated by William Safire in 1979 and written from 2010 to 2011 by Ben Zimmer. The latest On Language guys are Nitsuh Abebe and Dan Brooks; so far they’ve written about gatekeeping (gift link), -coded (gift link), and lethality, among other trending terms.

Get your straits straight

“Etymologically, ‘strait’ is ‘strict’ and ‘straight’ is ‘stretched’.” (John Kelly, Mashed Radish)

Word games!

Cadgy. OneLook, a terrific resource for all things word-related, recently launched a new and slightly addictive word game. Creator Doug Beeferman explains: “In Cadgy, you get a new grid of letters every day. You find 5-letter words by clicking one letter from each of the columns.” Grids contain 20 words each day, except on double days when there are 40. Beeferman says he stumbled on the word cadgy while testing the game: It’s “a Scots and northern English term for ‘cheerful’ or ‘merry’, with occasional notes of ‘amorous’.”

Sample Cadgy grid. Do you see MONTH and CONGA?

Noun sense. “Each day, you get 10 adjectives. Your job is to guess the most common noun that follows them.” Via Helen Lewis, who adds: “Also functions as a baleful reminder of how easy it is to lapse into cliche when writing.”

Hot take

There’s a new Japanese word for days that reach 40°C (104°F) or above: kokushobi. It translates to “cruelly hot,” “brutally hot,” or “severely hot.” (BBC) (Archive link)

Cut that out

“If you’re looking for a simpler way to measure the declining quality of the Times’ book coverage, you could try this. Count the number of gratuitous or misused exclamation points.” (Jan Harayda in “Letter from a Reader”)

Dressing up

I didn’t know what an abacost was until I read the Wordnik blog’s “Five Words from Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History.” On my must-read list. P.S. An abacost is better known as “a Mao-style tunic.” (Erin McKean)

Dressing down

How well do you know your British insults? I scored 5/8, mostly by guessing. (New York Times. Thanks for the gift link, Lynne Murphy!)

Undressed

In search of the woman who posed for a famous — or infamous — steakhouse ad: “The sexual revolution was underway, and this combination of text and image urged the viewer to imagine the extent of what could happen in low-lit banquettes as dark liquor flowed. By all accounts, the ads were a scandalous hit.” (“Finding the Cattle Queen,” by Rachel Ossip, granddaughter of Cattle Baron founder Jerry Ossip, in n+1).

Poster for the Cattle Baron, circa 1968. The dirty feet are part of the story.

Moonstruck

How NASA’s Artemis program got its name. (Christian Davenport in Aerospace America)

A deeper dive into the meaning of Artemis. (Classical scholar Marie-Claire Beaulieu in Tufts Now)

Name changes in the Bible

Score at trivia night or find an underused baby name, Belteshazzar? Ammi? Eliakim? Anyone? (Godwords)

The Canterbury Commute

An updated Canterbury Tales, in Middle and Modern English: “The Founder is like Chaucer’s Merchant: loud, outwardly prosperous, and secretly drowning in debt.” (Colin Gorrie in Dead Language Society)

AI in the sky

How many AI billboards are there in San Francisco? A local reporter and photographer took an audit. See the results and take a quiz: AI or not AI? (San Francisco Chronicle gift link) The city is also full of AI ads in lots of spaces that aren’t billboards; see my August 2025 post for a partial inventory.

Oakland International’s rebrand is official

It’s “Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport,” which is hella dumb and hella confusing, as we say here. (Oaklandside) I wrote about the kerfuffle back in August 2023, but did anyone listen? Noooo.

What happened to the Lonely Planet travel guides?

“Lonely Planet used to tell you how to change money on the black market. Now it tells you the top 10 most Instagrammable cafés. That shift tells you everything about what happened to travel.” (Beck Sharron in Between the Dots)

The tastiest magazine story I read this month

“I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America,” by the always-delightful Caity Weaver. “I will not attempt to slither to the moral high ground, arguing that best is a meaningless measure, or insisting that all bread is dear in its own way. Even if you attempt to betray me—for instance, by merely scanning the text that follows for the phrase Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America—I will uphold my end of the bargain.” (The Atlantic gift link)