There are various ways a corporate name can seem apposite. In the case of existing words, connotations are crucial: a Corvette is a light, speedy attack ship; Tesla was an inventor of genius. Made-up names often rely instead on resonances with other words: Lexus evokes luxurious; Viagra conjures virility and vitality. Bad names bring the wrong associations to consumers’ minds. In the nineteen-eighties, United Airlines tried to turn itself into a diversified travel company called Allegis. The move was a fiasco. No less an authority than Donald Trump (whose faith in brand-name power is total) said that the name sounded “like the next world-class disease.”
Group items tagged
The American Scholar: Hardwired for Talk? - Jessica Love - 0 views
-
Language ToK
What's in a Brand Name? - The New Yorker - 1 views
-
-
A philosopher called Hermogenes argues that the relationship between a word and its meaning is purely arbitrary; Cratylus, another philosopher, disagrees; and Socrates eventually concludes that there is sometimes a connection between meaning and sound. Linguistics has mostly taken Hermogenes’ side, but, in the past eighty years, a field of research called phonetic symbolism has shown that Cratylus was on to something.
-
Remarkably, some of these phonemic associations seem to be consistent across many languages. That’s good news for multinationals: research shows that if customers feel your name is a good fit they’ll remember it better and even like it more.
- ...1 more annotation...
8 pronunciation errors that made the English language what it is today Think hyperbole ... - 1 views
The Syllable Everyone Recognizes - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
Are there words that are universally understood, across all countries and cultures? A team of linguists has proposed one: “huh.”
-
Huh? In a paper published on Friday in the journal PLOS One, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands announced that they had found strikingly similar versions in languages scattered across five continents, suggesting that “Huh?” is a universal word.
And the Word of the Year Is... Selfie! : The New Yorker - 0 views
-
Hold on to your monocles, friends—the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013 is “selfie.” It’s an informal noun (plural: selfies) defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” It was first used in 2002, in an Australian online forum (compare the Australian diminutives “barbie” for barbecue and “firie” for firefighter), and it first appeared as a hashtag, #selfie, on Flickr, in 2004.
-
The word “selfie” is not yet in the O.E.D., but it is currently being considered for future inclusion; whether the word makes it into the history books is truly for the teens to decide. As Ben Zimmer wrote at Language Log, “Youth slang is the obvious source for much of our lexical innovation, like it or not.” And despite its cloying tone, that Oxford Dictionaries blog post from August does allude to the increasingly important distinction between “acronym“ and “initialism”—either of which may describe the expression “LOL,” depending if you pronounce it “lawl” or “ell-oh-ell.” The kids are going to be all right. Not “alright.” But all right.
UBC student writes 52,438 word architecture dissertation with no punctuation - not ever... - 1 views
-
A 61-year-old architect from the Nisga’a First Nation, Stewart explains that he “wanted to make a point” about aboriginal culture, colonialism, and “the blind acceptance of English language conventions in academia.”
Does Language Influence our View of the World? | TOKTalk.net - 0 views
-
A very interesting topic that we have already talked about a bit in our class before but it is still interesting to see a deeper analysis
Why Cambodians Never Get 'Depressed' : Goats and Soda : NPR - 0 views
-
People in Cambodia experience what we Americans call depression. But there's no direct translation for the word "depression" in the Cambodian Khmer language. Instead, people may say thelea tdeuk ceut, which literally means "the water in my heart has fallen." Anxious or depressed Haitians, on the other hand, may use the phrase reflechi twop, which means "thinking too much." And in parts of Nepal and India, people use the English word "tension."
-
But just as words for depression and anxiety get lost in translation, so can treatments.
Chinese speakers use more of their brain than English speakers - Quartz - 2 views
-
But Mandarin speakers also saw activation in the right hemisphere, specifically in a region important for processing music, via pitch and tone, that has long been seen as largely unrelated to language comprehension.
Why Are Certain Smells So Hard to Identify? - The New Yorker - 0 views
-
A recent paper in the journal Cognition, for instance, quipped that if people were as bad at naming sights as they are at naming scents, “they would be diagnosed as aphasic and sent for medical help.” The paper quoted scattershot attempts by participants in a previous study to label the smell of lemon: “air freshener,” “bathroom freshener,” “magic marker,” “candy,” “lemon-fresh Pledge,” “some kind of fruit.” This sort of difficulty seems to have very little to do, however, with the nose’s actual capabilities. Last spring, an article in the journal Science reported that we are capable of discriminating more than a trillion different odors. (A biologist at Caltech subsequently disputed the finding, arguing that it contained mathematical errors, though he acknowledged the “richness of human olfactory experience.”) Whence, then, our bumbling translation of scent into speech?
-
That question was the subject, two weekends ago, of an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium at the San Jose Convention Center (which smelled, pleasantly but nonspecifically, of clean carpet). The preëminence of eye over nose was apparent even in the symposium abstract, which touted data that “shed new light” and opened up “yet new vistas.” (Reading it over during a phone interview, Jonathan Reinarz, a professor at the University of Birmingham, in England, and the author of “Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell,” asked me, “What’s wrong with a little bit of inscent?”) Nevertheless, the people on the panel were decidedly pro-smell. “One thing that everyone at this symposium will agree on is that human olfactory discriminatory power is quite excellent, if you give it a chance,” Jay Gottfried, a Northwestern University neuroscientist, told me. Noam Sobel, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, used a stark hypothetical to drive home the ways in which smell can shape behavior: “If I offer you a beautiful mate, of the gender of your choice, who smells of sewage, versus a less attractive mate who smells of sweet spice, with whom would you mate?”
-
But difficulty with talking about smell is not universal. Asifa Majid, a psycholinguist at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, and the organizer of the A.A.A.S. symposium, studies a group of around a thousand hunter-gatherers in northern Malaysia and southern Thailand who speak a language called Jahai. In one analysis, Majid and her colleague Niclas Burenhult found that speakers of Jahai were as good at classifying scratch-and-sniff cards as they were at classifying color chips; their English-speaking counterparts, meanwhile, tended to give meandering and disparate descriptions of scents. At the symposium, Majid presented new research involving around thirty Jahai and thirty Dutch people. In that study, the Jahai named smells in an average of two seconds, whereas the Dutch took thirteen—“and this is just to say, ‘Uh, I don’t know,’ ” Majid joked onstage.
- ...1 more annotation...
Underhill: Rubber Time - 1 views
-
We soon realized we were dealing with differing concepts of time. In our culture, time has substance. It is not to be wasted. It is a container to be filled. We maintain calendars and make schedules to manage separate blocks of time. We measure accomplishment by how well the allotted segments are used. We take appointments seriously, and see promptness as a virtue. Our language is full of adages urging us to use time wisely, "to fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run." Our approach to time, which developed after the invention of the mechanical clock, is probably one of the reasons why Europe, a stagnant and peripheral backwater in the year 1000, became the predominant culture by 1500. Our own industrial and scientific preeminence and material wealth is also rooted in efficient use of time. But we have paid a price. We think that with schedules we can control the future, but often find instead that we have become the prisoners of schedules. We are compulsive about filling blocks of time with useful activity and hurry like the Mad Hatter from appointment to appointment. We are frustrated when a task takes longer than the time we had planned. We interrupt work we have almost finished and stop activities we're enjoying because we're "running behind schedule." From this can come stress and alienation. Seeing reality as a series of segmented time compartments can blind us to the wholeness of life.
-
"Wasting time" for the Indonesian is a meaningless concept. Time is seen as a gentle river carrying everything along. Little effort is made to "manage" the flow. "Morning," "noon," "afternoon," "evening," divide the day adequately. Indonesians explain to Westerners that they live in "rubber time." Appointments, when made, are vague, provisional indications of intention. Harmonious interaction with other people in a flexible, spontaneous, unstructured context is the norm they seek. Interpersonal skills are valued and highly developed. This approach to time is reflected in their language. Verbs in Indonesian have no tense. A time indicator is used, if necessary, at the beginning of a thought, but the verb remains the same for the past, present, future, and pluperfect subjunctive.
« First
‹ Previous
81 - 100 of 213
Next ›
Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page