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markfrankel18

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.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Word For... : The New Yorker - 1 views

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    "The word "neologism" dates to the seventeen-seventies, taken from Greek via French, meaning "new speech." But the practice of coining new words goes back to the beginning of language itself. It accelerated as culture accelerated, and by the nineteenth century conservative types were worried that industry and science were flooding the linguistic marketplace with all kinds of shoddy fad words, and that the language had to be protected from interlopers. Others embraced the dynamism. "
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Living with the J-word - 1 views

  • Thankfully, most of this Jew-targeted hatred takes the form of verbal aggression rather than physical violence. But because many critics of Israel make no distinction between citizens of the Jewish state and the worldwide Jewish community, the J-word has been the focus. You won't see "Kill Israelis" scrawled on London synagogue walls. What you see on walls is "Kill the Jews", and on banners "Hitler was Right". And this brings me back to the point about the complexity of anti-Semitism today. It is always around and in the end it is focused primarily on the J-word, in the same way that another form of racism is focused on the N-word. Those on the receiving end find their lives shaped by it. Certainly my life, my sense of myself, has been shaped by the casual anti-Semitism that I have encountered for more than half a century. The first time I was called a "Jew" with malicious intent was September 1958 in the playground of Belmont Hills Elementary School, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It came as a surprise. I was eight years old and up until that time had been living in New York City where everyone I encountered was Jewish. Until that moment, the word "Jew" had simply been one of the words and phrases - like "Mike", "son" and "114 East 90th Street" - whose meanings were slowly building up into a sense of who I was.
  • Throughout the 19th Century, "Israelite" or "Hebrew" or "follower of Moses" supplanted "Jew" as the politically correct way to refer to the community. It was a process analogous to the way "black" and then "African-American" or "person of colour" replaced "Negro" in polite discourse after the Civil Rights era.
  • Thirty years later, a new word for this hatred was coined - "anti-Semitism". This was a time when race science was all the rage. Anti-Semitism avoided the connotation of pure hatred against individuals which is, after all, irrational. It focused scientifically on the supposed racial and social characteristics of a group, the Jews, without mentioning them by name. From there it was easy to start a political movement - based on scientific "facts" - to rein in a people who clearly were alien.
markfrankel18

Why is the 'mor' in 'Voldemort' so evil-sounding? - The Week - 0 views

  • So what's the deal with "mor"? Is there something to the syllable that suits it for melancholy, darkness, and villainy? We have to be careful here. There are more words out there that have "mor" that don't carry such dark tones. The names Morgan, Maureen, and Maurice aren't so sinister (well, possibly excepting the case of Piers Morgan), and people just wanted more and more of Mork from Ork. So we can't say that this "mor" sound carries darkness and death wherever it goes. But we can say that it has some dark associations available if we want to use them. For starters, the Latin "mor" root (as in moribund and mortal and French words such as morte) refers to death; there is an old Germanic root mora for darkness, which shows up in words such as murky; our modern word murder comes from an Old English word morth for the same; and, of course, a morgue is a place where dead bodies are kept. That's enough to give a familiar ring. And every evil name that has "mor" in it adds to the weight of the association, especially when they're famous evil names. In fact, "mor" may be what is sometimes called a phonestheme: a part of a word that tends to carry a certain connotation not because of etymology or formal definition but just by association.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - How the English language became such a mess - 0 views

  • First, the greed: invasion and theft. The Romans invaded Britain in the 1st Century AD and brought their alphabet; in the 7th Century, the Angles and Saxons took over, along with their language. Starting in the 9th Century, Vikings occupied parts of England and brought some words (including they, displacing the Old English hie). Then the Norman French conquered in 1066 – and replaced much of the vocabulary with French, including words which over time became beef, pork, invade, tongue and person.
  • Once the English tossed out the French (but not their words) a few centuries later, they started to acquire territories around the world – America, Australia, Africa, India. With each new colony, Britain acquired words: hickory, budgerigar, zebra, bungalow. The British also did business with everyone else and took words as they went – something we call “borrowing,” even though the words were kept. Our language is a museum of conquests.
  • Sometimes sounds just change capriciously. The most significant instance of this in English was the Great Vowel Shift. From the 1400s to about 1700, for reasons that remain unclear, our long vowels all shifted in our mouths like cream swirling slowly in a cup of tea. Before it, see rhymed with "eh"; boot was said like “boat”; and out sounded like “oot.” But when the sounds shifted, the spelling stayed behind.
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  • One more layer of snobbery has added further complications across the Atlantic over the last couple of centuries: national pride. The (relatively few) American simplifications of spelling – color for colour, center for centre – largely owe their existence to Noah Webster’s desire to create a distinctive American English. Canadian preference for keeping many British spellings, on the other hand, has the same nationalistic origins… just in reverse.And now? Now we don’t even want to spell things as they sound. How do spellings like hed, hart, lafter, dotter, and det look to you? Uneducated, perhaps? Annoyingly simplistic? Exactly. We enjoy our discomforts – and we really enjoy arbitrary practices that allow us to tell who are and aren’t the “right sort”. We’ve taken a useful tool and turned it into a social filter.
markfrankel18

A Language of Conflict, and Peace - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • This is part of what I have come to call “conflict code”: words whose plain English meanings are politicized, distorted or undermined in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, which is much more a clash of narratives than a tussle over territory. In November, the International Press Institute issued “Use With Care,” a guide to more than 75 “alternative words and phrases” for “loaded language” on this beat.“There are words that can cause some audiences to simply shut down and stop listening,” the preface reads. “We all understand that words can only mediate reality, not define it. But words are also powerful, and they play a major role in shaping our consciousness and perceptions.”
Lawrence Hrubes

100 Czech Words that Are Lost in Translation, Prague - Czech Republic - 0 views

  • With its verb prefixes, perfective forms, diminutives and rules for forming nouns, the Czech language can often express an idea or action much more precisely than English. Or to put it another way, there are Czech words which don’t have a single- word translation in English. One famous example: Milan Kundera has contended that the Czech word litost, defined in his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as ‘a state of torment caused by a sudden insight into one’s own miserable self’, has no English, or any other language, equivalent. Here are 100 others:
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - Eleven untranslatable words - 1 views

  • There is one clear difference, though: Iyer has not invented them. The definitions she illustrates – 60 so far, from 30 different languages – match The Meaning of Liff for absurdity, but all of them are real. There is komorebi, Japanese for ‘the sort of scattered dappled light effect that happens when sunlight shines in through trees’; or rire dans sa barbe, a French expression meaning ‘to laugh in your beard quietly while thinking about something that happened in the past’.
  • Iyer’s Found in Translation project will be published as a book later in 2014. She has been a polyglot since childhood. “My parents come from different parts of India, so I grew up learning five languages,” she says. “I’d always loved the word Fernweh, which is German for ‘longing for a place you’ve never been to’, and then one day I started collecting more.”Some are humorous, while others have definitions that read like poetry. “I love the German word Waldeinsamkeit, ‘the feeling of being alone in the woods’. “It captures a sense of solitude and at the same time that feeling of oneness with nature.” Her favourite is the Inuit word Iktsuarpok, which means ‘the frustration of waiting for someone to turn up’, because “it holds so much meaning. It’s waiting, whether you are waiting for the bus to show up or for the love of your life. It perfectly describes that inner anguish associated with waiting.”
Lawrence Hrubes

WAYS OF SEEING HISTORY - 0 views

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    "Let me first offer a simple definition of history. History is a story about the past that is both true and significant. We might quibble about the word "story" and prefer "account" or "report". Some also might be cynical about the word "true". Here I take truth to mean closest possible correspondence to what actually happened. What is truth, after all? As we answer that question, I would caution against both facile dogmatism and stylish cynicism. The human experience of truth is complex but definite."
Lawrence Hrubes

What's in a Brand Name? - The New Yorker - 1 views

  • 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.”
  • 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.
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  • Over time, corporate naming has developed certain conventions: alliteration and vowel repetition are good. “X” and “z” are held to be memorable and redolent of speed and fluidity. The letter “x” occurs sixteen times as often in drug names as in other English words; “z” occurs eighteen times as often.
Lawrence Hrubes

European Maps Showing Origins Of Common Words - Business Insider - 0 views

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    "European etymology maps of various commons words"
Lawrence Hrubes

Most People Can’t Multitask, But a Few Are Exceptional. : The New Yorker - 0 views

  • In 2012, David Strayer found himself in a research lab, on the outskirts of London, observing something he hadn’t thought possible: extraordinary multitasking. For his entire career, Strayer, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah, had been studying attention—how it works and how it doesn’t. Methods had come and gone, theories had replaced theories, but one constant remained: humans couldn’t multitask. Each time someone tried to focus on more than one thing at a time, performance suffered. Most recently, Strayer had been focussing on people who drive while on the phone. Over the course of a decade, he and his colleagues had demonstrated that drivers using cell phones—even hands-free devices—were at just as high a risk of accidents as intoxicated ones. Reaction time slowed, attention decreased to the point where they’d miss more than half the things they’d otherwise see—a billboard or a child by the road, it mattered not.
  • What, then, was going on here in the London lab? The woman he was looking at—let’s call her Cassie—was an exception to what twenty-five years of research had taught him. As she took on more and more tasks, she didn’t get worse. She got better. There she was, driving, doing complex math, responding to barking prompts through a cell phone, and she wasn’t breaking a sweat. She was, in other words, what Strayer would ultimately decide to call a supertasker.
  • Cassie in particular was the best multitasker he had ever seen. “It’s a really, really hard test,” Strayer recalls. “Some people come out woozy—I have a headache, that really kind of hurts, that sort of thing. But she solved everything.
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  • Their task was simple: keep your eyes on the road; keep a safe difference; brake as required. If they failed to do so, they’d eventually collide with their pace car. Then came the multitasking additions. They would have to not only drive the car but follow audio instructions from a cell phone. Specifically, they would hear a series of words, ranging from two to five at a time, and be asked to recall them in the right order. And there was a twist. Interspersed with the words were math problems. If they heard one of those, the drivers had to answer “true,” if the problem was solved correctly, or “false,” if it wasn’t. They would, for instance, hear “cat” and immediately after, “is three divided by one, minus one, equal to two?” followed by “box,” another problem, and so on. Intermittently, they would hear a prompt to “recall,” at which point, they’d have to repeat back all the words they’d heard since the last prompt. The agony lasted about an hour and a half.
markfrankel18

Human Language Is Biased Towards Happiness, Say Computational Linguists - The Physics a... - 1 views

  • Back in 1969, a couple of psychologists from the University of Illinois began studying the way people in different cultures use words. Their conclusion was that whatever their culture, people tended to use positive words more often the negative ones.This finding is now known as the Pollyanna hypothesis, after a 1913 novel by Eleanor Porter about a girl who tries to find something to be glad about in every situation.
  • And their happy conclusion is that the data backs up the Pollyanna hypothesis. “The words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias,” they say.
  • And so that anyone can sample their wares, the team has produced an online tool that allows anybody to interrogate a wide range of major novels to see how the positivity and negativity of words changes throughout. This tool is available at this website. It’s worth a look if you have 20 minutes to spare.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - Mind your language! Swearing around the world - 0 views

  • We tend to think of swear words as one entity, but they actually serve several distinct functions. Steven Pinker, in The Stuff of Thought, lists five different ways we can swear: “descriptively (Let’s fuck), idiomatically (It’s fucked up), abusively (Fuck you…!), emphatically (This is fucking amazing), and cathartically (Fuck!!!).” None of these functions require swearwords. In Bikol (a language of the Philippines), there’s a special anger vocabulary – many words have alternative words that refer to just the same thing but also mean you’re angry. In Luganda (an African language), you can make a word insulting just by changing its noun class prefix – from a class for persons to a class for certain kinds of objects, for instance. In Japanese, you can insult someone badly just by using an inappropriate form of ‘you’.
tpakeman

Our Use Of Little Words Can, Uh, Reveal Hidden Interests : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

  • But some of his most interesting work has to do with power dynamics. He says that by analyzing language you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status.
  • We use "I" more when we talk to someone with power because we're more self-conscious. We are focused on ourselves — how we're coming across — and our language reflects that.
  • You can't, he believes, change who you are by changing your language; you can only change your language by changing who you are
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    Our use of 'little words' reveals aspects of our pyschology
markfrankel18

The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Now comes a new kind of challenge to the evidence of a cognitive decline, from a decidedly digital quarter: data mining, based on theories of information processing. In a paper published in Topics in Cognitive Science, a team of linguistic researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany used advanced learning models to search enormous databases of words and phrases. Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging “deficits” largely disappeared.
markfrankel18

Anne Curzan: What makes a word "real"? | Talk Video | TED.com - 0 views

  • One could argue that slang words like ‘hangry,’ ‘defriend’ and ‘adorkable’ fill crucial meaning gaps in the English language, even if they don't appear in the dictionary. After all, who actually decides which words make it into those pages? Language historian Anne Curzan gives a charming look at the humans behind dictionaries, and the choices they make.
Lawrence Hrubes

Google Ngram Viewer - 0 views

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    statistical mapping of the frequency of words found in 30+ million digitized books
Lawrence Hrubes

Interview: Edet Belzberg, Director Of 'Watchers Of The Sky' : NPR - 0 views

  • The world has grown far too familiar with genocide; as mass killings have claimed countless lives, the word has become ingrained into our vocabularies. But the term didn't exist until 1943, when Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined it — pairing the Greek "genos," meaning race or family, with the Latin "-cidere," for killing. Lemkin, who witnessed the massacres of the early 20th century, spent his life campaigning to make the world acknowledge and prosecute the crime. A new documentary, Watchers of the Sky, tells his story. Once he'd established the word, Lemkin worked persistently in the then-newly-formed United Nations, hounding delegates to discuss his new word and acknowledge the issue.
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