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Article discusses the controversy surrounding the use of "Hey guys" and the search for a more gender-inclusive address. (I like 大家: "everyone" in Chinese, but which literally means " big family.")

This article writes about address terms like "guys," "y'all," "bro," "dude," etc. They wrote about how masculine terms evolve tend to lose their gender over-time. This is the case because they are seen as more powerful and therefore more acceptable to be used for non-male addressees. People may take offense to being addressed as "ladies" because "ladies" puts attention towards their femininity when gender is usually irrelevant to the situation.

On some level we already know that language shapes the way we think. We're automatically more afraid to fight a guy named Jack Savage than somebody named Peewee Nipplepuss, even if we've never seen either of them before. It's totally illogical, but you probably run into an example of that every day, and don't notice it.

And for more on spatial orientation and color perception differences, read Guy Deutscher's _Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different Through Other Languages_. Referencing the first point that the author of the article makes, that English speakers are more apt to blame others, it's interesting how certain languages, like English, stress agency: someone/something causes an event, whereas languages like Hawaiian, are indeed, more apt to characterize situations in the passive: the event simply happened.

Interesting connections between language and the subconscious mind

This is from a Japanese television show (sort of like America's Got Talent). Sorry, there's no subtitles...but basically, this guy can sing with his mouth closed, and still produce a deep, full, and open sound. And what's even more amazing is he isn't singing in his own voice...he's imitating voices of famous Japanese singers. I thought this video was interesting because we just read an article on how humans produce sounds. I bet you phoneticians would like to study how his vocal tract works...

"But the "want you to listen; it's important" call gets threaded into almost every paragraph of the speech and amplified as the speech goes on. Clinton adds, among other asides, "Let me ask you something"; "Think about that"; "Let's think about it"; "I am telling you"; "Don't you ever forget"; "Wait, you need to know"; "You all need to listen carefully"; and perhaps the clincher, "You need to tell every voter where you live about this." It's a teacher's approach and more: It's the guy grabbing you by the shirt collar, demanding that you hear him and that you then go out and spread the Word."

Review of "Through the Language Glass," by Guy Deutscher (who wrote that NYT article). One interesting part: "As he sums it up, "what Gladstone was proposing was nothing less than universal color blindness among the ancient Greeks." He goes on to discuss Lazarus Geiger, who "reconstructed a complete chronological sequence for the emergence of sensitivity to different prismatic colors" and asked the crucial question "Can the difference between [the ancient Greeks] and us be only in the naming, or in the perception itself?" Then there was Hugo Magnus, who decided sensitivity to colors had been evolving since ancient times..."

I love the way this guy writes about math. I really understand math as a language because of him. I wish I'd had him as a teacher.

This commercial was a commercial of a guy who was walking around. As he walked around he noticed that the people around him were digital people and creatures who looked foreign and strange. The guy finally walked into a diner where he ordered a coke. The monster next to him accidentally grabbed for his coke at the same time he did and the monster became a normal girl and no longer a "stranger". The enthymeme here is that everyone and anyone is no longer a stranger if they like coca cola. They imply that if two people like the same thing they are no longer strangers because they share something in common and can relate to each other. However this statement is not always true. Just because you share a liking for one thing with someone else doesn't automatically mean that the other person is no longer a stranger to you.

Hey, you guys: let me know if this article is "true" as far as Punahou students go. Does the word "drama" mean for you what it means for the students they interviewed? And is what they say about using the word "bullying" true? Maybe you could just comment here or send me an email. Thanks!

This genius item of clothing is printed with nearly 40 icons that travelers can use to try to get their message across if they don't know the language. Inspired by a communications breakdown on the road, the shirt is part of a range of items created by a team of Swiss guys who've formed a company, Iconspeak.

A T-shirt that is printed with 40 universal symbols so that people may point at symbols when they can't understand each other

The attention-grabbing tricks that keep an audience watching, even when people are just talking at a camera Hey guys! What's up? It's Julie. And today I want to talk about YouTube voice.

"These guys have worked out how to measure power differences between individuals using the patterns of words they speak or write. In other words, they say the style of language during a conversation reveals the pecking order of the people talking. ... The key to this is an idea called linguistic co-ordination, in which speakers naturally copy the style of their interlocutors. ... 'If you are communicating with someone who uses a lot of articles - or prepositions, orpersonal pronouns - then you will tend to increase your usage of these types of words as well, even if you don't consciously realize it,' say Kleinberg and co." Also, as the article mentions, Kleinberg (previously) developed the algorithm on which Google's PageRank (the algorithm used to rank pages in its search engine) is based. Link to the study (available in PDF): http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3670

"Mondegreen" means a misheard word or phrase that makes sense in your head, but is, in fact, entirely incorrect. Hearing is a two-step process. First, there is the auditory perception itself: the physics of sound waves making their way through your ear and into the auditory cortex of your brain. And then there is the meaning-making: the part where your brain takes the noise and imbues it with significance. That was a car alarm. That's a bird. Mondegreens occur when, somewhere between the sound and the meaning, communication breaks down. You hear the same acoustic information as everyone else, but your brain doesn't interpret it the same way.

This article is also linked to a video in which Bill Nye the science guy explains dreams to kids using emoji. This article and video demonstrates that children are beginning to use and understand emoji at a younger and younger age.

Robert Bowers, the alleged Pittsburgh synagogue killer, had an online life like many thousands of anti-Semitic Americans. He had Twitter and Facebook accounts and was an active user of Gab, a right-wing Twitter knockoff with a hands-off approach to policing speech. The Times of Israel reported that among anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and slurs, Bowers had recently posted a picture of "a fiery oven like those used in Nazi concentration camps used to cremate Jews, writing the caption 'Make Ovens 1488F Again,'" a white-supremacist reference. Then he made one last post, saying, "I'm going in," and allegedly went to kill 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Only then did his accounts come down, just like Cesar Sayoc's, the mail-bomb suspect. This is how it goes now. Both of these guys made nasty, violent, prejudiced posts. Yet, as reporter after reporter has noted, their online lives were-to the human eye at least-indistinguishable from the legions of other trolls who say despicable things. There is just no telling who will stay in the comments section and who will try to kill people in the real world. It was not long ago that free-speech absolutism was the order of the day in Silicon Valley. But that was before anti-Semitic attacks spiked; before the Charlottesville, Virginia, killing; before the kind of open racism that had lost purchase in American culture made its ugly resurgence. Each new incident ratchets up the pressure on technology companies to rid themselves of their trolls. But the culture they've created will not prove easy to stamp out.

Pew Researchers surveyed more than 1,500 technologists and scholars about the forces shaping the way people interact with one another online. They asked: "In the next decade, will public discourse online become more or less shaped by bad actors, harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust?" The vast majority of techonolgists surveyed-81 percent of them-said they expect the tone of online discourse will either stay the same or get worse in the next decade. "Cyberattacks, doxing, and trolling will continue, while social platforms, security experts, ethicists, and others will wrangle over the best ways to balance security and privacy, freedom of speech, and user protections. A great deal of this will happen in public view," Susan Etlinger, a technology industry analyst, told Pew. "The more worrisome possibility is that privacy and safety advocates, in an effort to create a more safe and equal internet, will push bad actors into more-hidden channels such as Tor." Tor is software that enables people to browse and communicate online anonymously-so it's used by people who want to cover their tracks from government surveillance, those who want to access the dark web, trolls, whistleblowers, and others. The uncomfortable truth is that humans like trolling. It's easy for people to stay anonymous while they harass, pester, and bully other people online-and it's hard for platforms to design systems to stop them. Hard for two reasons: One, because of the "ever-expanding scale of internet discourse and its accelerating complexity," as Pew puts it. And, two, because technology companies seem to have little incentive to solve this problem for people. "Very often, hate, anxiety, and anger drive participation with the platform," said Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland, in the report. "Whatever behavior increases ad revenue will not only be permitted, but encouraged."

Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey." This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about. When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.