Group items tagged

This Wall Street Journal interactive employs lyrics from the musical Hamilton as well as the song lyrics of the Fugees, Nas, Kendrick Lamar, Rakim, etc. to illustrate sound devices in context. Audio included.

"A fascinating new exhibition at the British Library shows how all attempts to standardise the English language have been resisted - and that's why it continues to flourish today, says Adrian Hamilton."

In relation to the current election that just passed, it was pretty obvious that there was a huge disconnect between two opposing sides. Words of frustration and anger flooded newsprints and social media. In the past, researchers found that there was a curious phenomenon in known as "positive feedback", which refers to people's tendency to use more positive words than negative words. In recent years, Google Books and the New York Times partnered to disprove this phenomenon. Both major print companies forged through tons of texts and found that 16.2 million of those texts contained negative language. They also found that negative words were used more frequently during times of unemployment, poverty, inflation rates, wartime casualties and political tension. More research has been conducted by psychological scientist including William Hamilton and Mark Liberman. Shockingly, they found that events like these were being triggered more often and positive language has decreased in the last 200 years.