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Baltimore Sun editor John E. McIntyre tells you why you should forget everything your teacher taught you when it comes to gender-neutral pronouns.

Columbia University linguist and cultural critic John McWhorter asserts that texting, rather than being a scourge, is a linguistic miracle. Texting is not so much written language, as it is speech. McWhorter argues that people benefit from texting, because fluency in spoken language, written language and writing-like-speaking language expands humans' linguistic repertoire.

The meaning of words, and the way we used them, change all the time - and that's OK with linguist John McWhorter of Columbia University. He writes about how the English language has evolved in his new book, Words on the Move: Why English Won't - And Can't - Sit Still (Like Literally). This is a terrific book, by the way, with lots of entertaining examples of language shift, semantic drift, linguistic blending and contracting: perfect read for Words R Us. Highly recommended!

This article talks about how and why words in the English language are changing. For example, people now use "double check" when they really mean they will just "check". "Whelm" used to mean what "overwhelm" does now. Humans have done this over many years because it is in human nature to unconsciously give words extra strength. This article also analyzes some writers that are stuck behind the "train moving forward" that is the English language. The author of the article wonders if these writers will be able to keep up as years go on.

National Public Radio interviewed linguist John McWhorter on words and semantic change. The interview provides several contemporary examples showing how words and language are constantly changing. Mc Whorter asserts, "I think that we should learn not to listen to people using natural language as committing errors because there's no such thing as making a mistake in your language if a critical mass of other people speaking your language are doing the same thing."

Prof. Bennett Schwartz: "In a tip-of-the-tongue state a part of our cognitive system called metacognition lets us know that even though we can't retrieve something at the moment it's probably there stored on our memory, and if we work at it we'll get it... the conventional idea is sort of like your brain's, like, a big complicated filing cabinet. This is telling us that that's not so true. You can't just go to the J file and find John there."

Including answers to questions such as: - Can you walk us through the logic Watson would go through to answer a question such as, "The antagonist of Stevenson's Treasure Island." (Who is Long John Silver?) - ...I found myself wondering whether what it does is really natural language processing, or something more akin to word association... does Watson really need to understand syntax and meaning to just search its database for words and phrases associated with the words and phrases in the clue?

The realities of speech are much more complicated than the words used to describe it. What's the difference between a language and a dialect? Linguist John McWhorter contemplates the distinction.

Linguist John McWhorter examines 3 fictional constructed languages, also known as conlangs, and explains the features that make them bona fide languages, including the presence of grammar/syntax and the fact that they evolve and change over time.

A Johns Hopkins study found that damage to a key structure in the brain may explain why some stroke patients can't perceive sarcasm. Researchers looked at 24 people who had experienced a stroke in the right hemispheres of their brains. Those with damage to the right sagittal stratum tended to have trouble recognizing sarcasm, the researchers found. This bundle of neural fibers connects a number of brain regions, including those that process auditory and visual information. Sarcasm can be hard to interpret; it's a complex way to communicate. First, the person has to 1. understand the literal meaning of what someone says 2. detect the components of sarcasm: a wider range of pitch, greater emphatic stress, briefer pauses, lengthened syllables and intensified loudness relative to sincere speech "There're a number of cues people use, and it's both facial cues and tone of voice," noted Dr. Argye Hillis, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

A new study of 37 languages by three MIT researchers has shown that most languages move toward "dependency length minimization" (DLM) in practice. That means language users have a global preference for more locally grouped dependent words, whenever possible. Apparently, it's easier for our brains to process a sentence when related words are closer together.

Here's a quick task: Take a look at the sentences below and decide which is the most effective. (1) "John threw out the old trash sitting in the kitchen." (2) "John threw the old trash sitting in the kitchen out." Either sentence is grammatically acceptable, but you probably found the first one to be more natural. A new study of 37 languages by three MIT researchers has shown that most languages move toward "dependency length minimization" (DLM) in practice. That means language users have a global preference for more locally grouped dependent words, whenever possible.

Immigrant groups from every part of the world have routinely brought their languages to the United States, save one: African Americans. John Baugh explains how the African slave trade impacted this unique variety of American, and how the term "Ebonics" came into being.

Read this full article: "seems" is the operative word, as linguists are NOT in agreement that language definitively shapes how we see the world. If you want to learn another language and become fluent, you may have to change the way you behave in small but sometimes significant ways, specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice. Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a professor of linguistics at Temple University. If people speaking different languages need to group or observe things differently, then bilinguals ought to switch focus depending on the language they use. That's exactly the case, according to Pavlenko. For example, she says English distinguishes between cups and glasses, but in Russian, the difference between chashka (cup) and stakan (glass) is based on shape, not material. One's native language could also affect memory, says Pavlenko. She points to novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was fully trilingual in English, French and Russian. When Nabokov started translating his first memoir, written in English, into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when writing it in English. Pavlenko states that "the version of Nabokov's autobiography we know now is actually a third attempt, where he had to recall more things in Russian and then re-translate them from Russian back into English." Lena Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, has studied the differences in what research subjects remember when using English, which doesn't always note the intent of an action, and Spanish, which does. This can lead to differences in what people remember seeing, which is potentially important in eyewitness testimony, she says. However, not all linguists agree that language affects what we notice. John McWhorter,, a linguist at Columbia University, acknowledges such differences but says they don't really matter. The experim

Columbia University linguist predicts 600 languages will remain in 2115 This will be due to the movement of people and parents not teaching their children 'native' languages used to particular parts of the world Dr John McWhorter says languages will also likely become more simple Translating tools will not be enough to preserve linguistic diversity Sci-fi visions of the future may focus on soaring skylines and flying cars, but the world in 100 years may not only look different, but sound different too.

Linguist John McWhorter links Donald Trump's use of casual speech as one of the reasons for his popular appeal. Even Trump's penchant for Twitter is understandable: the 140-character limit creates a way of writing that, like texting, diverges as little as possible from talking. America's relationship to language has become more informal by the decade since the 1960s, just as it has to dress, sexual matters, culinary habits, dance and much else. Given this historical context, we have to realize that Trump's talking style isn't as exotically barbaric as it looks on the page - the oddness is that it winds up on the page at all. And second, we have to understand that his fans' not minding how he talks is symptomatic of how all of us relate to formality nowadays. Language has just come along with it.

This month, the journal Pediatrics published a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity in 3-to 5-year-old children as they listened to age-appropriate stories. The researchers found differences in brain activation according to how much the children had been read to at home. Children whose parents reported more reading at home and more books in the home showed significantly greater activation of brain areas in a region of the left hemisphere called the parietal-temporal-occipital association cortex. This brain area is "a watershed region, all about multisensory integration, integrating sound and then visual stimulation," said the lead author, Dr. John S. Hutton, a clinical research fellow at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. This region of the brain is known to be very active when older children read to themselves, but Dr. Hutton notes that it also lights up when younger children are hearing stories. What was especially novel was that children who were exposed to more books and home reading showed significantly more activity in the areas of the brain that process visual association, even though the child was in the scanner just listening to a story and could not see any pictures. "When kids are hearing stories, they're imagining in their mind's eye when they hear the story," said Dr. Hutton. "For example, 'The frog jumped over the log.' I've seen a frog before, I've seen a log before, what does that look like?" The different levels of brain activation, he said, suggest that children who have more practice in developing those visual images, as they look at picture books and listen to stories, may develop skills that will help them make images and stories out of words later on. "It helps them understand what things look like, and may help them transition to books without pictures," he said. "It will help them later be better readers because they've developed that part of the brain

In the mid-1970s, sociolinguist John Gumperz was summoned to Heathrow International Airport to help make sense of an odd culture clash. The new hires in Heathrow's employee cafeteria (mostly women from India and Pakistan) and some of the baggage handlers at the airport - had grown to openly resent each other. Why? One word: gravy. British women cafeteria employees said the word with a rising intonation - gravy? - that was understood as "Would you like some gravy?" The Indian and Pakistani women, however, said it with falling intonation - gravy. That came across as, "This is gravy; take it or leave it." A mere surface intonational difference, yet the cause of major social misunderstanding.

John Pennebacker, a University of Texas-Austin psychologist, found that language could successfully predict speed dating successes, as well as the relative longevity of such matches.. When the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date. "The more similar [they were] across all of these function words, the higher the probability that [they] would go on a date in a speed dating context," Pennebaker says. "And this is even cooler: We can even look at ... a young dating couple... [and] the more similar [they] are ... using this language style matching metric, the more likely [they] will still be dating three months from now." This is not because similar people are attracted to each other, Pennebaker says; people can be very different. It's that when we are around people that we have a genuine interest in, our language subtly shifts. "When two people are paying close attention, they use language in the same way," he says. "And it's one of these things that humans do automatically." Pennebacker also says that by analyzing language, you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status. "It's amazingly simple," Pennebaker says, "Listen to the relative use of the word "I." What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word "I" less.

British English speakers always seem to use the glottal stop: that abrupt silence that can replace the "t" in words . Ed Miliband, in an interview with Russell Brand consistently said phrases like "Gotta do it" instead of "Gotta deal with that." The question is why does the glottal stop have a bad reputation?