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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.

the limits of political word-counting

Words have more meaning than just their definition, and the use of words can give off emotions and more. People often use words to describe situations before thinking if what they're saying is considerate and politically correct. This article shows how the use of words can affect people's mental illnesses, and by saying the wrong thing can cause the person to feel ostracized and refuse to get theraputic help.

This article talked about different ways to handle a difficult situation, particularly on Thanksgiving. The reason for it being Thanksgiving, is because the midterm elections just happened recently, making the possibility of conversations to be about politics very likely. This article dove into why some people may want to converse about this, and why it's very hard to deal with tough conversations, particularly on a day where it's all about family and thankfulness.

A quote from Liz Posner, the author of the article: "When I set out to research the German words that capture what it feels like to be an American living during the era of the Trump administration, I didn't expect there to be so damn many. Like many of my fellow citizens who have flocked to therapists' offices over the past year, eager to sort through their trauma at being governed by a narcissistic megalomaniac, I was already aware that the current political era was doing something strange to my psyche. But it can be hard to pin down exactly what these emotions are, if words for them, even exist." Fortunately, German, not English, is able to capture the nuances of these feelings

Did Donald Trump use the word shithole when referring to African countries in a meeting with lawmakers on immigration policy, or did he actually say shithouse? These are the scatological depths to which our political discourse has sunk. Let's stipulate that regardless of whether Trump said shithole or shithouse, it does little to change the underlying racist sentiment of disparaging the whole continent of Africa (and Haiti and El Salvador as well, according to some accounts). But just as it's possible to trace the literary roots of shithole, we can observe how the word shithouse has been put into use over the centuries leading up to this peculiar moment in presidential history.

A leading political strategist explains how candidates use the art of storytelling to help swing elections.

A new study shows how certain ideas are still deeply ingrained the public's minds as masculine. For example, most of the public associates the president with a man. In fact, the study showed that when articles or people used "her" or feminine pronouns people's reading times increased because of the confusion caused in their brain. Many people don't use "she" when referring to a hypothetical president. The way that language can sometimes gender certain occupations has some important implications. That is why many states and representatives are trying to change the language to make it more inclusive. For example, Kamala Harris, when she was California's attorney general, and changed all the wording of the statutes that referred to the attorney general as a man. This is because gendering occupations can lead to an ingrained bias. However, with more women in politics, biases could change. For example, in UK, where there have been 2 female prime ministers, the study was replicated and it was found that people were comfortable using "she" or "her" when stating the next prospective prime minister.

Jennifer Sclafani, a linguist at Georgetown University, recently wrote a book set to publish this fall titled "Talking Donald Trump: A Sociolinguistic Study of Style, Metadiscourse, and Political Identity." Sclafani notes Trump has used language to "create a brand" as a politician. "President Trump creates a spectacle in the way that he speaks," she said. "So it creates a feeling of strength for the nation, or it creates a sense of determination, a sense that he can get the job done through his use of hyperbole and directness." The features of Trump's speech patterns include a casual tone, a simple vocabulary and grammar, frequent 2 word utterances, repetitions, hyperbole and sudden switches of topics, according to Sclafani. Trump also sets himself apart by the words he doesn't use. For example, he started his sentences with "well" less frequently than other Republican contenders during the 2016 GOP primary debates. Omitting the word "well" at the start of a sentence helped Trump come across as a straight talker who wouldn't try to escape a question asked by a moderator, Sclafani said.

Lying in politics transcends political party and era. It is, in some ways, an inherent part of the profession of politicking. But Donald Trump is in a different category. The sheer frequency, spontaneity and seeming irrelevance of his lies have no precedent. A whopping 70 percent of Trump's statements that PolitiFact checked during the campaign were false, while only 4 percent were completely true, and 11 percent mostly true. (Compare that to the politician Trump dubbed "crooked," Hillary Clinton: Just 26 percent of her statements were deemed false.) For decades, researchers have been wrestling with the nature of falsehood: How does it arise? How does it affect our brains? Can we choose to combat it? The answers aren't encouraging for those who worry about the national impact of a reign of untruth over the next four, or eight, years. Lies are exhausting to fight, pernicious in their effects and, perhaps worst of all, almost impossible to correct if their content resonates strongly enough with people's sense of themselves, which Trump's clearly do.

This article talks about the possibility of English words being used to suppress women in politics, the workplace, and in general. Also writes about how women use a more passive voice when speaking, and how this is seen as a bad thing, but actually could lead to a better environment in a workplace.

Why does "left" mean liberal and "right" mean conservative? To answer this question, the article probes into how this political terminology originated from the physical location of politicians in the 1789 French National Assembly, which was the parliament France formed after the French Revolution.

This article was intriguing as it highlighted how even one word can symbolize a definitive change. In this case, the article focused on how President Biden is using the word "equal" in regards to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the context of "Palestinians and Israelis equally deserve to live safely and securely and to enjoy equal measures of freedom, prosperity, and democracy." In turn, this signifies a political push, likely from Democratic progressives, who want to define the concept of equal rights as a objective the U.S. should focus from now on.

Straddling the imaginary border between the Balkans and Central Europe, Slovenia is home to two million citizens united by a common language. But this wasn't always the case. For about six hundred years, the Slovene lands were the domain of the Habsburgs, with the occasional appearance by the French, Italians, Hungarians, and Serbs. The Slovene language-and with it the core of Slovene identity-should by all rights have disappeared long ago, subsumed by the much stronger languages and political powers surrounding it. The language survived thanks to the efforts of many people, from the 16th-century protestants who first wrote it down to the 18th- and 19th-century intellectuals who coaxed it out of the church and spread it among the people. Among their arsenal of weapons: a cookbook, wielded by one relentlessly determined priest, Valentin Vodnik. Vodnik was a man of boundless energy, curiosity, and drive: Besides his work as a priest and later a high-school teacher and headmaster, he was fluent in half a dozen languages, wrote some of the first Slovene poetry, published the first Slovene newspaper, and began corresponding with intellectuals in Slovene. Vodnik's mission was popularizing and elevating the reputation of the language at a time when educated Slovenes mostly spoke German, considering their native tongue to be the vernacular of poor illiterate farmers, unfit for polite society and incapable of expressing complex ideas.

In fear of being left behind, China wanted to modernize their language to keep up with the rest of the world. This article considers how the political climate and technological advancements impacted the modernization and simplification of characters and phonetic writing of the pronunciation.

The culture of Okinawa, Japan is quite distinct from other Japanese islands. It became a part of Japan in 1879, but has a strong American influence because of three decades of military occupation following WWII. Today, 20% of the island is made up of over 30 U.S. military bases. This history has resulted in the near extinction of the Okinawan language, called Uchinaguchi, which was systematically suppressed when the island was annexed by Japan. Because of ubiquitous U.S. presence, Okinawans perceive more of a need for English competence than for learning the language of their ancestors. Once the U.S. ceded control of the island back to Japan in the 1970's, the island underwent changes that many Okinawans perceived as another occupation, but this time instead of U.S. military projects, Japanese business took over the island. Japanese power over Okinawa can even be seen in the language politics: Uchinaguchi was long considered a dialect of Japanese despite the two languages having less than 60% in common. In 2009 UNESCO recognized Okinawan as its own language along with five others spoken in the region, all of which are endangered. Native speakers are aging and dying off. Efforts to revitalize Uchinaguchi on the island are regularly stifled by the local government's indifference towards the language. Nonetheless, the language is praised for its folkloric value and is featured in local theater. Some schools offer language classes, such as Okinawa Christian University. Because Uchinaguchi is a low priority in the political field, the cultural field is the site of language revitalization and resistance to its extinction. One benefit of promoting the language through culture is that, unlike the government, the culture can have influence overseas.

This article explains some of the many harmful effects AI and voice replication are having on the growing misinformation crisis. Some cases paint certain political figures in a negative light by creating audio clips of them saying damaging things. Between political influence and scams, several problems arise from the cheep price and accessibility of sophisticated AI programs.