Group items tagged

This article talks about emojis and why they are not good to use when texting someone. An edition of the newspaper USA Today last week chose to supplement all its front-page stories with Facebook's new "emoji reactions"*. Of course, the internet's response was largely one of horrified bemusement (currently we lack an emoji for "horrified bemusement" so, apologies readers, you're going to have to do the hard work yourselves by reading the words the old-fashioned way).

"Barack Obama's speeches are much admired and endlessly analysed, but, says Charlotte Higgins, one of their most interesting aspects is the enormous debt they owe to the oratory of the Romans"

This article talks about the use of emojis in place of words. It describes emoji for serious, tragic matters as offensive and crass. They say when discussing these serious-type matters, it is better to say nothing at all than use emoji's to an express a verbally indescribable emotion.

This article talks about L2 acquisition in schools throughout the United States and how more schools are starting to offer foreign language classes to students. It talks about why it's important and beneficial to learn a foreign language.

Information about Spanish, a Romance language spoken in Spain and in most of Central and South America, as well as in the USA, by about 417 million people.

This Reuters inforgraphic succinctly summarizes the evolution and history of the English language, and what makes spelling in English so difficult. To quote the article, "English is the collector and assimilator of the world's words and retains all their color and irregularities."

Charting linguistic change was once a painstakingly slow task, but a new analysis of nearly one billion Tweets - presented on 17 April 2018 at the Evolang International Conference on Language Evolution in Torun, Poland - now offers us an unprecedented glimpse of this process in action. According to this new research, most of the more recent coinages will have originated in one of five distinct hotspots that are driving American English through continual change. More than 20% of Americans were using Twitter at the time of the study - and each Tweet is timestamped and geocoded, offering precise information on the time and place that particular terms entered conversations. The researcher behind the study, Jack Grieve at the University of Birmingham, UK, analysed more than 980 million Tweets in total - consisting of 8.9 billion words - posted between October 2013 and November 2014, and spanning 3,075 of the 3,108 US counties. From this huge dataset, Grieve first identified any terms that were rare at the beginning of the study (occurring less than once per billion words in the last quarter of 2013) but which had then steadily risen in popularity over the course of the following year. He then filtered the subsequent list for proper nouns (such as Timehop) and those appearing in commercial adverts, and he also removed any words that were already in Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Acronyms, however, were included. The result was a list of 54 terms, which covered everything from sex and relationships (such as "baeless" - a synonym for single), people's appearance ("gainz" to describe the increased muscle mass from bulking up at the gym), and technology ("celfie" - an alternative spelling of selfie). Others reflected the infiltration of Japanese culture (such as "senpai", which means teacher or master). They also described general feelings, like "litt" (or "litty" - which means impressive or good - or affirmations such as "yaaaas

SPANISH LANGUAGE TEXT. There is no English translation that I know of for this article. Comprised of eleven interviews of fairly "high-class" individuals (including authors, journalists, doctors, lawyers, professors, religious officials, and more), the focus of this article is profanity, and whether or not said individuals use profanity while speaking. Interestingly enough, eight out of the eleven individuals used profanity fairly regularly. Most of those eight were fairly shameful about their use of profanity, or only used them in particular contexts-including, interestingly enough, during homilies/sermons. Only one person (Pilar de Río) declared that they used profanity freely and enthusiastically, while others, though admitting the merits of such language (particularly its expressive power), did not view them in such a positive light. Two additional members of the eleven interviewees primarily used "muletas" or "muletillas," or, as we know them in English, crutches or filler words. This article is quite interesting if examining profanity in different cultures and languages, as it is a Spanish-language article from El Ciervo, the longest-running magazine in Spain's history. Do note, again, that this source is a SPANISH LANGUAGE TEXT, and that some proficiency in the language will be needed to interpret this text, even with the help of online dictionaries.