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This was a really interesting article about how language use impacted the amount of donations received by a hospital. It shows that by complimenting people and using positive adjectives, people will be more inclined to donate money. When trying to do fundraisers, complimenting potential donors and/or speaking to them with positive adjectives will, on average, increase the amount of money raised. In addition, even though many forms of communication are now online, people will be more inclined to donate if you send them a hard copy in the mail.

This article discusses the use and comparison of the two words "women" and "female." It takes a political, social, and economical aspect to show very interesting examples of how the two words differ. "Both words can function as nouns, but female, unlike woman, can also be an adjective. In an Oscar Hammerstein II lyric from "Flower Drum Song," written 50 years ago, a young woman glad to be a girl sings, "I'm strictly a female female" - the first use an adjective; the second, a noun. Adjectives are by their nature stretchable, happily taking "more" or "less": you can say "more female," but you cannot say "more woman"; you would have to say "more womanly." In modifying another noun, woman is what the O.E.D. labels an apposite noun - explaining, even identifying, the noun it "stands next to" - but syntactically stronger than an adjective. Both words can be used as modifiers of nouns, but the noun woman has more weight."

Some of the most binding rules in English are things that native speakers know but don't know they know, even though they use them every day. Adjectives, writes Mark Forsyth, author of _The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase_, "absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac." Mixing up the above phrase does, as Forsyth writes, feel inexplicably wrong (a rectangular silver French old little lovely whittling green knife…), though nobody can say why. It's almost like secret knowledge we all share. Learn the language in a non-English-speaking country, however, and such "secrets" are taught in meticulous detail.

"Some words feature prominently in every US presidential State of the Union message, others come and go as events dictate or fashions change. As President Barack Obama prepares to address Congress, we look at the ups and downs of the 10 nouns and adjectives (and one pronoun) used most often since 1790."

"Not every language suffers from this deficit of smell adjectives. The Kapsiki of Cameroon, for example, have 14 fundamental smell terms...  awesome words like dzafe and duf'duf are conspicuously absent from European languages."

Good possibilities for field research here.

English originated in England and is the dominant language in many countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia. It is also the official language of India, the Philippines, Singapore, island nations in the Carribean Sea and Pacific Ocean, and many countries in Africa, including South Africa. About a third of the world's population uses English and it is the first choice of foreign language in most other countries in the world. The parent language of English Proto-Indo-European was used about 5,000 years ago by nomads. The closest language to modern English is Frisian, used by the Dutch province of Friesland. During the course of many millennia, modern English has slowly gotten simpler and less inflected. In English, only nouns, pronouns (he, him, his), adjectives (big, bigger, biggest) and verbs are inflected. English is the only European language to use uninflected adjectives (tall man & tall woman versus Spanish el hombre alto & la mujer alta. For the verb "ride", English has 5 forms (ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden) versus German reiten that has 16 forms. The simplification and loss of inflection has made English more flexible functionally and more open in vocabulary. English has "borrowed" words from other languages (e.g. cannibal, cigar, guerrilla, matador, mosquito, tornado, vanilla, etc. From Greek, English "borrowed": alchemy, alcohol, algebra, arsenal, assassin, elixir, mosque, sugar, syrup, zero, cipher etc. From Hebrew is: amen, hallelujah, manna, messiah, seraph, leviathan, shibboleth, etc. There are many other words in the English dictionary that are taken from other languages. Many countries speak or use English, but not in the same way we use it. The article is very long and goes through phonology (sounds), morphology inflection (grammar forms of tense, case, voice, person, gender, etc), composition, syntax (sentence forms), vocabulary, orthography (spelling systems) of English. It also gives

WHO can say what order should be used to list adjectives in English? Mark Forsyth, in "The Elements of Eloquence", describes it as: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose and then Noun. "So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac." Mr Forsyth may have exaggerated how fixed adjective order is, but his little nugget is broadly true, and it has delighted people to examine something they didn't know they knew.

In 2016, linguist Mark Forsyth tasted internet fame this week when a passage from a book he wrote went viral, talking about adjective word order in English. In this BBC article, Forsyth explains more language secrets that L1 English speakers know without knowing.

Linguist Victor Mair references Caleb Madison's article in the "The Good Word" column of The Atlantic (1/24/22): "Why We're All Shooketh: The term is online slang of Biblical proportions". The phrase I'm shooketh was first uttered by the comedian Christine Sydelko in a YouTube video uploaded to her account in 2017 (she was expressing her shock at having been recognized by a fan at Boston Market). The adjective shooketh took off as a way to lend biblical proportions to awestruck confusion. But the linguistic journey to its creation spans the evolution of the English language, connecting Early Modern English, turn-of-the-century adventure novels, and Twitter slang. In the original article, Madison noted that when we want to transform verbs like shake into adjectives, we typically use something called a participle, either present or past. The present participle of shake is shaking, as in "I'm shaking." The past participle would be "I'm shaken." But in the 19th century, the simple past tense, shook, took hold. As for the "eth" part, Mair notes that this suffix was used in Early Modern English (think Shakespeare and the King James Bible) to put verbs in the third-person present tense, e.g. "she loveth." Soon, -eth simplified to just -s, but we still use the form when we need to give our verbs a little extra ancient oomph. It just wouldn't be as momentous to say "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away!" And it certainly wouldn't be as cool to say "I'm shooks." But our distance from the Elizabethan era allows -eth to reappear with no tense tension. Instead, it simply adds a wry dramatic flourish to the feeling of being shook. If using shook dials the shock of shaken up a notch, adding -eth pushes the intensity to 11, expressing a holy and almost sublime desire in the face of inexplicable events. Shooketh yokes together a punchy modern verbal innovation with a dramatic formal relic of early English to communicate a shaking of biblical propor

"... I picked up a Nature's Promise product called Organic Raspberry Fruit Spread. Why did I not see the obvious syntactic danger? Some grammarian, I thought to myself later, when I saw what I'd missed."

"Of the Dickens citations in the OED, 258 citations are the earliest recorded by the dictionary for a particular word, and 1,586 are the earliest for a particular sense of a word. Dickens was certainly an innovative writer, but these examples are not necessarily his own coinages. ... Very often the words that Dickens ushered in were from the earthy slang associated with the working class, the theatre, or the criminal underworld, and Dickens did much to make these once "vulgar" words mainstream. Dickens's very first novel, The Pickwick Papers from 1837, introduced such slang terms as butter-fingers ("a clumsy person"), flummox ("bewilder"), sawbones ("surgeon"), and whizz-bang ("sound of a gunshot"). ... One way that Dickens devised new words was by adding suffixes to old ones. He made good use of the -y suffix to make adjectives (mildewy, bulgy, swishy, soupy, waxy, trembly) and -iness to make nouns (messiness, cheesiness, fluffiness, seediness). ... Finally, no discussion of Dickensian language would be complete without mentioning the richly evocative names of his characters."

"You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!" It's an odd little speech. But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying. That's because all of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then. While traditionally, it's been thought that words can't survive for more than 8,000 to 9,000 years, a team of researchers from the University of Reading has come up with a list of two dozen "ultraconserved words" that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: "mother," "not," "what," "to hear" and "man." It also contains surprises: "to flow," "ashes" and "worm." The existence of the long-lived words suggests there was a "proto-Eurasiatic" language that was the common ancestor to about 700 contemporary languages that are the native tongues of more than half the world's people.

Dan Jurafsky's book, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, explores the history and origin of common food terms like "ketchup." Jurafsky also contemplates how menu wording can reflect the relative upscaleness of a restaurant. "Expensive restaurants are 15 times more likely to tell you where the food comes from - to mention the grass-fed things or the name of the farm or greenmarket cucumbers, but expensive restaurants also use fancy, difficult words like tonarelli, or choclo [large-kernaled corn] or pastilla," Jurafsky says. But they are also generally shorter in length. The really long menus, which he says are "stuffed with adjectives like fresh, rich, mild, crisp, tender and golden brown," are found at the middle-priced restaurants. And the cheapest restaurants use "positive but vague words - 'delicious,' 'tasty,' 'savory,' " he says. If an expensive restaurant used words like "fresh" and "delicious," that "implies you have to be convinced." Cheaper restaurants are also likely to say that the food should be served "your way." "The more expensive the restaurant, the more it's all about the chef," he says.

Language is universal - wherever there are humans, there is language. Not only do we depend heavily on language for conversation, we use it for archiving those conversations through books, texts and emails. For something so pervasive in human life, it only makes sense that we should try to understand it. "Just because all humans have language does not mean that all language is acquired in the same way," says Scofield, who studies child language development. Nouns, for instance, are typically learned earlier than adjectives.

This article discusses human communication with other animals. It states that animals won't be able to remember words like "bacteria" or "economy" because they don't have the brain capacity to understand those words. However, if you tell a dog to "sit", the dog is able to differentiate the sound of that particular word from other verbal signals, and can carry out the action. This is how learning words works. The article also discusses IQ and explains that human brains have been genetically modified for communication, and the size of our brains is also much bigger than expected in animals of the same size.

The article also underscores a quality that differentiates human language from other animal communication: grammatical orderliness. Human languages have word categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and so on. We can modify word order and word endings to create different tenses so that we can describe events from the past or imaginary ones from the future. This grammatical complexity emerges quite early in child development, beginning in the second year of life and exploding with full force in the third year of life. No nonhuman animal to date has demonstrated the ability to construct sentences with the level of grammatical complexity typical of a three-year-old human child.

It's commonly said that the Japanese language wields more food-describing onomatopoeia than any other. These adjectives capture the perceived sounds different foods make when we eat them. Saku saku! Fuwa fuwa! According to estimates, there are 445 such words in the Japanese language. "English has only slightly more than 130 words to describe the way foods feel in our mouths," reports Kendra Pierre-Louis in Popular Science's exploration of food texture in its latest issue themed around taste.