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Being passive-aggressive doesn't mean you're a bad person. Often it's "a strategy we use when we think we don't deserve to speak our minds or we're afraid to be honest and open." The article reviews 7 tell-tale signs: 1. Making wistful statements 2. Doling out backhanded compliments 3. Ignoring or saying nothing 4. Procrastinating 5. Leaving someone out 6. Sabotaging 7. Keeping score

As anti-Muslim rhetoric increases, American officials are cautioning that it could validate extremists' perceptions that Americans are waging a war on Islam. New research from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management lends credence to this fear. Research conducted by Ntour Kteily (Northwestern assistant professor of management and organizations), Gordon Hodson (Canada's Brock University), and Emile Bruneau (U. Penn. neuroscientist) shows that feeling dehumanized by another group can lead you to dehumanize that group in return, which can increase support for aggressive actions against them. Meaning, if Americans think that Muslims see them as savages, Americans will be more likely to return the "favor," perceiving Muslims to be savages. And both groups will be more likely to support aggressive acts-like drone strikes or torture-against the other.

This article talks about how German language can be perceived as aggressive. Which it explains why we only see it as how it's pronounce instead of what it really means, because the pronunciation doesn't reflect the emotions of the words.

The consensus among sociologists and psychologists who study online behavior is that all kinds of people can become trolls-not just the unwound, the immature or the irate. The Internet's anonymity produces the "disinhibition effect," in which "the frequency of self-interested unethical behavior increases among anonymous people." Online communication causes users to feel 'distant' from the people they're speaking to, and less focused on their own identities, resulting in increased aggressive behavior.

We start building our sense of people's personalities from the first words they utter. Phil McAleer, of the University of Glasgow, ran an experiment where he recorded 64 people, men and women, from Glasgow, reading a paragraph that included the word "hello." He then extracted all the hellos and got 320 participants to listen to the different voices and rate them on 10 different personality traits, such as trustworthiness, aggressiveness, confidence, dominance and warmth. Interestingly, participants largely agreed on which voice matched which personality trait. One male voice was overwhelmingly voted the least trustworthy. The pitch of the untrustworthy voice was much lower than the male deemed most trustworthy. McAleer says this is probably because a higher pitched male voice is closer to the natural pitch of a female, making the men sound less aggressive and friendlier than the lower male voices. What makes females sound more trustworthy is whether their voices rise or fall at the end of the word, says McAleer. "Probably the trustworthy female, when she drops her voice at the end, is showing a degree of certainty and so can be trusted." (Perhaps a reason to avoid uptalk, if you're female?)

This study shows the science behind first impressions, and how certain voices can affect first impressions.

Article talks re: the changing nature of a period. Its original function, to indicate the end of a thought, has become obsolete in texting, because of the ability to "send". Now the period can be used to indicate seriousness or a sense of finality. But caution is needed, said linguist Gretchen McCulloch, noting that problems can start to arise when you combine a period with a positive sentiment, such as "Sure" or "Sounds good." "Now you've got positive words and serious punctuation and the clash between them is what creates that sense of passive-aggression," said McCulloch. Binghamton University psychology professor Celia Klin says a period can inadvertently set a tone, because while text messaging may function like speech, it lacks many of the expressive features of face-to-face verbal communication, like "facial expressions, tone of voice, our ability to elongate words, to say some things louder, to pause." Our language has evolved, and "what we have done with our incredible linguistic genius is found ways to insert that kind of emotional, interpersonal information into texting using what we have," said Klin. "And what we have is things like periods, emoticons, other kinds of punctuation. So people have repurposed the period to mean something else."

Some of the "2016 is awful" rhetoric might be about the way we all consumed the headlines this year. Amy Mitchell, director of Journalism Research at the Pew Research Center, says what we've been witnessing in news consumption trends over the last few years has changed us. "A lot of the shift to digital is presenting a news experience that is more mixed in with other kinds of activities," she says. "You don't necessarily go online looking for news each and every time. Somebody shares it, somebody emails it to you, somebody texts a link. And so many Americans are bumping into the news throughout the course of the day." Nikki Usher, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, calls this recent phenomenon "ambient journalism," or "when you're constantly plugged in through social media and you're constantly online and engaged in some way." And that - that constant bumping into news and online discord, that constant engagement - over time, it becomes an assault. And, Usher says, besides that aggression of immediacy, a lot of the headlines we consumed this year, particularly about the election, pushed a certain narrative: a nation, and even a world, completely and disastrously divided, perhaps beyond repair. "Lots of crappy, bad things happen every year," she says, "but you aren't told over and over again that this just shows us how bad everything is."

Unlike dolphins sharks are loners from birth. However they still have an intricate form of communication involving vibrations that are inaudible to humans, body gestures and extreme aggression.

Swear words are just like "please" and "try" in this respect; only, instead of softening the edges of a request or statement, these make it sound rougher and more aggressive. If I say, "Someone stole my red guitar," all I'm saying is that someone stole my guitar, and that the guitar was red. But if I say "Someone stole my damn guitar," I am not saying that my guitar was stolen and that it was damned (even if I'm in a death-metal band). Instead, I'm saying that someone stole my guitar and that I'm pissed off about it.

Talks about the correlation between trolling and the Online Disinhibition Effect

Of course, had she inserted too many marks, that may have been a problem, too, as there is suddenly a very fine line between appearing overeager (too much punctuation) and dismissive (not enough). Even the period, once the most benign of the punctuation spectrum, now feels aggressive.

This article talks about how with our changing world is dealing with new ways of communication.

Maori is having a revival across New Zealand. Indigenous people are increasingly embracing their language, rejecting generations of stigma and shame associated with its use. And white New Zealanders are looking to Maori language and culture to help them make sense of their own cultural identity. As of 2013, just 3.7 percent of New Zealanders spoke the language fluently, and many predicted that it would soon die out. But analysts say Maori's status is shifting, and a basic knowledge of the language has come to signify cultural cool in a country that continues to wrestle with its colonial and indigenous roots. Now New Zealand's government, which says it wants more than 20 percent of the country's population to speak basic Maori by 2040, has pledged to provide Maori lessons in all New Zealand schools by 2025, despite a dearth of teachers who can speak the language.

This article talks about how the native Maori language is being revived in New Zealand. New Zealand was colonized by the British in the 19th century. Since that time, Maori language was looked down upon making it the minority language, but now with the recent rise of Maori speakers, it has started to become a common language used. This article talks about how every school is teaching Maori in their classes, and how they want Maori to be one of the dominantly spoken languages in New Zealand by 2040.

This article discusses the history of the Maori language and its progression throughout recent history. The Maori language was threatened like many other native languages in the world due to the aggression from the British. In the article shows how the people of the country are coming to terms with the past in order to build a brighter future for the native Maori culture and language.

This article talked about how our language has changed recently because of the internet. The purpose of texting is to send short, efficient messages, so our language has reflected that. We now use more acronyms and speak informally when we are talking to people online. An example of how language has changed is our use of periods. Since we speak less formally, we don't use periods as often. So now, when we receive messages that come with periods we interpret them as passive-aggressive. This can be problematic because the age people joined the internet plays a big role in how we interpret messages online. So there is often lots of miscommunication between people of different ages because we interpret language differently.