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"We can't talk about any complex situation-like crime-without using metaphors," says Lera Boroditsky, assistant professor of psychology.... In one study, 71 percent of the participants called for more enforcement when they read: "Crime is a beast ravaging the city of Addison." That number dropped to 54 percent among participants who read an alternative framing: "Crime is a virus ravaging the city of Addison."

Courtesy Merriam-Webster: 10 U.S. Presidential (and other politicians') gaffes: even presidents commit word crimes. But are they? Some are blatant bloopers, e.g. "Sometimes you misunderestimated me." - George W. Bush, News Conference, 12 Jan. 2009, yet others, like Warren Harding's use of "normalcy" or Barack Obama's "enormity" have become acceptable. Welcome to language evolution.

Closing your eyes when trying to recall events increases the chances of accuracy, researchers at the University of Surrey suggest. Scientists tested people's ability to remember details of films showing fake crime scenes. They hope the studies will help witnesses recall details more accurately when questioned by police.

Twitter is awash with trolls, spammers and misanthropes, all keen to ruin your day with a mean-spirited message or even a threat that can cause you genuine fear. It seems all too easy to set up an account and cause trouble anonymously, but an emerging field of research is making it easier to track perpetrators by looking at the way they use language when they chat.

All the technology in the world can't stop you from leaving a trail behind you when you broadcast your thoughts online or via text message. We all have individual writing styles and habits that build to create a linguistic identity. Forensic linguistic experts can penetrate technological anonymity by interrogating the linguistic clues that you leave as you write. Everything from the way someone uses capitalisation or personal pronouns, to the words someone typically omits or includes, to a breakdown of average word or sentence length, can help identify the writer of even a short text like a Tweet or text message.

Like Facebook or Twitter, Yik Yak is a social media network, only without user profiles. It does not sort messages according to friends or followers but by geographic location or, in many cases, by university. Only posts within a 1.5-mile radius appear, making Yik Yak well suited to college campuses. Think of it as a virtual community bulletin board - or maybe a virtual bathroom wall at the student union. It has become the go-to social feed for college students across the country to commiserate about finals, to find a party or to crack a joke about a rival school. Much of the chatter is harmless. Some of it is not. "Yik Yak is the Wild West of anonymous social apps," said Danielle Keats Citron, a law professor at University of Maryland and the author of "Hate Crimes in Cyberspace." "It is being increasingly used by young people in a really intimidating and destructive way."

It seemed somewhat relevant to what we talked about in class today.

Article talks about the growing field of forensic linguistics: that is, the study of language to identify who said or wrote that verbal sample. Applications are enormous, from evaluating the identity of potential asylum seekers to pinpointing the Unabomber or perpetrators of crimes where language data is involved, but critics maintain that computer scans alone to evaluate language are insufficient and that overreliance can pose dangers.

You only use 10 percent of your brain. Eating carrots improves your eyesight. Vitamin C cures the common cold. Crime in the United States is at an all-time high. None of those things are true. But the facts don't actually matter: People repeat them so often that you believe them. Welcome to the "illusory truth effect," a glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth. Marketers and politicians are masters of manipulating this particular cognitive bias. "Repetition makes things seem more plausible," says Lynn Hasher, a psychologist at the University of Toronto whose research team first noticed the effect in the 1970s. "And the effect is likely more powerful when people are tired or distracted by other information."

slang captures elements of humanity that are not recorded elsewhere. "What slang really does is show us at our most human," says Jonathon Green, a scholar of slang. It is the linguistic equivalent of our "unfettered Freudian id," proof of how deeply we desire social affirmation, how subversive we can be and, in some ways, how unchanging humans are. After all, while the words may change, the thematic areas (sex, drugs, crime, insults, etc.) have remained unwavering for half a millennium. So has slang's primary purpose: to playfully disguise true meaning in a way that determines who is in the know and who is out.