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Botched autocorrects are a byproduct of a technological convenience that allows typing on the go, even when the message does not always come out as planned. Yet as autocorrect technology has become more advanced, so have its errors. Tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple employ dozens of linguists - or "natural language programmers," as they are known - to analyze language patterns and to track slang, even pop culture. And they can do amazing things: correct when you hit the wrong keys (the "fat finger" phenomenon) and analyze whom you are texting, how you have spoken with that person in the past, even what you've talked about. Apple's iOS 8 operating system, released in September, even purports to know how your tone changes by medium - that is, "the casual style" you may use in texting versus "the more formal language" you are likely to use in email, as the company put it in a statement. It adjusts for whom you are communicating with, knowing that your choice of words with a buddy is probably more laid-back than it would be with your boss. Your smartphone may now be able to suggest not just words but entire phrases. And the more you use it, the more it remembers, paying attention to repeated words, the structure of your sentences and tone.

Skepticism of online "news" serves as a decent filter much of the time, but our innate biases allow it to be bypassed, researchers have found - especially when presented with the right kind of algorithmically selected "meme." At a time when political misinformation is in ready supply, and in demand, "Facebook, Google, and Twitter function as a distribution mechanism, a platform for circulating false information and helping find receptive audiences," said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College (and occasional contributor to The Times's Upshot column). Why? Here are the key reasons: 1. Individual bias/first impressions: subtle individual biases are at least as important as rankings and choice when it comes to spreading bogus news or Russian hoaxes. Merely understanding what a news report or commentary is saying requires a temporary suspension of disbelief. Mentally, the reader must temporarily accept the stated "facts" as possibly true. A cognitive connection is made automatically: Clinton-sex offender, Trump-Nazi, Muslim men-welfare. And refuting those false claims requires a person to first mentally articulate them, reinforcing a subconscious connection that lingers far longer than people presume.Over time, for many people, it is that false initial connection that stays the strongest, not the retractions or corrections. 2. Repetition: Merely seeing a news headline multiple times in a news feed, even if the news is false, makes it seem more credible. 3. People tend to value the information and judgments offered by good friends over all other sources. It's a psychological tendency with significant consequences now that nearly two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media.

Article talks about apologies and how CEOs whose facial expression matched their apologies had better invester recovery. Also, the vague language CEOs use in their apologies removed blame from themselves and made it seem like the mistake "just happened" rather than being their fault.

In this study, researchers analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. Articles (a, an, the) are highly predictive of males, being older, and openness. As a content-related language variable, the anger category also proved highly predictive for males as well as younger individuals. Females used more emotion words [(e.g., 'excited'), and first-person singular, and mention more psychological and social processes (e.g., 'love you' and ) for 23 to 29 year olds.

A study showing that most users only read headlines without actually reading the article was shown to be accurate. A satirical science news site hosted an article with the headlines "Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting". Though the story was shared over 50 thousand times, about only 40% of the time the link was clicked. This is interesting because this shows that we tend to rather comment on what we believe about a article from its headline, instead of its content.

The French have gotten themselves into one of their recurrent linguistic lathers, this one over the changes in their spelling that will be taking effect in the fall. The changes were originally proposed more than 25 years ago.

"In our still-budding digital world, where public and private spheres cross-pollinate in unpredictable ways, perhaps it's not surprising that soon-to-be parents now routinely turn to Google to vet baby names. A quick search can help ensure that a child is not saddled with the name of a serial killer, pornography star or sex offender. ... But maybe common names are more prudent. A recent study by the online security firm AVG found that 92 percent of children under 2 in the United States have some kind of online presence, whether a tagged photo, sonogram image or Facebook page."

"Two scholars of the 17th and 18th centuries say the earlier era prefigured the "information overload," with its own equivalents of Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Social networks have been key to almost all revolutions - from 1789 to the Arab Spring." Also includes an short, interesting video interview with the researchers.

"Facebook, YouTube and even texting will be the salvation of many of the world's endangered languages, scientists believe. Of the 7,000 or so languages spoken on Earth today, about half are expected to be extinct by the century's end. ... Tuvan, an indigenous tongue spoken by nomadic peoples in Siberia and Mongolia, even has an iPhone app to teach the pronunciation of words to new students. 'It's what I like to call the flipside of globalisation' [said K David Harrison] ... 'Everything that people know about the planet, about plants, animals, about how to live sustainably, the polar ice caps, the different ecosystems that humans have survived in - all this knowledge is encoded in human cultures and languages, whereas only a tiny fraction of it is encoded in the scientific literature.'"

Author Clive Thompson argues, "The fact that so many of us are writing - sharing our ideas, good and bad, for the world to see - has changed the way we think. Just as we now live in public, so do we think in public. And that is accelerating the creation of new ideas and the advancement of global knowledge." Every day, we collectively produce millions of books' worth of writing. Globally we send 154.6 billion emails, more than 400 million tweets, and over 1 million blog posts and around 2 million blog comments on WordPress. On Facebook, we post about 16 billion words. Altogether, we compose some 3.6 trillion words every day on email and social media - the equivalent of 36 million books.* (The entire US Library of Congress, by comparison, holds around 23 million books.) He notes the Internet has spawned a global culture of avid writers, one almost always writing for an audience, and suggests that writing for a real audience helps clarify one's thinking, enhances learning, and arguably, betters writers' organization, ideas, and attention to editing.

Science writer Virginia Morell, in her wonderful new book Animal Wise, describes an experiment involving horses and whinnies - whinnies being very like names. She also cites the research of ornithologist Karl Berg, who states that while most people might think, 'Well, all those [bird] calls are just noise, but I think they're having conversations." Berg has listened to so many parrots in so many nests for so long, he has been able to identify that weeks after birth, these little birds begin to use very specific peeps to identify themselves to others. Not only that, they learn the peeping "names" of their parents, brothers, sisters, and use them in conversation, as in, "Peep-duh-dee-Peep, is that you?" Apparently, dolphins also use particular clicks and whistles to designate particular individuals.

Continue reading the main story Earlier this month Nefertiti Menoe had had enough of the phrase "You're speaking white." After she saw a meme on Facebook that ridiculed minorities who use proper English, she posted a short video to her own page.

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.

Just having a feminine voice means you're probably not as capable at your job. At least, studies suggest, that's what many people in the United States think. There's a gender bias in how Americans perceive feminine voices: as insecure, less competent and less trustworthy.