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Researchers found that people tend to rate discoveries that came about "like a light bulb" as more exceptional than those that are "nurtured like seeds." These two metaphors are often used to describe scientific discovery and what we perceive as genius. Along with them come ingrained, subconscious associations that may have unintended consequences, according to a study published Friday in Social Psychological and Personality Science. Also, those metaphors had different effects depending on the gender of the idea's creator.

The Rap Genius website annotates rap lyrics: creators hope to provide a hip-hop Wikipedia. You can listen to songs, read lyrics, and click the lines that interest you for pop-up explanations. Like Wikipedia, you can also create and annotate entries.

Noted African-American author James Baldwin makes an argument for the legitimacy and dignity of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a real and rich language that defines one's identity, that it is not to be dismissed as a mere "dialect."

This genius item of clothing is printed with nearly 40 icons that travelers can use to try to get their message across if they don't know the language. Inspired by a communications breakdown on the road, the shirt is part of a range of items created by a team of Swiss guys who've formed a company, Iconspeak.

A T-shirt that is printed with 40 universal symbols so that people may point at symbols when they can't understand each other

TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.

In this TED Talk, Patricia Kuhl discusses how babies learn language. Using lab experiments and brain scans, such as PET scans, her team of researches were able to determine that babies "take statistics." This means they use a process of reasoning to determine what sounds they need to learn to say.

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."

My colleague Yunus Peer recommended this BBC video about the recent cultural trend of "linguistic supersizing"--the frequent use of hyperbole, extreme exaggeration. Pure genius!