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Douglas Quenqua reports on crowdsourcing projects in both American Sign Language and British Sign Language are under way at several universities, and how those projects standardize signs for commonly used science terms.

"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."

This article discusses how we might alter the language we use to discuss climate change in order to instill urgency and encourage meaningful action. It describes Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy's publication "An Ecotopian Lexicon," a book of words to better convey the crisis of climate change. In the spirits of science fiction writers who often create new vocabulary for their imagined worlds, the two professors assembled a committee of writers, scholars, and artists to compile loan words that would more adequately communicate the reality of the climate crisis. These words were taken from languages such as Thai, Gaeilge, Norwegian, and Luganda. They hope that intentionally influencing the language we treat climate change with will help influence the action and imagination we apply to it. As written, "our inability to imagine another path forward reflects a limited vocabulary. "

Languages often adapt naturally to the world around them. Speakers create new words to communicate new concepts. But when a language isn't spoken widely enough to adapt on its own - as with Hawaiian - it may need help to move things along. The Hawaiian language has nearly 30,000 words. But up until the late 1980s, the language didn't have words for subjects like soccer, computer or recycling. So a group of linguists and language advocates formed a lexicon committee in 1987 to invent new words. The committee has created at least 7,500 new words since its inception. Many of the committee's entries have been published in a modern Hawaiian language dictionary called Māmāka Kaiao. Much of the group's work helped to make Hawaiian teachable in language immersion schools. But some are skeptical of the committee's work. One interviewee noted that there is a small group creating words that we "need" now, but it's unclear why that word was chosen or how. Even the pronunciation of new words can be confusing, she adds. Disagreements among Hawaiian speakers may seem like bad news for spreading the language. But Larry Kimura, UH-Hilo Hawaiian language professor, says it's a sign that the language is growing. He said the lexicon committee helps speed up what would have been an otherwise natural process of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi adapting to the world around it.

This article talks about the ASL-LEX database that four scientists created. The map of signs is meant to represent a mental lexicon and is allowing them to examine how signs are organized in the human mind. The article explains that signs may rhyme in a visual way even though the words do not, which causes the brain to relate groups of signs together. One pattern that was noticed is that the more commonly used signs tend to be simpler and shorter than the rare ones, which is comparable to spoken language. They also found that common signs are more likely to be in clusters of visually similar words, while rare signs are more isolated.

How TV shows, more specifically Peppa Pig, affect language development in young children. This study looked at the language lexicons within episodes and evaluated whether or not it was appropriate for young language learners.

Black Americans have long contributed to the ways in which the English language is used, and now a new research project aims to compile the first Oxford Dictionary of African American English. The research project is a collaboration between Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and Oxford University Press.

How Students Literacy Affected by Texting

A group of anthropologists from England used a computer program to analyze the emotional content of books from every year of the 20th century - close to a billion words in millions of books. Researchers found that the Twenties marked the apex of joy-related words; the overall usage of commonly known emotion words, however, has been in decline over the 20th century. The one exception: "fear", which started to increase just before the 1980s.

Could understanding other cultures' concepts of joy and well-being help us reshape our own? The Positive Lexicography Project aims to catalogue foreign terms for happiness that have no direct English translation. The brainchild of Tim Lomas, a lecturer in applied positive psychology at the University of East London, the first edition included two hundred and sixteen expressions from forty-nine languages, published in January. Lomas used online dictionaries and academic papers to define each word and place it into one of three overarching categories, doing his best to capture its cultural nuances. The glossary can be found here: http://www.drtimlomas.com/#!alphabetical-lexicography/b5ojm

For he/she's a jolly bad pronoun How English Lost its Genders When Nouns Grew Genitals and other exciting articles

Stephen Wilson, an associate professor in the University of Arizona's Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, studied the upper and lower white-matter connecting pathways between Broca's region and Wernicke's region: the two areas of the brain that are hubs for language processing. Brain imaging and language tests were used to examine patients suffering from language impairments caused by neurodegeneration. Wilson discovered the pathways have distinct functions. Damage to the lower pathway affects lexicon and semantics: "You forget the name of things, you forget the meaning of words. But surprisingly, you're extremely good at constructing sentences." Conversely, damage to the upper pathway creates problems in syntactic processing and figuring out the relationship between words in a sentence.

Language isn't found in just one part of the brain but rather in separate individual parts that are responsible for different aspects of language. Neurodegentive diseases that target specific areas of the brain affecting language, only have a partial effect on the patients ability to understand and communicate.

Psychologists Kristin Jay, of Marist College, and Timothy Jay, of Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, examine profanity acquisition in children: specifically what vocabulary items/ phrases comprised their "taboo lexicon" at different ages, and the children's assessment of the Inappropriateness of those words, as compared with teen and adult viewpoints.

Joshua Katz, of North Carolina State University, has developed a program that maps your dialect of American English, based on your responses to 25 questions. Take the quiz and find out yours.

fun

"Most people implicitly associate positive ideas with "right" and negative ideas with "left"....The meanings of words in English, Dutch, and Spanish are related to the way people type them on the QWERTY keyboard. Words with more right-hand letters are rated as more positive in emotional valence than words with more left-hand letters, consistent with right-handers' tendency to implicitly associate "good" with "right.""

"Ground zero, sleeper cells, progressive vertical collapse: The most resonant phrases of 9/11 are imbued with what might be called antipoetry, a resistance to prettification."

Sad.