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This article includes new information about how the coronavirus lockdowns have negatively impacted children's speech and language skills. It has small anecdotes of real families with young children where their language progress was practically stalled during the lockdowns but able to bounce back through rigorous language assistance schools. It even touches on how by adulthood, "four times more likely to struggle with reading, three time more likely to have mental health issues, twice as likely to be unemployed and have social-mobility issues, " if someone has issues with language in childhood.

This article discusses the importance of not incorrectly using medical terms and disorders to describe emotion. It talks about how it can be insensitive towards people that actually suffer from the disorder and how the casual use can make the idea of the real thing seem less serious to others.

describes techniques that memory-athletes use

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."

Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey." This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about. When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

This MIT Technology Review article notes that while Artificial Intelligence has experienced many sophisticated advances, one fundamental capability remains elusive: language. Systems like Siri and IBM's Watson can follow simple spoken or typed commands and answer basic questions, but they can't hold a conversation and have no real understanding of the words they use. In addition, humans, unlike machines, have the ability to learn very quickly from a relatively small amount of data and have a built-in ability to model the world in 3-D very efficiently. Programming machines to comprehend and generate language is a complex task, because the machines would need to mimic human learning, mental model building, and psychology. As MIT cognitive scientist Josh Tenenbaum states, "Language builds on other abilities that are probably more basic, that are present in young infants before they have language: perceiving the world visually, acting on our motor systems, understanding the physics of the world or other agents' goals." ­ If he is right, then it will be difficult to re-create language understanding in machines and AI systems without trying to mimic human learning, mental model building, and psychology.

The Latin word anathema has evolved over time. Today, it means "a strongly disliked person or thing," e.g. "bullying is anathema to me." In medieval times, however, "anathema" means "an excommunicated person, also the curse of excommunication." In medieval, pre-printing press times, books were highly valued and rare, as they were laboriously handwritten by monks, and sometimes took years to produce. Given the extreme effort that went into creating books, scribes and book owners had a real incentive to protect their work. They used the only power they had: words. At the beginning or the end of books, scribes and book owners would write dramatic curses threatening thieves with pain and suffering if they were to steal or damage these treasures. They did not hesitate to use the worst punishments they knew-excommunication from the church and horrible, painful death. Steal a book, and you might be cleft by a demon sword, forced to sacrifice your hands, have your eyes gouged out, or end in the "fires of hell and brimstone." "These curses were the only things that protected the books," says Marc Drogin, author of Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses. "Luckily, it was in a time where people believed in them. If you ripped out a page, you were going to die in agony. You didn't want to take the chance."

A neologism is a newly-coined word. The website Word Play Masters keeps an archive of humorous neologisms: words created by changing a real word by one letter, in order to give new, witty meanings to existing words. Some examples: 1.Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it. 2. Beelzebug (n.) : Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out. 3. Coptimism The irrational hope that the police car behind you is pulling over someone else FYI: This contest is often (incorrectly) attributed to either the Washington Post or Mensa International, but is actually an Internet phenomenon. You can view the present year's winners, and listing of winners dating back to 2010

How are gendered languages holding up in society's current push for gender-neutral terms? This NPR podcast explores gender bias in the Spanish language, the role of the Real Academia Española, and efforts led by teenagers in Argentina to de-gender the Spanish language.

Columbia University linguist John McWhorter opines on the impact AI translation might have on second language learning. We already know that Americans and UK folx are the most monolingual populations in the world; fewer than one in 100 American students currently become proficient in a language they learned in school. McWhorter argues that AI might offer utilitarian practicality for casual users, e.g. translating useful phrases on the fly while traveling: "With an iPhone handy and an appropriate app downloaded, foreign languages will no longer present most people with the barrier or challenge they once did." Yet McWhorter also says, "I don't think these tools will ever render learning foreign languages completely obsolete. Real conversation in the flowing nuances of casual speech cannot be rendered by a program, at least not in a way that would convey full humanity." He also suggests that genuinely acquiring a language will still beckon a few select people, e.g. those relocating to a new country, those who'd like to engage with literature or media in the original language, as well as those of us who find pleasure in mastering these new codes: that language learning will become "an artisanal pursuit" of sorts.

Jonah DeChants, a research scientist at the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ mental health nonprofit notes an "explosion of language that we're seeing around how young people express their gender." A 2001research study of 34,700+ US youth released Monday by the LGBTQ mental health nonprofit the Trevor Project found that over one in four (26%) LGBTQ youth identified as nonbinary. An additional 20% said they are not sure or are questioning whether they identify as nonbinary. The term "nonbinary" refers to people whose gender does not fit within the traditional binary construction of male or female. Drawing from an online survey conducted between October and December of 2020 of over 34,700 LGBTQ youth in the U.S., the Trevor Project found that while the term "nonbinary" has often been associated with a trans or transitioning person, only half of the respondents who identified as nonbinary also identified as transgender. (An additional 20% said they were not sure or questioning whether they are transgender). While 72% of respondents who identified as nonbinary said they use the term to describe their gender identity, other terms were also cited, including queer (used by 29% of respondents), gender non-confirming (27%), genderfluid (24%), genderqueer (23%), androgynous (23%), agender (15%), demigirl (10%), demiboy (8%), genderflux (4%), and bigender (4%). (Queer is also a term people can use to identify their sexuality, which is separate from gender identity. Most the nonbinary youth sampled reported being multisexual or attracted to multiple genders.) "More and more young people are taking control over their gender identity, and finding language and terms that resonate with them," DeChants continues. "And expressing that in the world in [ways] that we haven't necessarily seen in the past." The majority of nonbinary respondents said they use pronouns outside the gender binary-such as "they/them" or "xe/xem." Here, DeChants notes an "emp