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Dan Jurafsky's book, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, explores the history and origin of common food terms like "ketchup." Jurafsky also contemplates how menu wording can reflect the relative upscaleness of a restaurant. "Expensive restaurants are 15 times more likely to tell you where the food comes from - to mention the grass-fed things or the name of the farm or greenmarket cucumbers, but expensive restaurants also use fancy, difficult words like tonarelli, or choclo [large-kernaled corn] or pastilla," Jurafsky says. But they are also generally shorter in length. The really long menus, which he says are "stuffed with adjectives like fresh, rich, mild, crisp, tender and golden brown," are found at the middle-priced restaurants. And the cheapest restaurants use "positive but vague words - 'delicious,' 'tasty,' 'savory,' " he says. If an expensive restaurant used words like "fresh" and "delicious," that "implies you have to be convinced." Cheaper restaurants are also likely to say that the food should be served "your way." "The more expensive the restaurant, the more it's all about the chef," he says.

"So to sum up: language is a collective human creation, reflecting human nature -- how we conceptualize reality, how we relate to one another -- and by analyzing the various quirks and complexities of language, I think we can get a window onto what makes us tick."

A great insight on how revealing of our personalities our use of language can be.

You should write clearly and concisely when you write your college essay. If you bring something up such as how you reflected on an event or how this event changed your life, you should follow it up with a reason/explanation as to why this affected you as it did, etc. The college admission officers are not going to fill in the blank that you created and assume that is what you meant. Every reason must be stated explicitly.

This article contradicted some of the other articles by saying that you shouldn't search for the unique hook that will wake up the reader. It did have the similar notion that showing is far more important than telling.

A very interesting and amusing presentation. From the abstract (http://nwav40.georgetown.edu/262.docx.pdf): "I use co-occurrences of words and emoticons to (i) develop a taxonomy of the affective stances Twitter users take, and (ii) characterize the meanings and usage of their emoticons. ... It's reasonable to ask what emoticons themselves mean and reversing the direction of analysis shows how emoticons pattern across words. ... Emoticons with noses are historically older. ... this means that people who use old-fashion noses also use a different vocabulary ... affect and word choice both create and reflect social characteristics like age and gender."

Article explores the etiquette of appropriate pronouns to use with genderqueer individuals. Language changes to reflect changing societal norms.

Sperm whales have accents, reflecting what ocean they're from: these are socially learned. Calves go through a babbling phase, similar to humans.

Award-winning, Chinese contemporary artist, Xu Bing, has created _Book From the Ground_, a text that speakers of any language can "read." His interest in pictorial storytelling was heightened by a bubblegum wrapper he happened upon-a series of three images connected by two arrows that instructed the chewer to put the gum back into the wrapper after chewing and throw it in the trash. This became Xu's inspiration for _Book from the Ground_. Xu's book reflects cultural literacy and modern tools and technologies, rather than traditional literacy. The author predicts that the younger generation is likely to find his icon language easier to "read" because they've been exposed to these images for as long as they can remember on the Internet. "I think it can be seen two ways," says Robert Harrist, a professor of Chinese art history at Columbia University who has taught a semester-length course on Xu's work. "It's great that everybody can communicate now and stay in touch constantly through one medium or another, a kind of shared, plugged-in visual world." But at the same time, with the "flattening and evening out in communication so much is lost," especially when it comes to tense or nuance. "The real surprising thing here and the challenge and the thing I love about it is he makes you ask yourself: What is writing?" adds Harrist, who describes Xu as "the greatest living Chinese artist, simple as that.... Everything he does is profoundly thoughtful."

Throughout the world, languages are going extinct at a rapid rate. Many people have been investigating to see if the internet is to blame for language extinction, or if it is simply a reflection of what is happening in real-world. Some linguists even believe that small languages are given an advantage on the internet because it is a place for languages to be expressed.

It's sometimes said that the eyes are windows into the soul, revealing deep emotions that we might otherwise want to hide. Although modern science precludes the existence of the soul, it does suggest that there is a kernel of truth in this old saying: it turns out the eyes not only reflect what is happening in the brain but may also influence how we remember things and make decisions.

Taiwanese-American writer Esme Wang reflects on the untranslated use of other languages in literature which is otherwise written in English. By making the linguistic choice to use untranslated Chinese in a novel geared for an English-reading audience, she hopes her readers will be able to relate to characters, yet also experience the nuances and complexities of inhabiting a space where difficulty in communication is its own kind of trauma.

This is a video link to Tara Fallaux's short documentary "Love Letters," from the Amsterdam-based production company HALAL Films. Fallaux trains the camera on various couples as they read each other heartfelt letters and openly discuss their relationship. We also hear from single people, who read letters they wrote to ex-lovers while reflecting on the trials and tribulations of these life-changing relationships. Love Letters is an intimate rumination on the project of love-and, ultimately, the virtues of vulnerability.

Like the Islands themselves, ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (the Hawaiian language) is a living, breathing part of the native culture. This reflection of the two, the symbiotic relationship between land and language, is displayed in details such as how many words and terms exist in Hawaiian for rain alone: more than 200.

This website, five years in the making, documents humorous uses of Chinglish: spoken or written English that reflects L1= Chinese influence. Radtke's collection of signage has been documented in two books: _Chinglish: Found in Translation_ and _More Chinglish: Speaking in Tongues_. Thanks to Kayla LaRieu for sharing!

Chisato Danjo, Lecturer in Japanese and Linguistics at York St John University, reports on her ethnographic case study examining a mother and her two bilingual Japanese-English children. Danjo argues that instead of seeing bilingualism as "dual monolingualism," as reflected in the practice of "One Parent, One Language" (OPOL), we adopt a broader view of language learning: translanguaging, which conceptualises language as a bundle of socially constructed linguistic resources that individuals can deploy to make sense of their multilingual world. When we see a child actively using, adapting and negotiating their repertoire, it casts doubt on the belief that it's bad for children to mix languages. What it could actually be doing is demonstrating high-level flexibility and interpersonal skills.

Language is not static but dynamic, constantly evolving to suit the fashions of the time and this results in shifts in pronunciation and pitch. In the UK, for instance, far fewer people talk with "received pronunciation" these days - and even Queen Elizabeth II's voice has lost some of the cut-glass vowels of her youth. This is thought to reflect a more general shake-up in Britain's social hierarchies, leading to a kind of linguistic cross-pollination between the classes that has even reached Her Majesty. Women today speak at a deeper pitch than their mothers or grandmothers would have done, thanks to the changing power dynamics between men and women.

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. "

Both metaphor and grammar influence how people think about political candidates and elections. voters' attitudes can be influenced by a number of factors, including which information the media chooses to emphasize and how it is slanted. Framing, how a message is worded to encourage particular interpretations and inferences, can influence the perception of political candidates. Negative framing is often used to make opposing candidates seem weak, immoral and incompetent. It is persuasive because it captures attention and creates anxiety about future consequences. Grammar, though seemingly innocuous, also encodes meaning and is linked to mental experience and physical interactions with the world. Information framed with past progressive caused people to reflect more on the action details in a given time period than did information framed with simple past. Using grammatical aspect to frame campaign information, positive or negative, appears to be an effective tool for influencing how people perceive candidates' past actions. It may also be tweaked to invite inferences about what candidates will do in the future because it influences inferences about how events transpire.

Talks about how rhythmic characteristics of language and accents are reflected in the rhythms of songs.

In a 2011 published study (https://mp.ucpress.edu/content/29/1/51.full.pdf+html), Nicholas Temperley and David Temperley, 2 musicologists, did a musical corpus analysis showing that the Scotch snap, a sixteenth-note on the beat followed by a dotted eighth-note, is common in both Scottish and English songs, but virtually nonexistent in German and Italian songs, and explored possible linguistic correlates for this phenomenon. British English shows a much higher proportion of very short stressed syllables (less than 100 ms) than the other two languages. Four vowels account for a large proportion of very short stressed syllables in British English, and also constitute a large proportion of SS tokens in our English musical corpus. A Scotch snap, as Adam Neely notes in the above video, is the musical, rhythmical counterpart to a trochee in poetry. Say the phrase "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" to hear a series of Scotch snaps.

The takeaway suggestions: 1.Give one piece of constructive feedback and let it stand on its own. Don't undermine your message by padding it with irrelevant positive statements. This might be uncomfortable at first, but research shows that people are hungry for constructive feedback. 2. Before your next one-on-one, pause to reflect before giving feedback. If you're stressed or rushed, you're more likely to deliver feedback without compassion or empathy - even if that's unintentional. 3.When you notice a problem, find a way to surface it immediately. Don't just hope a problem will go away, or assume someone else will fix it. When you speak up with compassionate directness, everyone benefits. 4. In your next meeting or one-on-one, consider another person's perspective. It can be as simple as pausing before a meeting to ask yourself, "Where is this person coming from?" By zooming out, you'll be better able to see others' motivations and understand their priorities. 5. When you receive constructive feedback, write it down and come back to it later. This will allow you to move beyond the emotion of the moment and consider more dispassionately whether it holds truth for you. 6.Turn a digital exchange into an in-person conversation. A lot of nuances of human communication are lost in digital interaction. When you get to know your co-workers as people instead of just names in your inbox, you'll build trust and camaraderie. 7. Once a day, have a conversation where you mostly listen. Don't underestimate the power of your silence. Instead of giving your opinion or changing the subject, invite the other person to go deeper.

Languages a world apart have a similar habit of borrowing elevated vocabulary from other languages. In 1066, because the ruling class spoke Old French, that set of vocabulary became synonymous with the elite. Everyone else used Old English. During this period, England's society was diglossic: one community, two language sets with distinct social spheres. Today, English-speakers pick and choose from the different word sets-Latinate (largely Old French borrowings) and Germanic (mostly Old English-derived words)-depending on the occasion. Although English is no longer in a diglossic relationship with another language, the Norman-era diglossia remains reflected in the way we choose and mix vocabulary. In informal chat, for example, we might go on to ask something, but in formal speech we'd proceed to inquire. There are hundreds of such pairs: match/correspond, mean/intend, see/perceive, speak/converse. Most of us choose one or the other without even thinking about the history behind the split. Germanic words are often described as earthier, simpler, and friendlier. Latinate vocabulary, on the other hand, is lofty and elite. It's amazing that nine hundred years later, the social and political structure of 12th-century England still affects how we think about and use English. The article also discusses a similar historical phenomenon in India, where much of southern India, just like Norman England, was diglossic between Sanskrit (an Indo-European language used ritually and formally by Hindu elites) and vernacular Dravidian languages. Today, that diglossia is gone, but Sanskrit-derived vocabulary still forms an upper crust, mostly pulled out for formal speech or writing.