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Language of Dogs

Emojis were Oxford Dictionary's word of the year. And it's quickly becoming the universal language of the Internet -- after Apple included an emoji keyboard on its phones five years ago. It's estimated 6 billion emojis are sent each day. Emojis are becoming a secret language for kids.

people's anonymous secrets on postcard-art

Some of the most binding rules in English are things that native speakers know but don't know they know, even though they use them every day. Adjectives, writes Mark Forsyth, author of _The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase_, "absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac." Mixing up the above phrase does, as Forsyth writes, feel inexplicably wrong (a rectangular silver French old little lovely whittling green knife…), though nobody can say why. It's almost like secret knowledge we all share. Learn the language in a non-English-speaking country, however, and such "secrets" are taught in meticulous detail.

Answer by David Bailey, CEO of Spotnight, on Quora. I've learned several foreign languages as an adult. I was able to learn French to conversation fluency in 17 days using the following techniques. Note that I had previously learned Spanish to fluency so this was not my first foreign language.

"Remarkably, how people used pronouns was correlated with almost everything I studied. For example, use of first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) was consistently related to gender, age, social class, honesty, status, personality, and much more. Although the findings were often robust, people in daily life were unable to pick them up when reading or listening to others... Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students' major."

Baby's communicate through emotions. Fun video of twin babies communicating with babbling (ie secret language of twins).

Developmentally, teens are at particular risk for reckless online behavior, including secrecy regarding social networking. Many people - adults and kids alike - view likes, loves, comments and followers as a barometer for popularity, even within a smaller, closed group. Teens can quickly get caught up in the feedback loop, posting and sharing images and videos that they believe will gain the largest reaction. Over time, teens' own values may become convoluted within an online world of instantaneous feedback, and their behavior online can become based on their "all about the likes" values rather than their real-life values. There is a very real biological basis for this behavior. The combination of social media pressure and an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain that helps us rationalize decisions, control impulsivity and make judgments, can contribute to offensive online posts. In a recent study, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that the areas of teens' brains focused on reward processing and social cognition are similarly activated when they think about money and sex - and when they view a photo receiving lots of likes on social media. When teens viewed photos deemed risky, researchers found the brain regions focused on cognitive control were not activated as much, suggesting that it could be harder for them to make good decisions when viewing images or videos that are graphic in nature.

Here's how to be more emotionally intelligent: 1. Emotions are concepts: They're not hardwired or universal. They're learned. 2. Emotional intelligence starts with emotional granularity: If your doctor came back with a diagnosis of "you're sick", you'd sue the quack for malpractice. Doctors need to be able to distinguish between "chancre" and "cancer." And you need to know the difference between "sad" and "lonely." 3. Emotional intelligence is in the dictionary: You can't feel Fremdschämen if you don't know what it is. So learn new emotion words so you can feel new emotions and increase your emotional granularity, that is, the ability to distinguish the emotions you feel and recognize them as distinct and different. 4. Create new emotions: We could all use a little more "passion-o-rama" in our lives. Name those unnamed feelings you have and share them with others to make them real. In sum, finding specific words to describe the particularities of what you're feeling can lead to greater mental health. The article also discusses the differences that cultures/languages have in re: feelings and emotions we might've previously assumed were universal.

describes techniques that memory-athletes use

Documentary about Whale communication; similar to what we talked about in class. Talks about pods and different accents and interactions.

A coded lexicon mostly spoken by gay men, Swardspeak draws from English and Tagalog, as well as Spanish and, to a lesser extent, Japanese. It's what might be referred to as an "anti-language," the lingua franca of an "anti-society"-in this case, the Philippines' gay subculture.

I found this video very interesting. Who knew all babies had their own "secret language!"

Some adults learn a second language better than others, and their secret may involve the rhythms of activity in their brains. New findings by scientists at the University of Washington demonstrate that a five-minute measurement of resting-state brain activity predicted how quickly adults learned a second language.

Polari (also spelt Palarie, Parlary, Palare and various other ways) is a language most commonly associated with gay men (and to a lesser extent lesbians), used in the first two-thirds of the 20th century in British cities that had large and mainly underground gay subcultures. Originally a secret language, passed down via word of mouth, it was a necessity in a world where homosexuality was stigmatized. According to author Paul Baker, "Polari could be seen as a form of anti-language, a term created by Michael Halliday in 1978 to describe how stigmatised subcultures develop languages that help them to reconstruct reality according to their own values."

After analyzing the music of some of hip hop's biggest artists, from Eminem to Public Enemy, linguists at the University of Manchester in England noticed something pretty impressive. As it turns out, Grammy Award-winning rappers seem to have an intuitive sense for rhyme, using subtle rhyming patterns called half-rhymes (like "hop and "rock") much more often than traditional rhymes (like "cat" and "mat").