Group items tagged

Government's word choice and terminology to increase publicity

In The Hidden Language, Nat Towsen interviews an insider of a particular subculture in order to examine the terms and phrases created by that subculture to serve its own needs. This is language innate to an insider and incomprehensible, if not invisible, to an outsider.

This article (and the other articles posted in Vice's "Hidden Language" column) lists a sample lexicon of terms that reveal the character of the subculture being studied--some nice examples of professional jargon/insider terminology and the way that professions/social groups shape language.

Words have more meaning than just their definition, and the use of words can give off emotions and more. People often use words to describe situations before thinking if what they're saying is considerate and politically correct. This article shows how the use of words can affect people's mental illnesses, and by saying the wrong thing can cause the person to feel ostracized and refuse to get theraputic help.

Texting language is a new language variety that appears with the Internet and digital media. This language has developed a unique style that requires new terminology, which separates it from daily language.

Why does "left" mean liberal and "right" mean conservative? To answer this question, the article probes into how this political terminology originated from the physical location of politicians in the 1789 French National Assembly, which was the parliament France formed after the French Revolution.

Thought-provoking article on the absorption of drag slang and AAVE into mainstream language, and the legitimacy of "crossing over." Much of our everyday language has roots in various subcultures. With the rise of social media, the lines between "subculture" and "mainstream" are starting to blur further. As just one example, drag slang and AAVE words are absorbed into mainstream slang with an almost clockwork-like consistency. But does this terminology belong to the communities who created it? What's the boundary between the natural evolution of language and cultural appropriation? Author Eleanor Tremeer notes, "In an ideal world, the fusion of social groups and cultures would organically lead to the merging of dialects. The problem, as always, lies in oppression. Black individuals and LGBT people are marginalized: Their cultures are seen as unprofessional, they frequently live below the poverty line, they are targeted for prosecution. Yes, words are just words. But as long as people are still oppressed because they belong to certain groups, the usage of their vernacular by those on top - white people, rich people, corporations - will always have sinister undertones."

The U.S. National Library of Medicine launched the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) in 1984 to help computers understand biomedical meaning as well as retrieve and integrate information from various electronic sources such as patient records and biomedical literature. From the set up of parameters for vocabulary sources, to the release of the UMLS "Metathesaurus," this article takes a look at how a vocabulary database tackled the most significant barrier to the application of computers in medicine, the lack of standard language in medicine.