IN ENGLISH, the object on your face that smells things is called a "nose", and, if you are generously endowed, you might describe it as "big". The prevailing belief among linguists had been that the sounds used to form those words were arbitrary. But new work by a team led by Damian Blasi, a language scientist at the University of Zurich, and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that may not be true-and that the same sounds may be used in words for the same concepts across many different languages.

WHO can say what order should be used to list adjectives in English? Mark Forsyth, in "The Elements of Eloquence", describes it as: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose and then Noun. "So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac." Mr Forsyth may have exaggerated how fixed adjective order is, but his little nugget is broadly true, and it has delighted people to examine something they didn't know they knew.

Swearing has become a normal part of society's universal conversation. Whether you're in the nosebleeds cheering on your favorite team and a hearty "f--- yeah!" helps to get the crowd rallying together, or you're running to answer the phone and stub your toe along the way, something about yelling "damnit!"

Text messaging may offer tweens a quick way to send notes to friends and family, but it could lead to declining language and grammar skills, according to researchers. Tweens who frequently use language adaptations -- techspeak -- when they text performed poorly on a grammar test, said Drew Cingel, a former undergraduate student in communications, Penn State, and currently a doctoral candidate in media, technology and society, Northwestern University.