"The most Chinese of Chinese ideograms was identified as 和 (pronounced 'huh' and typically Romanized as 'he')-the character for an indistinct concept often (though clumsily) translated as "peace" or "togetherness.""

"Researchers found that, on average, those given the harder-to-read fonts actually recalled 14% more.... The researchers caution that their research was done with paid volunteers - who might be more willing to put in that extra bit of effort - and with students at a high-performing school.... 'What really matters most when reading is mindfulness... it's not printing things badly that's needed, but more thoughtful reading.'"

Essay/study by Deborah Tannen: "So the key to why having sisters makes people happier - men as well as women - may lie not in the kind of talk they exchange but in the fact of talk. If men, like women, talk more often to their sisters than to their brothers, that could explain why sisters make them happier." See also discussion on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2739 (they advise us to be wary of overstating the significance of the results)

"The first recorded use of OK in the March 23, 1839, edition of the Boston Morning Post, where it appeared as "o.k.," with a clarifying "all correct" immediately following. Actually, "o.k." stood for "oll korrect": There was a craze in the late 1830s not just for abbreviations but for abbreviations of mangled spellings. Of these faddish coinages, only OK and "the three R's" (reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic) survive."

"American audiences will hear an accent and style surprisingly like their own in its informality and strong r-colored vowels... Meier said audiences will hear word play and rhymes that "haven't worked for several hundred years (love/prove, eyes/qualities, etc.)" Plus a sample video.

"Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth ... may disappear." National Geographic wants to help by "identifying language hotspots ... and documenting the languages and cultures within them."

Rappers' names, organized. Full size: http://j.mp/cCj04J

Including information on the Forbidden Experiment, Critical Period hypothesis, Victor of Aveyron, Genie, and others.

"The discrepancies between the two accounts which have been identified here are genuine, farreaching, and not merely apparent discrepancies. [...] it is clear that a definitive judgement on the character and extent of Genie's linguistic development still cannot be given."

"People deaf from birth may be able to reassign the area of their brain used for hearing to boost their sight, suggests a study."

Interactive timeline of the history of English (spread across 10 different "acts") - includes sound clips (including Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales prologue), English language history, etc.

His theory: brand names become verbs if: 1. There's no good, pre-existing verb 2. There's not already a verbed brand name (like how we say Googled, and not yahooed or binged)

For both English and Mandarin speakers, the major formants in vowel sounds paralleled the intervals for the most commonly used intervals in music worldwide, namely the octave, the fifth, the fourth, the major third, and the major sixth. To Purves, the upshot is a simple truth: "There's a biological basis for music, and that biological basis is the similarity between music and speech," he says. "That's the reason that we like music." "Whenever we've heard happy speech, we've tended to hear major-scale tonal ratios," Purves says. "Whenever we've heard sad speech, minor tones tend to be involved."

"A physicist named M. F. M. Osborne noticed that stock prices tended to cluster around numbers ending in zero and five. Why? Well, on the one hand, most people have five fingers, and on the other hand, most people have five more. [...] As it turns out, in well over 100 languages, the words that denote bigness are made with bigger sounds."

"Humans may love music, biologically speaking, because it mimics the sounds of our own voices. Neuroscientists say the use of 12 tone intervals in the music of many human cultures is rooted in the physics of how our vocal anatomy produces speech and conveys emotion." The study: http://purveslab.net/publications/bowling_purves_2009.pdf

"The idea that Eskimos have many more words for snow than English speakers is a myth." See also: Language Log's collection of posts on the topic: http://j.mp/dnmNNc

"The verb tweet is gradually developing its own syntax according to what it means and what its users regard as its combinatory possibilities. That is a really interesting, though unintended, large-scale natural experiment in how syntactic change works."

"The women reported giving 37% more apologies than the men did... The diary data suggest that women offer more apologies than men do because women have a lower threshold for what constitutes offensive behavior... [T]here was no gender difference in how men and women apologized." A comprehensive study, unfortunately not available online, although this post is pretty detailed.

"It turns out that very young children [4-6 yrs] can understand and even use ironic speech, even if they cannot describe what they have done to a researcher."

"In cultures with left-to-right orthography (e.g., English-speaking cultures) time appears to flow rightward, but in cultures with right-to-left orthography (e.g., Arabic-speaking cultures) time flows leftward." Participants who read regular text tended to press the left button for past-oriented phrases and the right button for future-oriented phrases, but participants who read mirrored text did the opposite.