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good blog for stat-minded inquiry into linguistics

"For the past three years, Brendon Ayanbadejo, a backup linebacker and standout special-teams player for the [Baltimore] Ravens, has been advocating for same-sex marriage-writing about it, talking about it, appearing as one of the stars of a video campaign launched by backers of a measure to legalize it in Maryland. It's not his day job, but he's gotten enough attention for it that an anti-gay-marriage Maryland state legislator wrote to the owner of the Ravens and demanded that he shut Ayanbadejo up."

An interesting article of how Americans have tinkered with English and how they believe their way is the proper one.

If any of you like History Channel, this would be an interesting video to watch. This film explains why American citizens have different accents and how their take on the American language has affected the shapes of our states. Note: This video does not contain great quality in terms of sound or picture but is still a cool video to watch if you have time :)

The experimenters argue that a baby's vocalizations signal a state of focused attention, a readiness to learn language. When parents respond to babble by naming the object at hand, the argument goes, children are more likely to learn words. So if a baby looks at an apple and says, "Ba ba!" it's better to respond by naming the apple than by guessing, for example, "Do you want your bottle?"

"The idea of assigning colors to Republicans and Democrats has been around for more than a century, though the red-blue color scheme has only been fixed relatively recently.... [In the 1900s] Democrats may have wanted to appropriate the positive connotations of blue (as in true-blue) at a time when red was becoming associated with revolutionaries and anarchists." First contemporary usage on TV in 2000, by Tim Russert.

Prof. Bennett Schwartz: "In a tip-of-the-tongue state a part of our cognitive system called metacognition lets us know that even though we can't retrieve something at the moment it's probably there stored on our memory, and if we work at it we'll get it... the conventional idea is sort of like your brain's, like, a big complicated filing cabinet. This is telling us that that's not so true. You can't just go to the J file and find John there."

"The goal of the Lexicalist project is to develop a dictionary that depicts, in real time, the changing demographics of English in the United States, a dictionary that supplements the fundamental meaning of a word or phrase with the current cultural backdrop that's informing its use today."

This commercial is about Progressive, a insurance company. In most of the commercials, they use the "Red Herring" fallacy, bringing an irrelevant matter into the conversation. At the end of the commercial, Flo talks about his feminine looking shoulder bag randomly, which displays the fallacy stated above. I think they do this so observers remember the commercial as informative but at the same time entertaining.

"[W]hen you can't tell if word X is a noun or a verb, that means X is a state of mind... Going by this graph from the Google Ngram viewer, it looks like the prom is still well in the lead, but EW is right that people have begun to use plain old prom a lot more in the last decade."

"Even when daydreaming, there is a tremendous amount of communication happening between different areas in the brain... The fact that these areas are synchronized has led many scientists to presume that they are all part of an interconnected network called a resting-state network. ... that these resting-state networks look essentially normal in people missing the corpus callosum link... [it] highlights the brain's remarkable plasticity... the findings are significant when considering the link between brain connections and autism or schizophrenia."

The US has no national-level mandates for studying foreign language, and requirements are mostly set at the school-district and state level. According to a 2017 statistic, only 20% of American K-12 students are enrolled in a foreign language class. In contrast, most European countries have national-level mandates for formally studying languages in school. Across Europe, students typically begin studying their first foreign language as a required school subject between the ages of 6 and 9. Furthermore, studying a second foreign language for at least one year is compulsory in more than 20 European countries. Overall, a median of 92% of European students are learning a language in school. Check out the article to see the statistics--it really puts our monolingual nation to shame.

Dr. Nick Perham, a lecturer in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, conducted a 2010 study, "Can preference for background music mediate the irrelevant sound effect?", that shows how music can interfere with short-term memory performance. Perham had subjects conduct a certain task, in this case recalling a series of numbers, while listening to different kinds of background music. If sound exhibits acoustical variations, or what Perham calls an "acute changing-state," performance is impaired. Steady-state sounds with little acoustical variation don't impair performance nearly as much. Perham asked his subjects how they thought they performed when exposed to different tastes in music. Each reported performing much worse when listening to disliked music, although the study's results showed no difference. However, Perham found no distinction in performance, regardless of whether the music was liked or disliked: both were "worse than the quiet control condition. Both impaired performance on serial-recall tasks." The interviewer queried how curious how prevalent serial-recall is in everyday life, and if one could get by without developing this skill. Unlikely, Perham says, as one would have tremendous difficulty recalling phone numbers, doing mental arithmetic, and even learning languages. "Requiring the learning of ordered information has also been found to underpin language learning. If you consider language, learning syntax of language, learning the rules that govern how we put a sentence together, all of these require order information . . . " Perham says.

Good summary of general trends in language use by people with different states of mind, gender, class

This is very useful for the suicide note we tried to figure out in medium

A new study shows how certain ideas are still deeply ingrained the public's minds as masculine. For example, most of the public associates the president with a man. In fact, the study showed that when articles or people used "her" or feminine pronouns people's reading times increased because of the confusion caused in their brain. Many people don't use "she" when referring to a hypothetical president. The way that language can sometimes gender certain occupations has some important implications. That is why many states and representatives are trying to change the language to make it more inclusive. For example, Kamala Harris, when she was California's attorney general, and changed all the wording of the statutes that referred to the attorney general as a man. This is because gendering occupations can lead to an ingrained bias. However, with more women in politics, biases could change. For example, in UK, where there have been 2 female prime ministers, the study was replicated and it was found that people were comfortable using "she" or "her" when stating the next prospective prime minister.

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.

This article argues how there is a separate language of the law. This language consists of technical legal terms and it is different from ordinary language because ordinary language cannot compare to the amount of legal terms. This type of language allows for more precision by stating specifically the rules of something. This can prove that the Constitution was writing in the language of the law. This is because the Constitution consists of around 100 reasons why the United States shouldn't be a part of Britain.

In the article, Stuart McGurk talks about how in Trump's tweets, the words that be used that is usually used in the empathic way, does not communicate Trump's actual feelings. In the article, it is stated that Trump used the word sorry in 72 tweets, but never actually used in the ways were someone would feel sorrow for something. Instead, for example, he used it in a way were if Obama said sorry, he would have more respect for him. See how he was able to use a sympathetic word but not in the way that he is feeling sorry. Also, in certain circumstances, the wording that Trump uses is not appropriate. For example, in light of the Las Vegas shooting, Trump tweeted, "My warmest condolences and sympathies to the victims and families of the terrible Las Vegas shooting." No one would use the phrase "Warmest Condolences" in this situation.

Yikes: "warmest condolences"! Our president: Master Malaprop. LOL!

That agonizing moment when you know precisely what you want to say but you fail to produce the word or phrase is known as a "tip-of-the-tongue" moment. Lise Abrams, a psychology professor at the University of Florida has studied the phenomenon for 20 years. Researchers have even found occurrences among sign language users--termed "tip-of-the-finger" states. Key findings: 1. Low-frequency use: We're more likely to draw blanks on words we use less frequently - like abacus or palindrome. 2. There are also categories of words that lead to tip-of-the-tongue states more often. Proper names are one of those categories. There's no definitive theory, but one reason might be that proper names are arbitrary links to the people they represent, so people with the same name don't possess the same semantic information the way that common nouns do, Abrams said.