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Clearly I am in a judgmental phase. When I saw this year's list of words that Merriam-Webster Unabridged has added to its pages, I groaned with dismay a few times. Normally I love learning new words, and I hadn't known a lot of these words, but some seemed pointless.

In spoken language, especially in conversations, people are prone to using filler words or - as linguists call them - discourse particles. By inserting these semantically and syntactically neutral words in an utterance, they allow for a speaker to pause while collecting their thoughts while preserving the position of speaker, a coveted social role.

In relation to the current election that just passed, it was pretty obvious that there was a huge disconnect between two opposing sides. Words of frustration and anger flooded newsprints and social media. In the past, researchers found that there was a curious phenomenon in known as "positive feedback", which refers to people's tendency to use more positive Words than negative Words. In recent years, Google Books and the New York Times partnered to disprove this phenomenon. Both major print companies forged through tons of texts and found that 16.2 million of those texts contained negative language. They also found that negative Words were used more frequently during times of unemployment, poverty, inflation rates, wartime casualties and political tension. More research has been conducted by psychological scientist including William Hamilton and Mark Liberman. Shockingly, they found that events like these were being triggered more often and positive language has decreased in the last 200 years.

This article highlighted some of the averted words in the english language, like "slacks" or "gasp." The study showed that most of the averted words were related to body parts and bodily functions. Other averted words bothered people for no reason. For example, "ointment" and "unguent" were recorded in the study.

A baby's first words usually have to do with their visual experiences. Familiar objects (e.g. shirts, the table, a spoon, bottle, etc.) can predict which words they'll learn first. This could suggest new ways to help treat autism and language deficits. There could be a correlation between visual processing problems and difficulty learning words. For example, children with autism have visual processing problems, which could explain why they have trouble communicating.

John Pennebacker, a University of Texas-Austin psychologist, found that language could successfully predict speed dating successes, as well as the relative longevity of such matches.. When the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date. "The more similar [they were] across all of these function words, the higher the probability that [they] would go on a date in a speed dating context," Pennebaker says. "And this is even cooler: We can even look at ... a young dating couple... [and] the more similar [they] are ... using this language style matching metric, the more likely [they] will still be dating three months from now." This is not because similar people are attracted to each other, Pennebaker says; people can be very different. It's that when we are around people that we have a genuine interest in, our language subtly shifts. "When two people are paying close attention, they use language in the same way," he says. "And it's one of these things that humans do automatically." Pennebacker also says that by analyzing language, you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status. "It's amazingly simple," Pennebaker says, "Listen to the relative use of the word "I." What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word "I" less.

Dan Jurafsky's book, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, explores the history and origin of common food terms like "ketchup." Jurafsky also contemplates how menu wording can reflect the relative upscaleness of a restaurant. "Expensive restaurants are 15 times more likely to tell you where the food comes from - to mention the grass-fed things or the name of the farm or greenmarket cucumbers, but expensive restaurants also use fancy, difficult words like tonarelli, or choclo [large-kernaled corn] or pastilla," Jurafsky says. But they are also generally shorter in length. The really long menus, which he says are "stuffed with adjectives like fresh, rich, mild, crisp, tender and golden brown," are found at the middle-priced restaurants. And the cheapest restaurants use "positive but vague words - 'delicious,' 'tasty,' 'savory,' " he says. If an expensive restaurant used words like "fresh" and "delicious," that "implies you have to be convinced." Cheaper restaurants are also likely to say that the food should be served "your way." "The more expensive the restaurant, the more it's all about the chef," he says.

"Language shapes our behavior and each word we use is imbued with multitudes of personal meaning. The right words spoken in the right way can bring us love, money and respect, while the wrong words-or even the right words spoken in the wrong way-can lead to a country to war.

Without understanding the 'referential function' of language (words as 'verbal labels', symbolizing other things) it is impossible to learn a language. Is this implicit knowledge already present early in infants? Marno, Nespor, and Mehler of the International School of Advanced Studies conducted experiments with infants (4 months old). Babies watched a series of videos where a person might (or might not) utter an (invented) name of an object, while directing (or not directing) their gaze towards the position on the screen where a picture of the object would appear. By monitoring the infants' gaze, Marno and colleagues observed that, in response to speech cues, the infant's gaze would look faster for the visual object, indicating that she is ready to find a potential referent of the speech. However, this effect did not occur if the person in the video remained silent or if the sound was a non-speech sound. "The mere fact of hearing verbal stimuli placed the infants in a condition to expect the appearance, somewhere, of an object to be associated with the word, whereas this didn't happen when there was no speech, even when the person in the video directed the infant's gaze to where the object would appear, concludes Marno. "This suggests that infants at this early age already have some knowledge that language implies a relation between words and the surrounding physical world. Moreover, they are also ready to find out these relations, even if they don't know anything about the meanings of the words yet. Thus, a good advice to mothers is to speak to their infants, because infants might understand much more than they would show, and in this way their attention can be efficiently guided by their caregivers."

Including answers to questions such as: - Can you walk us through the logic Watson would go through to answer a question such as, "The antagonist of Stevenson's Treasure Island." (Who is Long John Silver?) - ...I found myself wondering whether what it does is really natural language processing, or something more akin to word association... does Watson really need to understand syntax and meaning to just search its database for words and phrases associated with the words and phrases in the clue?

new words

How does a people using language without words for numbers count things?

Since we think in words, the more words we know, the more we can think. Some languages have many words for describing the same thing, making communication much more specific. Yet this study looks at a language that doesn't have words - for numbers. The small population that speaks Piraha showed that they could only think as accurately as their vague "amount" words.

And the 2015 word of the year: the emoji for "tears of joy." Whereas traditional alphabet scripts struggle to keep pace with 21st century rapid communication, emoji, in contrast, "are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one which transcends linguistic borders...They can serve as insightful windows through which to view our cultural preoccupations."

In one of the most viral Twitter stories of 2018, people listened to the same acoustically-degraded audio clip of a word, and hotly debated which was the correct word: laurel or yanny. What's the reason for the diametrically-opposed discrepancy? The poor quality of the audio, likely re-recorded multiple times, makes it more open to interpretation by the brain, says Brad Story, a professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at the University of Arizona. Primary information that would be present in a high-quality recording or in person is "weakened or attenuated," Story says, even as the brain is eagerly looking for patterns to interpret. "And if you throw things off a little bit, in terms of it being somewhat unnatural, then it is possible to fool that perceptual system and our interpretation of it," says Story. Story says the two words have similar patterns that easily could be confused. He carried out his own experiment by analyzing a waveform image of the viral recording and compared it to recordings of himself saying "laurel" and "yanny." He noticed similarities in the features of these words, which you can see below. Both words share a U-shaped pattern, though they correspond to different sets of frequencies that the vocal tract produces, Story explains. Britt Yazel, a neuroscience post-doctoral student at UC Davis, also provides more reasons for why people are hearing different things. Some people have greater sensitivity to higher frequencies or lower frequencies, Yazel says. "But not only that, the brains themselves can be wired very differently to interpret speech," he says. For example, if you hear the sounds in either "yanny" or "laurel" more in your everyday life, you might be more likely to hear them here. In other words, your brain may be primed and predisposed to hearing certain sounds, due to environmental exposure.

Words change meaning all the time - and over time. Language historian Anne Curzan underscores the natural process of language evolution, presenting 20 Words that illustrate the creative morphing of language. Take, for example the Word "clue". Curzan notes that "centuries ago, a clue (or clew) was a ball of yarn. Think about threading your way through a maze and you'll see how we got from yarn to key bits of evidence that help us solve things."

Warning: this article contains a word that you might find offensive. In fact, some readers might find it so deeply unsettling that they might begin to wonder about the cause of their aversion. What is it about this word that generates such a visceral experience of revulsion and discomfort?

A quote from Liz Posner, the author of the article: "When I set out to research the German words that capture what it feels like to be an American living during the era of the Trump administration, I didn't expect there to be so damn many. Like many of my fellow citizens who have flocked to therapists' offices over the past year, eager to sort through their trauma at being governed by a narcissistic megalomaniac, I was already aware that the current political era was doing something strange to my psyche. But it can be hard to pin down exactly what these emotions are, if words for them, even exist." Fortunately, German, not English, is able to capture the nuances of these feelings

Why do Jane Austen's literary works endure some 200 years after her death? The Stanford Literary Lab ran computational analysis on the words contained in Austen's work. Eschewing the fantastical and dramatic elements typical of novels both in Austen's lifetime and ours, Austen is more concerned with social realities and human nature. Her works display emotional intelligence; she employs more words about emotions and time, as well as abstract words connected to states of mind and social relationships.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut once opined, "There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can't be fed into computers. They are beautiful shapes." Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done. Researchers at the University of Vermont's Computational Story Lab have analysed over 1,700 English novels to reveal six basic story types - you could call them archetypes - that form the building blocks for more complex stories. They are: 1. Rags to riches - a steady rise from bad to good fortune 2. Riches to rags - a fall from good to bad, a tragedy 3. Icarus - a rise then a fall in fortune 4. Oedipus - a fall, a rise then a fall again 5. Cinderella - rise, fall, rise 6. Man in a hole - fall, rise The researchers used sentiment analysis to get the data - a statistical technique often used by marketeers to analyse social media posts in which each word is allocated a particular 'sentiment score', based on crowdsourced data. Depending on the lexicon chosen, a word can be categorised as positive (happy) or negative (sad), or it can be associated with one or more of eight more subtle emotions, including fear, joy, surprise and anticipation. For example, the word 'happy' is positive, and associated with joy, trust and anticipation. The word 'abolish' is negative and associated with anger. Do sentiment analysis on all the words in a novel, poem or play and plot the results against time, and it's possible to see how the mood changes over the course of the text, revealing a kind of emotional narrative. While not a perfect tool - it looks at words in isolation, ignoring context - it can be surprisingly insightful when applied to larger chunks of text

This article talks about: -swearing -what makes a word taboo -social norms -why "taboo" words still exist -to envoke feeling -part of the brain used while swearing -amygdala: processes emotion and memory -swearing and medical conditions -swearing and freedom of speech

This article explains different aspects of swearing. It talks about the idea of swearing itself and why swear words are considered swear words. It also explains why people swear and for what uses. It also explains how swearing affects the brain.