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Monday, April 8, marked the launch of Code Switch, our new blog covering race, ethnicity and culture. To commemorate the blog's launch, all week we solicited stories about code-switching - the practice of shifting the languages you use or the way you express yourself in your conversations.

This article focuses on a new book which argues that informal online communication is sometimes more advanced than even the most elegant prose. It also explores the possibility that internet slang makes people better writers due to the fact that it sharpens the user's communication skills to get the point across, even through the use of emojis.

Canadian linguist Gretchen McCulloch rails against linguistic prescriptivism. She feels that people should exhibit flexible and receptive attitudes towards linguistic change: "We create successful communication when all parties help each other win." She also notes that "the only languages that stay unchanging are the dead ones."

I wonder what the effects of possessing the skill to read others' facial expressions would produce. Would it strengthen our relationships with people or weaken them?

When the article said that misreading emotions is worst than not knowing of the emotion at all is worst, I question whether reading emotions is even worth it. Also, compared to a century ago, the divorce rate has skyrocketed. Could the lack of reading emotions be the cause of this increase? Emotions are innate and humans have always read or not read emotions. What's the difference between now and then? Freedom? So what if you can read someone's emotions? If you can't assist the person in his/her tragedy or emotional stress being able to read emotions is worthless. In addition Paul Ekman said that the percent rate after his lessons on DVD rose to 80-85%, but that still leaves 15%-20% of mistake. As i previously said, the article says that misreading emotions is worst than not knowing of the emotions at all. There's still of chance of being worst. Are we really accomplishing whatever we are trying to do by learning how to read emotions?

This is a very cool article, as it has caused me to become more aware of other people's reactions - sometimes I know that someone is holding an emotion in, but hopefully, through observing their facial gestures, perhaps I can find out how they feel.

This article talks about a face all humans make, the "not face." It combines the 3 emotions of anger, disgust, and contempt. It not only shows that we are able to express complex emotions, but also how the "not face" is closely tied to language. In ASL speakers, the sign for "not" is also replaced with the negative expression. This article also highlights how facial expression affects language and that there could be more facial expressions like grammatical markers.

An article on how many endangered languages are dying out

One of the central questions of Words R Us is what conditions fostered the emergence of language. In this article, you can discover where the 'F' and 'V' sounds, so challenging to replicate in ventriloquism, came from. A hint is that diet influenced the human bite and mouth shape, but take a peek to find out more!

A unique sign language, possibly dating back to the 1800s or before, is being used in Hawaii, marking the first time in 80 years a previously unknown language -- spoken or signed -- has been documented in the U.S. The language is not a dialect of American Sign Language, as previously believed, but an unrelated language with unique vocabulary and grammar. It also is on the verge of extinction, with an estimated 40 users of the language.

This article talks about why it is impossible to study a sentence and look at the physical structure of the letters without reading or comprehending the sentence meaning. It references the Stroop Effect, which is a cognitive interference where there is a delay in the reaction time of a certain task occurs due to a stimuli conflicting. So when people are told to read a set of words such as "orange, purple, green, blue, yellow", but the color of these words are not that of what they read, people usually stumble as they read. It was interesting because when we are children, it was the opposite, but once we learn the skill to read, it becomes irreversible.

This article was intriguing as it highlighted how even one word can symbolize a definitive change. In this case, the article focused on how President Biden is using the word "equal" in regards to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the context of "Palestinians and Israelis equally deserve to live safely and securely and to enjoy equal measures of freedom, prosperity, and democracy." In turn, this signifies a political push, likely from Democratic progressives, who want to define the concept of equal rights as a objective the U.S. should focus from now on.

This Wikipedia article details several categorical contexts, e.g. Internet posts, text messages, Chinese New Year, in which Chinese homophonic punning is used.

The article details changes in the verb that has the most meanings. Currently, the verb with the most definitions appears to be run, but it was not always this way. Other verbs such as "put" and "set" used to have more, but over time, "run" has out paced them. The article finishes by explaining a potential reason for this change and how British versus American culture could have had an effect.

An app called Duolingo is the top app to learn a new language. The site includes learning vocab and grammar and doing exercises that are tailored to what the person learns quickly and what the person need to repeatedly review. Teaching language has changed from early "grammar translation" (learning grammar rules and translating sentences) to "audiolingualism" (learn rules and patterns by repeating sentences over and over) after World War II to other methods in the 60s and 70s that turned into a general "communicative approach" which focuses on the function of language as communication not the rules and structure. The app is mostly "audiolingual" because it drills users to repeat words and phrases over and over, but it also helps users learn a lot of words, reminds them to practice, and keeps them practicing with virtual rewards so can be effective.

This is about how telehealth is being used during this pandemic, and the complications with expressing people's thoughts over video chat

Since the creation of advertisements, its hard for people to go a day without seeing at least one ad on TV, outside, or online. It's like impossible. However with the increasing amount of advertisements people see everyday, research shows that it is harder to retain what you saw. As a result, advertisers are reverting to a newer method called linguistic synaesthesia which is a type of metaphor created by combining linguistic expressions which evoke multiple senses at one time. Read the article to find out more examples of linguistic synaesthesia.

This New York Times article was very interesting. It talked about the effect that the corona virus has on our language, and how the stay at home order is causing a plateau in the English dictionary.

Check this article out to learn more about how our own language and our Top 20 keywords in the Oxford Corpus has changed since the beginning of the pandemic. While some words are not uncommon, two new ones come to mind. These are "social distance/social distancing" and "self-isolate/self-isolation." We can see the impact of the coronavirus by seeing which words are now used more frequently.

There are many laws of linguistics that exist in human communication. Laws such as Zipf's law of abbreviation, which predicts commonly used words to be short, and Menzerath's law, which predicts that large linguistic structures are made of shorter ones. This article talks about a study conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Roehampton, which explores the parallels of these linguistic laws in chimpanzee gestural communication. They measured the length of over 2000 gestures, and found that they indeed used shorter gestures if they were using it more frequently and long gestures were composed of the shorter ones.

A neologism is a newly-coined word. The website Word Play Masters keeps an archive of humorous neologisms: words created by changing a real word by one letter, in order to give new, witty meanings to existing words. Some examples: 1.Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it. 2. Beelzebug (n.) : Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out. 3. Coptimism The irrational hope that the police car behind you is pulling over someone else FYI: This contest is often (incorrectly) attributed to either the Washington Post or Mensa International, but is actually an Internet phenomenon. You can view the present year's winners, and listing of winners dating back to 2010