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"Phubbing" is the practice of snubbing others in favor of our mobile phones. Research is revealing the profound impact this sort of snubbing can have on our relationships and well-being. There's an irony here. When we're staring at our phones, we're often connecting with someone on social media or through texting. Sometimes, we're flipping through our pictures the way we once turned the pages of photo albums, remembering moments with people we love. Unfortunately, however, this can severely disrupt our actual, present-moment, in-person relationships, which also tend to be our most important ones. The article details several deleterious effects of phubbing.

This article talked about basic rules and structures in creating your own language. For example in creating your own language, you have to consider nouns, verbs, conjunctions, and prepositions. You need to first start with verbs in the infinitive form and then structurally conjugate them with prefixes or suffixes. This article was interesting and all, but I was sort of looking for how to create your own language. This article seemed to talk about how Aliens would talk in the english language.

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

With 2020 being an election year, several key states along the presidential campaign trail get thrown into the spotlight. Candidates, celebrities, and the media all have been criticized for pronouncing some states' names incorrectly. States such as Nevada, Florida, Missouri, and Colorado are some controversial states with debated pronunciations. As this article investigates, although states have pronunciation from its original language, it has evolved and people today believe they're in the right. Read the article to find out whether you're pronouncing state names correctly.

Fun article! And then there's "Hah-WHY-yuh"...LOL!

Both metaphor and grammar influence how people think about political candidates and elections. voters' attitudes can be influenced by a number of factors, including which information the media chooses to emphasize and how it is slanted. Framing, how a message is worded to encourage particular interpretations and inferences, can influence the perception of political candidates. Negative framing is often used to make opposing candidates seem weak, immoral and incompetent. It is persuasive because it captures attention and creates anxiety about future consequences. Grammar, though seemingly innocuous, also encodes meaning and is linked to mental experience and physical interactions with the world. Information framed with past progressive caused people to reflect more on the action details in a given time period than did information framed with simple past. Using grammatical aspect to frame campaign information, positive or negative, appears to be an effective tool for influencing how people perceive candidates' past actions. It may also be tweaked to invite inferences about what candidates will do in the future because it influences inferences about how events transpire.

Metaphors are extremely useful things. They provide a common language-an agreed-upon shorthand-for truths that can be difficult to discuss in terms that are simultaneously broad and precise. It doesn't take a Lakoff or a Luntz to appreciate the power of shared metonyms, particularly as the country grapples with the results of an election that was a political embodiment of that well-worn Fitzgerald line: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." This election, in particular, featured many more than two oppositional ideas. The 2018 midterms were about voter suppression, which is also to say about robbing swaths of Americans of their constitutional rights, which is also to say about structuralized inequality. They were about enfranchisement and its opposite. They were about progress. They were about backlash. They were about women winning. They were about women losing. They were about compassion empowered, and racism rewarded, and hard work realized, and cruelty weaponized, and corruption unpunished. They were about hatred. They were about love. They were about history made. They were about history ignored. They were about American exceptionalism in the best sense and-at the same time-in the worst. How do you sum that up in a headline or a news article? How do you talk about it in neatly cable-newsed sound bites? The true answer is that you can't, and the even truer answer is that this is why it is necessary to have a flourishing and extremely diverse media ecosystem, so that a broadly coherent picture might emerge from the individual efforts-but the more practical and immediate answer is that you can try to use metaphors to summarize the situation. You can talk about waves, with their familiarity and their liquidity and their visual power, and you can talk about the color of your notional water, and the size and shape of the swell, and you

Typically, politicians do not openly express racist statements because it simply is not okay. However, Donald Trump's racism is found all over the media. But, to some, it seems okay because it is covered up with a "racial figleaf," which is "an additional utterance which provides just enough cover for an utterance that would otherwise be seen as clearly racist."

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.

Texting language is a new language variety that appears with the Internet and digital media. This language has developed a unique style that requires new terminology, which separates it from daily language.

Pew Researchers surveyed more than 1,500 technologists and scholars about the forces shaping the way people interact with one another online. They asked: "In the next decade, will public discourse online become more or less shaped by bad actors, harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust?" The vast majority of techonolgists surveyed-81 percent of them-said they expect the tone of online discourse will either stay the same or get worse in the next decade. "Cyberattacks, doxing, and trolling will continue, while social platforms, security experts, ethicists, and others will wrangle over the best ways to balance security and privacy, freedom of speech, and user protections. A great deal of this will happen in public view," Susan Etlinger, a technology industry analyst, told Pew. "The more worrisome possibility is that privacy and safety advocates, in an effort to create a more safe and equal internet, will push bad actors into more-hidden channels such as Tor." Tor is software that enables people to browse and communicate online anonymously-so it's used by people who want to cover their tracks from government surveillance, those who want to access the dark web, trolls, whistleblowers, and others. The uncomfortable truth is that humans like trolling. It's easy for people to stay anonymous while they harass, pester, and bully other people online-and it's hard for platforms to design systems to stop them. Hard for two reasons: One, because of the "ever-expanding scale of internet discourse and its accelerating complexity," as Pew puts it. And, two, because technology companies seem to have little incentive to solve this problem for people. "Very often, hate, anxiety, and anger drive participation with the platform," said Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland, in the report. "Whatever behavior increases ad revenue will not only be permitted, but encouraged."

Thought-provoking video reminding us how much our and other people's online presence is not truth/reality, but the act of "framing"--presenting a particular, curated, portrait of yourself that you desire others to see, whether in images or words.

For anyone who's ever dated, or maintained any kind of relationship, in the digital age, you have probably known a breadcrumber. They communicate via sporadic noncommittal, but repeated messages - or breadcrumbs - that are just enough to keep you wondering but not enough to seal the deal (whatever that deal may be). Breadcrumbers check in consistently with a romantic prospect, but never set up a date. They pique your interest, of that prospective job, perhaps, by reminding you repeatedly that it exists, but never set up the interview. Breadcrumbers are one step shy of ghosters, who disappear without a trace, but are in more frequent contact than a person giving you the fade. On the hierarchy of digital communication, the breadcrumber is the lowest form. "It really is a cousin of the 'friend zone,'" said Rachel Simmons, an author and leadership coach at Smith College. "It's about relegating a person to a particular dead end, but one that still keeps them hanging on in some way."

Writer Jessica Bennett shares the perks, perils and absurdities of the way we communicate via social media. Entertaining and informative reading.

Research from Columbia Business School professors Adam Galinsky and Michael Slepian shows that merely saying a name aloud sparks an instant connection to a specific gender, evoking a cascading pattern of stereotypical judgments about the masculinity or femininity of an individual, often in the first second of hearing a spoken name. "Names give cues to social categories, which in turn, activate stereotypes," says Slepian. "By considering how names symbolically represent stereotypes, we link sounds to social perception. The most basic social category division is gender and the most distinction between phonemes (the sounds that make up words) is voiced versus unvoiced. We found that female and male names differ phonetically." The Columbia Business School researchers believe that names become established as for males or females through their spoken sounds. They conducted eleven studies focused on distinguishing the different sounds of spoken names. The findings provide consistent evidence that voiced names (those pronounced with vocal cord vibration which often sound "harder") such as "Gregory," "James," and "William" are given more frequently to males, and unvoiced names (those pronounced without vocal cord vibration which often sound "softer" and breathier) such as "Heather," "Sarah," and "Tiffany" are more frequently given to females. These name assignments fit stereotypical gender categories - men as "hard" and tough, and women as "soft" and tender. The researchers also noted other naming trends, namely 1. A rise in gender-neutral names. 2. Parents are more likely to give their baby a name that has recently grown in popularity. 3. Parents often give names that phonetically resemble their social category. 4. Female names go in and out of style faster than male names. 5. Current naming inspiration includes social media and technology, celestial themes, and royal birth announcements.

Emma Perrier was deceived by an older man on the internet-a hoax that turned into an unbelievable love story. Article is simultaneously entertaining, but also, in keeping with the intellectual, scholarly nature of The Atlantic, also cites some scholarly research on catfishing--why it happens, why itʻs addictive.

Homeschooled children are typically seen as having less social skills and slower language development, but in fact this stereotype is not true. According to this scholarly article, homeschooled students actually performed better on the SAT in the language section than the math section. Homeschooled children also performed better overall on the SAT than the average public school student. The article also found that due to the advent of technology and social media, homeschooled students have much less social interaction than public school students.

Many acronyms meant to be written have wormed their way into spoken language - just ask your BFF, or the co-worker who prefaces everything with "FYI." Lately, this is also the case for Internet slang. Whether the practice will leave a permanent mark on the language remains to be seen.

This article discusses the English language and if it could become the one surviving language. With English being a language that everyone wants to know, due to business opportunities, media, and more, could it be a possibility to be the universal language?

This article talks about how social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Reddit have helped researchers track the dynamic of a relationships of people who have broken up. There are signs you might be able to detect when a relationship is about to end, even before either person consciously aware of this. The subtle changes in language leading up to a breakup, such as the use of "I"-words, talking more about other people than ideas, and referencing their partner quite a bit (because their identities are still so strongly knit), for example, can be seen as evidence of an impending split.

Essayist Ligaya Mishan (one of my best friends from Punahou!) examines "cancel culture"--the practice of publicly ostracizing a person, whether it's professionally, personally, or in the digital/social media world--historically contextualizing the phenomenon, which is not recent, but something that has existed in many cultures, past and present, and examining the reasons behind it. This essay is also a Words R Us special in its use of etymology: examining the origins and evolution of different words related to cancel culture.