Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

It seems like a lot of people can't get enough of being told how to live their lives by Scandinavians. That's what you might assume by the truckload of English-language books, articles, and TED talks emerging in recent years, all urging readers to adopt lifestyle philosophies that hail from various Nordic cultures. First came the craze for Danish hygge (pronounced HOO-guh) a striving for cozy, primarily domestic wellness that some authors claimed lay behind Danes' apparent satisfaction with their lives. Then we discovered Swedish lagom (LAW-gm), a term broadly meaning "just enough," whose use as a moderating folk principle, boosters suggested, has helped Swedes achieve their unusually high levels of happiness. Now, as Sweden's neighbor Finland tops this year's Northern European happiness league, Finnish writers and pundits are getting in on the act, tossing their own mythologized national mental attitude-called sisu-into the crowded Nordic life-hack market. Sisu= fortitude; inner stamina; grit.

Jez Burrows is the author of Dictionary Stories: more than 150 short fiction pieces, composed entirely from example sentences taken from 12 different dictionaries. Describing his writing process, Burrows comments: "It was only a few weeks into writing Dictionary Stories that I realized the dictionary is something of a Trojan horse. Trundling up to the perimeter of your bookshelves, it presents itself as a harmless book of reference-but look inside and you'll find it crawling with thousands upon thousands of microscopic pieces of fiction, all in the form of example sentences. Fiction is perhaps a slightly misleading word to use in this context. Lexicographers do not write these examples from scratch in the service of whimsical narrative; they query huge corpora of texts that could include novels, news broadcasts, articles and essays, and select an example that demonstrates the most probable usage of a word. But surrounded by the neutral, instructive language of dictionary definitions, example sentences feel vital and full of personality. The New Oxford American Dictionary contains over 80,000 examples, but it was just one ("He perched on the edge of the bed, a study in confusion and misery," an example of the word "study") that set me on the journey of collaging these sentences together to create very short stories. Should you wish to try writing stories of your own in this vein, I give you this list of some of the most versatile words the New Oxford American has to offer-or at least, words with the highest number of example sentences, any of which would make a fine start to a story." So, if you want to try emulating Burrows' style, here're the 6 words: 1. go, 2. run, 3. take, 4. set, 5. cut, and 6. stand. These words illustrate the linguistic concept of polysemy: words that possess many meanings. Try creating a story using one--or collaging several example sentences. Have fun!

In my humble opinion? In my honest opinion? Alexis Madrigal, the author, suggests how the dueling dual definitions came to be: "I'd say that IMHO, which developed as a way to reduce miscommunication through the indication of a lighthearted, ironic tone, became itself a form of miscommunication, as those unfamiliar with the original meaning backed into one, inserting honesty where humility once stood. IMHO, there is no debate. But it's the internet, so of course there is a debate."

Quinn Norton is a technology writer whose job offer from The New York Times was rescinded after tweets from her past caused backlash on social media. In her essay, Norton describes how the controversy built and destroyed a falsely-constructed version of herself. The article talks about the potential perils of social media use, including context collapse, where online culture that was meant for a particular in-group becomes disseminated to other groups via social-media platforms. Consequently, it can be taken out of context and recontextualized easily and accidentally.

Did Donald Trump use the word shithole when referring to African countries in a meeting with lawmakers on immigration policy, or did he actually say shithouse? These are the scatological depths to which our political discourse has sunk. Let's stipulate that regardless of whether Trump said shithole or shithouse, it does little to change the underlying racist sentiment of disparaging the whole continent of Africa (and Haiti and El Salvador as well, according to some accounts). But just as it's possible to trace the literary roots of shithole, we can observe how the word shithouse has been put into use over the centuries leading up to this peculiar moment in presidential history.

When it comes to meeting that special someone, we've gone from IRL to swiping right. Online dating has changed the way people meet and communicate - and as that old saying goes, when you're trying to find bae, communication is key. With new ways to flirt, date and find love come new lingo to describe the adventures - or misadventures - of online dating.

The hallmark of President Trump's Twitter feed is that it sounds like him - grammatical miscues and all. But it's not always Trump tapping out a Tweet, even when it sounds like his voice. West Wing employees who draft proposed tweets intentionally employ suspect grammar and staccato syntax in order to mimic the president's style, according to two people familiar with the process. They overuse the exclamation point! They Capitalize random words for emphasis. Fragments. Loosely connected ideas. Trump's staff has become so adept at replicating the President's tone that people who follow his feed closely say it is getting harder to discern which tweets were actually crafted by Trump sitting in his bathrobe and watching "Fox & Friends" and which were concocted by his communications team. Staff-written tweets do go through a West Wing process of sorts. When a White House employee wants the president to tweet about a topic, the official writes a memo to the president that includes three or four sample tweets, according to those familiar with the process. Those familiar with the process wouldn't fess up to which tweets were staff-written. But an algorithm crafted by a writer at The Atlantic to determine real versus staff-written tweets suggested several were not written by the president, despite the unusual use of the language.

For the study, conducted by Dr. John Hutton, a researcher and pediatrician at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, and someone with an interest in emergent literacy, 27 children around age 4 went into an FMRI machine. They were presented with the same story in three conditions: audio only; the illustrated pages of a storybook with an audio voiceover; and an animated cartoon. While the children paid attention to the stories, the MRI, the machine scanned for activation within certain brain networks, and connectivity between the networks. Here's what researchers found: In the audio-only condition (too cold): language networks were activated, but there was less connectivity overall. "There was more evidence the children were straining to understand." In the animation condition (too hot): there was a lot of activity in the audio and visual perception networks, but not a lot of connectivity among the various brain networks. "The language network was working to keep up with the story," says Hutton. "Our interpretation was that the animation was doing all the work for the child. They were expending the most energy just figuring out what it means." The children's comprehension of the story was the worst in this condition. The illustration condition was what Hutton called "just right".When children could see illustrations, language-network activity dropped a bit compared to the audio condition. Instead of only paying attention to the words, Hutton says, the children's understanding of the story was "scaffolded" by having the images as clues. Most importantly, in the illustrated book condition, researchers saw increased connectivity between - and among - all the networks they were looking at: visual perception, imagery, default mode and language. One interesting note is that, because of the constraints of an MRI machine, which encloses and immobilizes your body, the story-with-illustrations condition wasn't actually as good as reading on Mom or Dad's lap. The emotional bon

As emoji have become more specific in both their appearance and their meaning, their ideographic flexibility has eroded. Emoji are transforming into a large catalog of fixed portraits, rather than a smaller set of flexible ideograms.

Researchers from King's College London Institute of Psychiatry, in collaboration with Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the University of Barcelona, mapped the neural pathways involved in word learning among humans. They found that the arcuate fasciculus, a collection of nerve fibres connecting auditory regions at the temporal lobe with the motor area located at the frontal lobe in the left hemisphere of the brain, allows the 'sound' of a word to be connected to the regions responsible for its articulation. Differences in the development of these auditory-motor connections may explain differences in people's ability to learn words. Researchers used diffusion tensor imaging to image the structure of the brain before a word learning task and functional MRI, to detect the regions in the brain that were most active during the task. They found a strong relationship between the ability to remember words and the structure of arcuate fasciculus, which connects two brain areas: the territory of Wernicke, related to auditory language decoding, and Broca's area, which coordinates the movements associated with speech and the language processing. In participants able to learn words more successfully their arcuate fasciculus was more myelinated i.e. the nervous tissue facilitated faster conduction of the electrical signal. In addition the activity between the two regions was more co-ordinated in these participants. Dr Catani concludes, "Now we understand that this is how we learn new words, our concern is that children will have less vocabulary as much of their interaction is via screen, text and email rather than using their external prosthetic memory. This research reinforces the need for us to maintain the oral tradition of talking to our children."

The South has various species of both accents and dialects. An accent is composed purely of pronunciation changes, almost always vowel sounds. Dialects, on the other hand, incorporate all kinds of other stuff, including vocabulary, structure, syntax, idioms, and tenses. There were many distinct regional accents or dialects in the pre-Civil War South. North Carolina, smack in the middle of the Atlantic South, found more of those dialects within its borders than any other state. On top of that, North Carolina is home to a dialect found nowhere else in the world: the English spoken by those in the Pamlico Sound region, the coastal area that includes the Outer Banks. Interesting trivia tidbit: Distinctly Southern dialects among the white population of the American South seem only to have taken hold starting around the time of the Civil War.The period from the end of the Civil War until World War I-which seems like a long time, but is very condensed linguistically, less than three generations-saw an explosion of diversity in what are sometimes referred to as Older Southern American Accents. The article also notes the reasons for the South's linguistic diversity in re: accents and dialects, and why those accents and dialects have been perpetuated. In Southern states bordering the Atlantic Ocean, regional dialects sprung up seemingly overnight, influenced by a combination of factors, including the destruction of infrastructure, the panic of Reconstruction, lesser-known stuff like the boll weevil crisis, and the general fact that regional accents tend to be strongest among the poorest people. In the post-Civil War period, Southerners left the South en masse; the ones who stayed were often the ones who couldn't afford to leave, and often the keepers of the strongest regional accents. A lack of migration into the South, either from the North or internationally, allowed its regional accents to bloom in relative isolation. However, after WWII, an influx of Northerne

When it comes to the popular naming of infectious diseases, xenophobia has long played a prominent role. Susan Sontag, in her 1988 work, AIDS and Its Metaphors (a follow-up to her extended essay from a decade earlier, Illness as Metaphor), observed that "there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness. It lies perhaps in the very concept of wrong, which is archaically identical with the non-us, the alien." Cognizant of how geographic labels have been unfairly used in the past, the WHO (World Health Organization) introduced a new set of best practices for naming infectious diseases, in 2015. Geographic names are to be avoided in order to "avoid causing offense," though the WHO did not insist that already established names like Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, should be retroactively changed.

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

Interesting article: not simply about lipreading per se, but generally about the importance of visual cues in discerning language and comprehending messages, and the connection between vision and speech perception.

If you are on the far side of 70, as I am, you may not even know what emoticons and Emojis are, but trust me, your grandchildren do. Emoticons - those little smiley face icons used to show various emotions, and their descendants, Emojis - icons illustrating almost anything, from Santa Claus to a screaming cat to a pile of excrement - have become so popular with young people who communicate by texting and emailing, that some Emoji experts converse only through pictographs. You don't need to know the other person's foreign language - or even how to read!

This article talks about the importance of the level of respect when it comes to a student-teacher interaction. Mark Tomforde, a math professor at the University of Houston who has been teaching for almost two decades, said that he had to draw the line when students started calling him his first name. This article goes over the fact that students should not assume that teachers will reciprocate the same language-use such as speaking casual terms like "LOL" or "SMH." Students should not be contacting teachers through text message-like emails. Students should keep in mind that professors have much more knowledge and wisdom and as their superiors, should be given a good amount of respect. This respect starts by using appropriate language when communicating and not treating them like your friend.

Though the article is geared for married couples, some of the communication pointers are applicable to any situation where two people are trying to resolve a conflict. Psychologist Dr. John Gottman advocates the ATTUNE model, where both speaker and listener have responsibilities to uphold; the actual article further describes these responsibilities and what they entail. Speaker's Role A = Awareness T = Tolerance T = Transforming criticisms into wishes and positive needs Listener's Role U = Understanding N = Non-Defensive Listening E = Empathy During his research, Dr. Gottman discovered that problem solving or giving your partner advice before understanding their feelings or perspective is counterproductive and actually interferes with reaching a resolution. Learning how to use conflict as an opportunity to understand and get to know each other better is a vital part of attunement.

Although this article is directed towards couples, the advice provided can easily apply to any relationship: familial, friendship, or professional, where a conflict needs to be resolved amicably.

Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is the remotest inhabited island on Earth, 1,298 miles from its nearest populated neighbor. According to oral traditions, tablets with rongorongo, the only indigenous writing system to develop in Oceania before the 20th century, were brought there by the first settlers, who arrived between the years 800 and 1200, probably from the Marquesas or Gambier islands, which are now part of French Polynesia.

Article discusses the negative impacts of parent screen time and digital device distraction on parent-child communication, conversational interaction, and language development, especially in young children.