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The Latin word anathema has evolved over time. Today, it means "a strongly disliked person or thing," e.g. "bullying is anathema to me." In medieval times, however, "anathema" means "an excommunicated person, also the curse of excommunication." In medieval, pre-printing press times, books were highly valued and rare, as they were laboriously handwritten by monks, and sometimes took years to produce. Given the extreme effort that went into creating books, scribes and book owners had a real incentive to protect their work. They used the only power they had: words. At the beginning or the end of books, scribes and book owners would write dramatic curses threatening thieves with pain and suffering if they were to steal or damage these treasures. They did not hesitate to use the worst punishments they knew-excommunication from the church and horrible, painful death. Steal a book, and you might be cleft by a demon sword, forced to sacrifice your hands, have your eyes gouged out, or end in the "fires of hell and brimstone." "These curses were the only things that protected the books," says Marc Drogin, author of Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses. "Luckily, it was in a time where people believed in them. If you ripped out a page, you were going to die in agony. You didn't want to take the chance."

This article combines data from two lists. This first one was compiled by National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center at Beijing Language and Culture University: "Big data analysis" of over a billion online posts and forum discussions from the Chinese internet in 2021 was reportedly used to decide on the final list, but it's clear from the selection that the artificial intelligence tool used has a good understanding of socialism with Chinese characteristics. The second list comes from Yaowen Jiaozi, a magazine founded in 1995 that publishes stories about the the misuse and abuse of language in Chinese society. This combined list has items that made BOTH lists. Separately, the magazine Yǎowén Jiáozì (咬文嚼字) published its year-end list of "popular buzzwords" (2021年十大流行语). Yaowen Jiaozi is a magazine founded in 1995 that publishes stories about the the misuse and abuse of language in Chinese society. Its name is variously translated as "Correct Wording," "Verbalism," and "Chewing Words." The Yaowen Jiaozi list does not claim to be created by big data, but rather from reader suggestions, online polling, and selection by specialists.

If you're looking for the species that most closely matches our linguistic prowess, surprisingly, you won't find it in the apes, the primates, or even in the mammals. You have to travel to a far more distant relative, all the way to a family of birds known as the songbirds. The vocal life of a songbird is similar to ours in many ways. They learn songs by imitating their elders. Like human speech, these songs are passed down from one generation to the next. Songbirds are also best equipped to learn songs in their youth, and they have to practice to develop their ability. They can improvise and string together riffs into new songs, and over generations these modified songs can turn into new dialects. and like us, they come hard-wired with 'speech-centers' in their brain that are dedicated to language processing. An experiment from 2009 by Fehér and colleagues took newly hatched songbirds of the zebra finch species and raised them in sound proof chambers. They did this during their critical period of language development. Surprisingly, this culturally isolated generation of birds began to develop their own songs. These songs were less musical than your typical songbird song - they had irregular rhythms, they would stutter their notes, and the notes would sound more noisy. But the researchers were curious where this would lead. They listened to the songs of the next few generations of pupils, the offspring of these children of silence. What they found was quite amazing. In just two generations, the songs started to change in unexpected ways - they were becoming more musical. In fact, they started to converge upon the song of the wild songbirds, even though none of these birds had ever heard the wild songs. The Feher study suggests, but does not prove, that songbirds must have an innate understanding of the structures of their language. In other words, they seem to have a built-in intuition about grammar. Over time, they may be using these intuitions to develo

Abstract: The speech community of the Hawaiian Islands is of theoretical interest to both the sociologist and the linguist. The reasons for this are clear. In the first place, it has a linguistic repertoire which is characteristic of multilingual societies. This is a direct consequence of the influx of immigrant labor from China, Korea, the Philippines, Okinawa, Japan, and Portugal and their social and linguistic contacts with the native Hawaiians and the English-speaking colonialists. Hence, Hawaii is a veritable laboratory for sociolinguistic research. Secondly the varieties of speech range extensively and in accordance with the social demands of solidarity and status. This is particularly evident in the phenomenon of code-switching where a native speaker of Hawaiian Creole can either shift towards a dialect of English or towards a variety of immigrant speech when the social context of the situation demands it. Finally, the study of Creole languages such as the one to which this paper is directed has some very interesting implications for the "sociology of knowledge" because a Creole speaker attributes a different cognitive saliency to the lexical relations "push/pull," "bring/take," and "come/go" when he speaks Hawaiian Creole, then when he switches to standard English. These sundry concepts and their relevance to the field of sociolinguistics are the central topics of this paper.

Imagine putting on a virtual reality headset and entering a world where you can explore communities, like Missoula, except your character, and everyone you interact with, speaks Salish, Cheyenne or Blackfoot. Imagine having a device like Amazon's Alexa that understands and speaks exclusively in Indigenous languages. Or imagine a digital language playground in Facebook's Metaverse, where programmers create interactive games to enhance Indigenous language learning. Michael Running Wolf, a Northern Cheyenne man who is earning his Ph.D. in computer science, wants to make these dreams a reality. Running Wolf grew up in Birney, a town with a population of 150 just south of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. He spent most of his childhood living without electricity. Running Wolf can speak some Cheyenne, but he wants Indigenous language learning to be more accessible, immersive and engaging. and he believes artificial intelligence is the solution. Running Wolf is one of a handful of researchers worldwide who are studying Indigenous languages and AI. He works with a small team of linguists and data scientists, and together, they analyze Indigenous languages and work to translate them into something a computer can interpret. If his team can accomplish this, Running Wolf reasons, then perhaps AI can be used to help revitalize Indigenous languages everywhere.

Copied from Youtube description: "How did humans acquire language? In this lecture, best-selling author Steven Pinker introduces you to linguistics, the evolution of spoken language, and the debate over the existence of an innate universal grammar. He also explores why language is such a fundamental part of social relationships, human biology, and human evolution. Finally, Pinker touches on the wide variety of applications for linguistics, from improving how we teach reading and writing to how we interpret law, politics, and literature."

Recent studies suggest that metaphors are more than just fancy literary devices and that there is a psychological basis for linking cold with feelings of social isolation. Psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management wanted to test the idea that social isolation might generate a physical feeling of coldness. In their first experiment, they divided a group of volunteers into two groups. One group recalled a personal experience in which they had been socially excluded-rejection from a club, for example. This was meant to tap into their feelings of isolation and loneliness. The other group recalled an experience in which they had been accepted into a group. Afterwards, volunteers were asked to estimate the temperature in the room. Those who recalled memories of being ostracized experienced the ambient temperature of the room as colder. In a second experiment, researchers triggered feelings of exclusion by having volunteers play a computer-simulated ball tossing game. The game was designed so that some of the volunteers had the ball tossed to them many times, but others were left out. Afterwards, all the volunteers rated the desirability of certain foods and beverages: hot coffee, crackers, an ice-cold Coke, an apple, and hot soup. The findings were striking. As reported in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the "unpopular" volunteers who had been ostracized during the computer game were much more likely than the others to want either hot soup or hot coffee. Their preference for warm food and drinks presumably resulted from physically feeling cold as a result of being excluded. "It's striking that people preferred hot coffee and soup more when socially excluded," Leonardelli said. "Our research suggests that warm chicken soup may be a literal coping mechanism for social isolation."

Read this full article: "seems" is the operative word, as linguists are NOT in agreement that language definitively shapes how we see the world. If you want to learn another language and become fluent, you may have to change the way you behave in small but sometimes significant ways, specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice. Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a professor of linguistics at Temple University. If people speaking different languages need to group or observe things differently, then bilinguals ought to switch focus depending on the language they use. That's exactly the case, according to Pavlenko. For example, she says English distinguishes between cups and glasses, but in Russian, the difference between chashka (cup) and stakan (glass) is based on shape, not material. One's native language could also affect memory, says Pavlenko. She points to novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was fully trilingual in English, French and Russian. When Nabokov started translating his first memoir, written in English, into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when writing it in English. Pavlenko states that "the version of Nabokov's autobiography we know now is actually a third attempt, where he had to recall more things in Russian and then re-translate them from Russian back into English." Lena Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, has studied the differences in what research subjects remember when using English, which doesn't always note the intent of an action, and Spanish, which does. This can lead to differences in what people remember seeing, which is potentially important in eyewitness testimony, she says. However, not all linguists agree that language affects what we notice. John McWhorter,, a linguist at Columbia University, acknowledges such differences but says they don't really matter. The experim

Recently, people have been returning to writing basics: handwriting, notebooks, pens, paper, and stationary. While technology can certainly provide an edge for certain tasks, digital overload, addiction, and distraction are growing concerns. many studies indicate that multitasking is bad for us and makes our brains more scattered. In contrast, several studies suggest that pen and paper have an edge over the keyboard. In three studies, researchers found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. Those who took written notes had better comprehension and retention of material because they had to mentally process information rather than type it verbatim. and, another study, published in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology, showed that people who doodle can better recall dull information. Writing it down also sparks innovation. Being innovative and creative is about "getting your hands dirty" a feeling that is lacking when you use technology or gadgets, says Arvind Malhotra, a professor at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School."Research has also shown that tactile sensory perceptions tend to stimulate parts of the brain that are associated with creativity. So, touch, feel and the sensation you get when you build something physical has also got a lot to do with creativity," he says.

"Teenagers are more susceptible to developing disorders like addiction and depression ... "The brain region traditionally associated with reward and motivation, called the nucleus accumbens, was activated similarly in adults and adolescents," said Moghaddam. "But the unique sensitivity of adolescent DS to reward anticipation indicates that, in this age group, reward can tap directly into a brain region that is critical for learning and habit formation." ... not only is reward expectancy processed differently in an adolescent brain, but also it can affect brain regions directly responsible for decision-making and action selection. ... "Adolescence is a time when the symptoms of most mental illnesses-such as schizophrenia and bipolar and eating disorders-are first manifested, so we believe that this is a critical period for preventing these illnesses," Moghaddam said."

Researchers at the University of Washington and University of Connecticut examined thousands of 30-second snippets of verbal exchanges between parents and babies. They measured parents' use of a regular speaking voice versus an exaggerated, animated baby talk style, and whether speech occurred one-on-one between parent and child or in group settings. "What our analysis shows is that the prevalence of baby talk in one-on-one conversations with children is linked to better language development, both concurrent and future," said Patricia Kuhl, co-author and co-director of UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. The more parents exaggerated vowels -- for example "How are youuuuu?" -- and raised the pitch of their voices, the more the 1-year olds babbled, which is a forerunner of word production. Baby talk was most effective when a parent spoke with a child individually, without other adults or children around. "The fact that the infant's babbling itself plays a role in future language development shows how important the interchange between parent and child is," Kuhl said.

This article examines Nadine Gaab's 2014 study which established a connection - in both children and adults - between learning to play an instrument and improved executive functioning, like problem-solving, switching between tasks and focus. The article also cites the research of neuropsychologist Ani Patel, who advances the OPERA theory of music's benefits for learning. Patel notes "music is not an island in the brain cut off from other things, that there's overlap, that's the 'O' of OPERA, between the networks that process music and the networks that are involved in other day-to-day cognitive functions such as language, memory, attention and so forth," he says. "The 'P' in OPERA is precision. Think about how sensitive we are to the tuning of an instrument, whether the pitch is in key or not, and it can be painful if it's just slightly out of tune." That level of precision in processing music, Patel says, is much higher than the level of precision used in processing speech. This means, he says, that developing our brains' musical networks may very well enhance our ability to process speech. "and the last three components of OPERA, the 'E-R-A,' are emotion, repetition and attention," he says. "These are factors that are known to promote what's called brain plasticity, the changing of the brain's structure as a function of experience."

Oral forms like ballads and epics exist in every culture, originating long before the advent of written language. In preliterate eras, tales had to be appealing to the ear and memorable to the mind or else they would simply disappear. After all, most messages we hear are forgotten, or if they're passed on, they're changed beyond recognition - as psychologists' investigations of how rumors evolve have shown. In his classic book Memory in Oral Traditions, cognitive scientist David Rubin notes, "Oral traditions depend on human memory for their preservation. If a tradition is to survive, it must be stored in one person's memory and be passed on to another person who is also capable of storing and retelling it. All this must occur over many generations… Oral traditions must, therefore, have developed forms of organization and strategies to decrease the changes that human memory imposes on the more casual transmission of verbal material." What are these strategies? Tales that last for many generations tend to describe concrete actions rather than abstract concepts. They use powerful visual images. They are sung or chanted. and they employ patterns of sound: alliteration, assonance, repetition and, most of all, rhyme. Such universal characteristics of oral narratives are, in effect, mnemonics - memory aids that people developed over time "to make use of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of human memory," as Rubin puts it.

With studies showing that one-third of married couples started their relationships online, finding romance via URLs is no longer as novel - and creepy - as it seemed when dating sites launched in the mid-1990s. But now the digital aisle to marriage is transforming, moving from dating sites to social networks, where couples say encounters are more revealing and, with witty tweets and thoughtful status updates, more like flirting in the analog world. and they're free.

The University of Hawaii plays a lead role in a major statewide initiative called the Hawaii Language Roadmap, which aims to create a robust, multilingual workforce in Hawaii. This video gives an overview of the project. On June 16, 2015, thanks to the efforts of several stakeholders, including the Hawaii Language Roadmap, Hawaii's Board of Education unanimously voted to approve a Seal of Biliteracy for Hawaii's public school students. The policy adopted by the BOE reads as follows: The Board of Education hereby establishes a Seal of Biliteracy to be awarded upon graduation to students who demonstrate high proficiency in either of the State's two official languages and at least one additional language, including American Sign Language; provided that a student who demonstrates a high proficiency in both of the State's two official languages shall be awarded a Seal of Biliteracy. The purposes of the Seal of Biliteracy are to recognize the importance of: (1) enabling students to be college, career, and community ready in today's global society; (2) establishing an educational culture that recognizes and values the wealth of linguistic and cultural diversity students bring to the classroom; (3) supporting opportunities for study of and increasing proficiency in 'Ōlelo Hawai'i, an official language of the State of Hawai'i; and (4) encouraging partnerships with institutions of higher education and community organizations to increase access to language instruction in a variety of languages. The Department of Education shall implement the Seal of Biliteracy, including developments of criteria that students must satisfy to receive the Seal. Rationale: The Board of Education recognizes that there is personal, cultural, social, academic, and vocational/occupational value in encouraging students to maintain, or develop, proficiency in more than one language.

"The human knowledge base is eroding as we lose languages, exacerbated by the fact that most of them have never been written down or recorded... Each language is a unique expression of human creativity... it seems premature to begin constructing grand theories of universal grammar...If we can learn to value the intellectual diversity that is fostered by linguistic variety, we can all help to ensure its survival."

"Some words feature prominently in every US presidential State of the Union message, others come and go as events dictate or fashions change. As President Barack Obama prepares to address Congress, we look at the ups and downs of the 10 nouns and adjectives (and one pronoun) used most often since 1790."

By Paul H. Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky "In five experiments, we have explored how these metaphors influence the way that we reason about complex issues and forage for further information about them. We find that metaphors can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve complex problems and how they gather more information to make "well-informed" decisions.... [D]ifferent metaphorical frames created differences in opinion as big or bigger than those between Democrats and Republicans."

I think that is really helpful because everyone thinks that a college essay needs to be written and re-written a million times and it sometimes ends up not sounding like you.  This reminds me of what the interviews with college counselors I have had say, that it needs to sound and be you.

The college essay seems to be one that is not written for the college admission officers, nor your college counselor, parents and teachers, but rather for yourself. No one should tell you to change your ideas if you believe that they are inspired by you and represent who you are. You need to forget the "rules" of writing a good college essay, and instead focus on writing one that pleases you.