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freshman etymology course

series of language and gender syllabi

The New England Journal of Medicine has a first-person article about the consequences of the language of economics in the doctoring biz . From the article, "A decent medical-care system that helps all the people cannot be built without the language of equity and care. If this language is permitted to die and is completely replaced by the language of efficiency and cost control, all of us - including physicians - will lose something precious."

An Outside Magazine article that blends information and virtual reality.

It also follows our "recipe" for essays: begin first with a story, then move into research....tasty.

Ben Blatt, _Slate_ journalist, shares and reports on some maps of the United States that incorporate data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey regarding the languages spoken in American homes. One map shows what language, after English, is most commonly spoken in each of the 50 states (Spanish, for the most part), and another, the second most-spoken language. I personally question the veracity of the data for Hawai'i, which lists Tagalog as the second-most spoken language behind English. Surely it's Hawai'i Creole English (HCE), but perhaps it's because survey respondents don't know HCE= its own language. Also, Ilocano seems to be more commonly spoken than Tagalog in the 808, but maybe because Tagalog= the language of school instruction in the Philippines, it's universally spoken by everyone who speaks some Filipino variant. Some caveats on the construction of these maps. A language like Chinese is not counted as a single language, but is split into different dialects: Cantonese, Mandarin, Shanghaiese and treated as different languages. If those languages had been grouped together, the marking of many states would change. In addition, Hawaiian is listed as a Pacific Island language, so following ACS classifications, it was not included in the Native American languages map.

Botched autocorrects are a byproduct of a technological convenience that allows typing on the go, even when the message does not always come out as planned. Yet as autocorrect technology has become more advanced, so have its errors. Tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple employ dozens of linguists - or "natural language programmers," as they are known - to analyze language patterns and to track slang, even pop culture. And they can do amazing things: correct when you hit the wrong keys (the "fat finger" phenomenon) and analyze whom you are texting, how you have spoken with that person in the past, even what you've talked about. Apple's iOS 8 operating system, released in September, even purports to know how your tone changes by medium - that is, "the casual style" you may use in texting versus "the more formal language" you are likely to use in email, as the company put it in a statement. It adjusts for whom you are communicating with, knowing that your choice of words with a buddy is probably more laid-back than it would be with your boss. Your smartphone may now be able to suggest not just words but entire phrases. And the more you use it, the more it remembers, paying attention to repeated words, the structure of your sentences and tone.

The ability to speak and write more than one language gives people more alternatives in the global market economy. I call these people Global Linguals. A Global Lingual is a person who not only understands the global market economy, but also has trained his/herself to think globally and to speak and write more than one language.

A start-up, Eterni-Me, is looking at ways of using artificial intelligence to keep us alive virtually - long after we're gone. The company collects data that you've curated from Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, photos, video, location information, and even Google Glass and Fitbit devices., and processes this huge amount of information using complex artificial intelligence algorithms. Then it generates a virtual YOU, an avatar that emulates your personality and can interact with, and offer information and advice to your family and friends, even after you pass away.

North Korea has published 310 new slogans to encourage patriotism - so what do they say, what do they mean and what do they tell us about the leadership in Pyongyang? Propaganda in the form of slogans, posters, stamps and books has played an important role in the country since the state was founded in 1948, so the appearance of a new batch of exhortations is not surprising. My personal favorite: "Play sports games in an offensive way!" See http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-31446387 for a full list of the slogans.

Social media users now number more than 1.4 billion - more than half of the Earth's Internet-using population. We share a lot of information on social media, but it turns out we are sharing far more than we think. Seemingly innocuous information, when analyzed against tens of thousands of other profiles, can reveal secrets you never intended to share.

There are millions of people, even in the mostly monolingual US, who speak more than one language at home. Competence in three languages is not unusual. But what about 10, 20, 30, 100 languages? What's the upper limit on the number of languages a person can know?

LAST week, Johnson took a look at some of the advantages of bilingualism. These include better performance at tasks involving "executive function" (which involve the...

According to standard grammar, "they" and its related forms can only agree with plural antecedents. But English sorely lacks a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun, and "they" has for centuries been pressed into service for that purpose, much to the grammarians' chagrin. Now, it seems, those who have held the line against singular "they" may be easing their stance.

In the good old days, dating was defined by a series of face-to-face encounters. People met, they spent time in each other's company, they got to know each other's friends and family, and they evaluated the quality of their connection and compatibility in person...

Gawker is running a competition, tournament style, to see which accent will be crowned "America's Ugliest." In the running are 16 cities in the US, and readers get to vote. Accent discrimination still thrives... Josef Fruehwald, the linguist author of this article, states, "Linguists call this general pattern "standard language ideology." It's the idea that somewhere out there, there's a perfect, unadulterated version of English, and what your everyday person speaks is a poor copy. I call it the kilogram model of language, because there is literally a physical object in France by which the unit kilogram is defined, and there are in fact multiple and worryingly imperfect copies of it around the world. But what linguists have discovered is that language is definitely not like the kilogram. The only place where English really exists is in the minds of its everyday speakers. To the extent that varies geographically and socially, so does English. There are no imperfect copies."

This person can sing with his mouth closed while imitating other Japanese artists. I have no idea what he is saying since I can't understand Japanese, but it's still cool anyway.

Schizophrenia is a devastating brain disorder, and current treatments may not do enough to address the personal suffering, family burden, and cost to society linked to the illness. But a landmark new study finds that a treatment combining talk therapy and low-dose medication is more effective than traditional medication-only treatment. The actual study can be found at this link: http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2015.15050632.