Words R Us

slang captures elements of humanity that are not recorded elsewhere. "What slang really does is show us at our most human," says Jonathon Green, a scholar of slang. It is the linguistic equivalent of our "unfettered Freudian id," proof of how deeply we desire social affirmation, how subversive we can be and, in some ways, how unchanging humans are. After all, while the words may change, the thematic areas (sex, drugs, crime, insults, etc.) have remained unwavering for half a millennium. So has slang's primary purpose: to playfully disguise true meaning in a way that determines who is in the know and who is out.

Journalist Nicholas Kristof explores contemporary buzzwords and changing social sensibilities regarding language and journalistic style norms, for example, the shift from "women" to "people with uteruses" or "homeless" to "houseless." Kristof examines the reasons behind these recent adoptions, but also raises the issue of how some peopleʻs use of well-intentioned, more sensitive, and "inclusive" language may ironically be alienating other sectors of society. For example, while the media and corporate (white) America mayʻve adopted the term "Latinx," a Pew survey found that only 3 percent of Hispanics themselves use the term.

According to Ethnologue, of the 115 Indigenous languages spoken in the U.S. today, two are healthy, 34 are in danger, and 79 will go extinct within a generation without serious intervention. In other words, 99% of the Native American languages spoken today are in danger. Despite the Cherokee Nation's efforts, the Cherokee language (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ) is on that list. There are 573 federally recognized tribes in the United States, and most are battling language extinction. Since 2008, thanks in part to the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act, the Administration for Native Americans (ANA), through a competitive grant process, has allocated approximately $12 million annually to tribes working to preserve their languages. In 2018, only 47 language projects received funding - just 29% of all requests, leaving more than two-thirds of applicants without funding, according to ANA. The Bureau of Indian Education, the Department of Education's Department of Indian Education and the National Science Foundation allocated an estimated additional $5.4 million in language funding in 2018, bringing the grand total of federal dollars for Indigenous language revitalization last year to approximately $17.4 million. Compared to how much the United States spent on exterminating Native languages, that sum is a pittance. At the height of the Indian boarding school era, between 1877 and 1918, the United States allocated $2.81 billion (adjusted for inflation) to support the nation's boarding school infrastructure - an educational system designed to assimilate Indigenous people into white culture and destroy Native languages. Since 2005, however, the federal government has only appropriated approximately $180 million for Indigenous language revitalization. In other words, for every dollar the U.S. government spent on eradicating Native languages in previous centuries, it spent less than 7 cents on revitalizing them in this one.

Adopting the same gestures, posture or tone can enhance bonding and help with networking or negotiating. mirroring can help you create powerful connections with others. This behavior, often called "the chameleon effect," often causes others to like and trust you more. Professional networkers, negotiators and salespeople say they use mirroring to help them engage more deeply in a conversation and understand the person they're talking with. Retail salespeople who were told to mimic the nonverbal and verbal behavior of customers sold more products and left customers with a more positive opinion of the store, according to a 2011 study of 129 customers by French researchers. In another study, published in 2008 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 62 students were assigned to negotiate with other students. Those who mirrored others' posture and speech reached a settlement 67% of the time, while those who didn't reached a settlement 12.5% of the time.

As well as making signage clearer, it's been shown that an easy-to-read typeface might convince your brain that a given task is easier to perform because information printed in a legible typeface ostensibly requires less mental effort to understand and process. Interestingly, some studies suggest when words are harder to process, people pay more attention to what the words actually say; because of that, the memory trace becomes stronger, aiding comprehension and retention. Printing something in hard-to-read font increases "desirable difficulty," the addition of an obstruction to the learning process that requires you to put in just enough effort, which leads to better memory retention and deeper cognitive processing." For those of you who might be interested in testing desirable difficulty out, the author suggests an experimental design.

Author Daniel Stillman offers up excellent pointers to create more productive conversations, especially when conversing with folx who hold diverse and maybe conflicting perspectives. The whole article's worth mining for details, but here are the key takeaways: 3 Ways to Deepen Conversations How do we go deeper into understanding other people's perspectives? Use these three levels of goals to peel back the layers in the conversation and understand why people want what they want, and find agreements that work for everyone involved. LEVEL 1: INTERESTS: Why does someone want what they want? Try saying, "That sounds important to you. Can you tell me why?" LEVEL 2: OPTIONS: "Hard" negotiators demand what they want. Reply: "That thing you're asking for is one option. Are there any other options or alternatives you can think of? Can we generate any others together?" Finding all the levers of value on both sides can help open up opportunities to create shared value. LEVEL 3: LEGITIMACY: When someone throws out a number or any firm position, it often feels like we need to counter. Instead, ask: "Where did you get that number? What can we base a fair number on?" Probing for ways to judge an outcome as objectively legitimate can lower the stakes.

English as She Is Spoke is a charming 19th century (1884) phrasebook created by a Portuguese gentleman, Pedro Carolino, who only wanted to help teach the English language to his peers, but instead created a literary disaster that became a linguistic phenomenon. Check out the digital scan of the book here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/english-as-she-is-spoke-1884

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.

AI writers like ChatGPT can often produce work that is, at least on first glance, indistinguishable from human writing. With a simple prompt like "write an expository essay on symbolism in Heart of Darkness," ChatGPT can spit out an organized, coherent, five-paragraph essay in seconds. (See results below.) And no two essays will be identical. In some cases, help from an AI may be as acceptable as using a Google search as part of the research process. But in many cases, it will be unacceptable for classroom work. So how do teachers deal with the growing ease with which AIs can complete student homework? Turnitin, which is known for its technology used for plagiarism detection, has posted a technology preview that shows its software automatically detecting work written by an AI writer, even going so far as to show which parts of an essay were written by AI versus human and indicate where AI writing transitions into human writing.

Hawaii put forward a plan Tuesday, 1/17/2023, to make preschool available to all 3- and 4-year-olds by 2032, which if successful would put the state in a rarified group of states managing to provide pre-kindergarten education to most of its children. Hawaii's leaders have aspired to universal pre-K for decades but have found it elusive. A recent analysis found the state was moving so slowly toward that goal that it would take 47 years to build all the public preschool capacity Hawaii needed. The state expects it will need 465 new classrooms to serve the additional students. Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, who has been tasked by Gov. Josh Green to lead the state's efforts, said only half of Hawaii's 35,000 3- and 4-year-olds attend preschool, either by paying expensive tuition for private schools or obtaining one of the few spots in publicly-funded pre-K programs. The state estimates there are about 9,200 children whose parents want to send them to preschool but aren't able. It's targeting its plans at this group.

Teachers worried about students turning in essays written by a popular artificial intelligence chatbot now have a new tool of their own. Edward Tian, a 22-year-old senior at Princeton University, has built an app to detect whether text is written by ChatGPT, the viral chatbot that's sparked fears over its potential for unethical uses in academia. Tian, a computer science major who is minoring in journalism, spent part of his winter break creating GPTZero, which he said can "quickly and efficiently" decipher whether a human or ChatGPT authored an essay.

Luke Center has archived the lectures of their speaker series addressing all 17 of the UN Sustainability and Development Goals. Might be worth a listen as you work on your Changemaker projects.

Multilingualism has been shown to have many social, psychological and lifestyle advantages, including superior ability to concentrate, solve problems and focus, better mental flexibility and multitasking skills. Moreover, researchers are finding a swathe of health benefits from speaking more than one language, including faster stroke recovery and delayed onset of dementia. A steady stream of studies over the past decade has shown that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in a range of cognitive and social tasks from verbal and nonverbal tests to how well they can read other people. Greater empathy is thought to be because bilinguals are better at blocking out their own feelings and beliefs in order to concentrate on the other person's.

This short interactive quiz, meant for Gen Y and above readers, tests your ability to translate common slang used by Gen Z.

Chinese honorifics (尊稱zūnchēng) and honorific language (敬辭jìngcí，謙辭qiāncí，婉辭wǎncí，客套語kètàoyǔ，雅語yáyǔ), are words, word constructs, and expressions in the Chinese language that convey self-deprecation, social respect, politeness, or deference

The growing number of Hawaiian language accounts on social media is sparking discussions on how ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi can take advantage of platforms like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Traditional approaches to language revitalization, like classroom instruction, have been fruitful, but using social media may help raise the visibility and accessibility of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi.

Issues of equality and acceptance of transgender and nonbinary people - along with challenges to their rights - have become a major topic in the headlines. These issues can involve words and ideas and identities that are new to some. That's why we've put together a glossary of terms relating to gender identity. Our goal is to help people communicate accurately and respectfully with one another. Proper use of gender identity terms, including pronouns, is a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance.

The urge to converse with animals is age-old, long predating the time when smartphones became our best friends. A new app, is the product of a growing interest in enlisting additional intelligences - machine-learning algorithms - to decode animal communication. The app detects and analyzes cat utterances in real-time, assigning each one a broadly defined "intent," such as happy, resting, hunting or "mating call." It then displays a conversational, plain English "translation" of whatever intent it detects. MeowTalk uses the sounds it collects to refine its algorithms and improve its performance, the founders said, and pet owners can provide in-the-moment feedback if the app gets it wrong. In 2021, MeowTalk researchers reported that the software could distinguish among nine intents with 90 percent accuracy overall. But the app was better at identifying some than others, not infrequently confusing "happy" and "pain," according to the results. Dogs could soon have their own day. Zoolingua, a start-up based in Arizona, is hoping to create an A.I.-powered dog translator that will analyze canine vocalizations and body language. Still, even sophisticated algorithms may miss critical real-world context and cues, said Alexandra Horowitz, an expert on dog cognition at Barnard College. For instance, much of canine behavior is driven by scent. "How is that going to be translated, when we don't know the extent of it ourselves?" Dr. Horowitz said in an email.

Increasing demand is sparking conversations around Hawai`iʻs constitutional duty to provide access to ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, or Hawaiian language education. It's been three years since the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court ruled that the state has a constitutional duty to provide immersion education. The case involved Chelsa-Marie Kealohalani Clarabal. She wanted an immersion education for her daughters on Lānaʻi where there was no such program. "The legal landscape at the time was there was no case law that we could cite," said Honolulu attorney Sharla Manley who represents the Clarabal ʻohana. "There were three provisions of the state constitution - one being the official languages provision, the other provision being the Hawaiian education provision and thereʻs the provision for traditional and customary practices," Manley told HPR. But no court had enforced any of these provisions when it came to ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi until the Clarabal case.

Ubiquitous video technology and social media have given deaf people a new way to communicate. They're using it to transform American Sign Language. For more than a century, the telephone has helped shape how people communicate. But it had a less profound impact on American Sign Language, which relies on both hand movements and facial expressions to convey meaning. Until, that is, phones started to come with video screens. Over the past decade or so, smartphones and social media have allowed ASL users to connect with one another as never before. Face-to-face interaction, once a prerequisite for most sign language conversations, is no longer required. Video has also given users the opportunity to teach more people the language - there are thriving ASL communities on YouTube and TikTok - and the ability to quickly invent and spread new signs, to reflect either the demands of the technology or new ways of thinking.