Words R Us

"Remarkably, how people used pronouns was correlated with almost everything I studied. For example, use of first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) was consistently related to gender, age, social class, honesty, status, personality, and much more. Although the findings were often robust, people in daily life were unable to pick them up when reading or listening to others... Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students' major."

"When legal teams need to prove or disprove the authorship of key texts, they call in the forensic linguists. Scholars in the field have tackled the disputed origins of some prestigious works, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers. But how reliably can linguistic experts establish that Person A wrote Document X when Document X is an e-mail - or worse, a terse note sent by instant message or Twitter? After all, e-mails and their ilk give us a much more limited purchase on an author's idiosyncrasies than an extended work of literature. Does digital writing leave fingerprints?"

This article is interesting. It makes me theorize that birds can speak different languages, like how humans can be bilingual, trilingual, etc. I don't think animals can really understand each other, but they learn to do so in their hostile environment. My questions is this: humans are animals, so why can't we understand other animal's language like how, the video we watched in class claimed/Mrs. Stewart said, one species can understand the calls of other species? My answer is simply because we don't have to. Our environment doesn't force us to really pay attention to the signs and warnings of calls and such of predators because we are the dominant animals.

Who plays baseball/softball in Words R Us?

plain speech and politics

Very cool results. At first, I wasn't sure if there was actually a way to gather this data, but it appears that with lots of training, it can be quiet easy to find things out!

If you're interested in learning more about it, consult Paul Eckman's research into microexpressions and the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). The animation industry depends on FACS, in fact!

Take a look at Dr. Paul Eckman's research on Facial Action Coding System, also bookmarked here (FACS)

"Microbloggers may think they're interacting in one big Twitterverse, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science find that regional slang and dialects are as evident in tweets as they are in everyday conversations."

This article answers that question!

I think you'll enjoy this video, which plays with language/words visually.

Thanks, Mark. I just now embedded it on the Moodle page for everyone. Nice find!