Words R Us

"Now in the 21st century, with sophisticated text-crunching tools at our disposal, it is possible to put Bridgman's theory to the test. Has a vernacular style become the standard for the typical fiction writer? Or is literary language still a distinct and peculiar beast?"

"Changes in word use are normal and not unique to any language. But English does enjoy a privileged status as the world's lingua franca. That began with the British, but has been maintained by the Americans. It's difficult to predict how English will next evolve, but the one certainty is it will."

""Interviewers who spoke moderately fast, at a rate of about 3.5 words per second, were much more successful at getting people to agree than either interviewers who talked very fast or very slowly," said Jose Benki... variation in pitch could be helpful for some interviewers but for others, too much pitch variation sounds artificial, like people are trying too hard. ... "People who pause too much are seen as disfluent. But it was interesting that even the most disfluent interviewers had higher success rates than those who were perfectly fluent.""

"Our main conclusion is that delays in word onset facilitate word recognition, and that such facilitation is independent of the type of delay. ... Our findings support the perhaps counterintuitive conclusion that fillers like um can sometimes help (rather than hinder) listeners to identify spoken words. But critically, the data show that the same is true for silent pauses and pauses filled with artificially generated tones. "

"Chinese speakers can download nine numbers in two seconds, English speakers only seven. Dehaene thinks our brains scoop up information in two-second gulps, or loops, so the Chinese are regularly getting a number-retention advantage just because their number words are shorter."

"The Harry Potter books," writes Jessy Randall in this essay from VERBATIM, "are not just good literature but a treasury of wordplay and invention," and we couldn't agree more.

"Even though these students are fluent in English, their brains still automatically translate what they see into Chinese. This suggests that knowledge of a first language automatically influences the processing of a second language, even when they are very different, unrelated languages."

"Word usage in 40 speeches given at graduations this year."

By George Lakoff. Includes indexes of conceptual metaphors, e.g., - A force is a moving object- A problem is a body of water- Psychological forces are physical forces- Time is a landscape we move through- Words are weapons Includes examples for each. E.g., for "A problem is a body of water": - He dived right into the problem.- The murky waters of the investigation frustrated him.- He'd been fishing for the answer for weeks.- Finally the answer surfaced.- The answer's just floating around out there.

AHH! We needed this. Thanks, Ryan!

"A small research arm of the U.S. government's intelligence establishment wants to understand how speakers of Farsi, Russian, English, and Spanish see the world by building software that automatically evaluates their use of metaphors."

"From Nazi to Chocolate, words play a vital role in our lives. And each word has its own story. But where do they come from? What do they mean? How do they change? Some of these questions will be answered by "Words of the World" - a series of short videos presented by experts from the University of Nottingham's School of Modern Languages and Cultures."

With topics ranging from slang etymology to how slang affects a culture. "Slang is a reaction to standard language. To have slang, I think you need to have a tradition of education to emphasize the importance of the standard language. You also need to have a stratified society with a certain amount of mobility in it, so very different kinds of people have opportunities to mingle. Finally, I think you have to have an established cultural tendency toward irreverence. You have to have the standard and at the same time a popular skepticism about it."

"I am collecting number systems of world languages. The languages shown below are listed according to the complexity of the way of counting numbers..."

"All of the justices talk about "legalese" in disparaging terms, and many refer to great fiction writers as masters of language. ... That sentiment is echoed by Breyer, who points to Proust, Stendhal and Montesquieu as his inspirations. Justice Anthony Kennedy loves Hemingway, Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn, Dickens and Trollope. ..."

"Children whose parents talked about sets of four to 10 objects that the child could see were more likely to understand the cardinal principle. Using smaller numbers in conversations and referring to objects the children couldn't see (such as "I'll be there in two minutes.") did not have the same results."

"The Assyrian Dictionary is not simply a word list. By detailing the history and range of uses of each word, this unique dictionary is in essence a cultural encyclopedia of Mesopotamian history, society, literature, law and religion and is an indispensable research tool for any scholar anywhere who seeks to explore the written record of Mesopotamian civilization"

"The current, long-standing theory suggests that children learn their first words through a series of associations; they associate words they hear with multiple possible referents in their immediate environment....A small set of psychologists and linguists, including members of the Penn team, have long argued that the sheer number of statistical comparisons necessary to learn words this way is simply beyond the capabilities of human memory.... rich interactions with children-and patience-are more important than abstract picture books and drilling."