Words R Us

Blog devoted to analyzing language of public figures

links to Pennebaker's research, such as how using pronouns flexibly is linked to mental and physical health!?

A blog about language

Hey, I thought I bookmarked this one and now Diigo is crediting you!

This site claims to "analyze" the words we use; more importantly though, it lists a number of useful links at the bottom of the page.

Mark, you've almost overtaken Mary Keller! But will you ever catch up to Ryan?!

Ryan had a bit of a head start...

"There is a reason why neither Globish nor Basic caught on in a mainstream way, and that reason is the basis of the English language's growing global power."

"The field of natural language processing doesn't usually get showcased in a widely watched game show, but that's exactly what happened on Jeopardy! over the last three evenings, as IBM's Watson supercomputer squared off against the two best humans ever to play the game."

Including answers to questions such as: - Can you walk us through the logic Watson would go through to answer a question such as, "The antagonist of Stevenson's Treasure Island." (Who is Long John Silver?) - ...I found myself wondering whether what it does is really natural language processing, or something more akin to word association... does Watson really need to understand syntax and meaning to just search its database for words and phrases associated with the words and phrases in the clue?

Want to Study Forensic Linguistics in college?

describes techniques that memory-athletes use

"Longer words tend to carry more information, according to research by a team of cognitive scientists.... Piantadosi and colleagues suggest that the relationship of word length to information content might not only make it more efficient to convey information linguistically but also make language cognition a smoother ride for the reader or listener."