Words R Us

My favorite: "mamihlapinatapei," meaning "the wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start." Note (via Language Log) that by "untranslatable," the author really means that there's no one English word which corresponds exactly with the foreign word. Clearly, the words are translatable, just as English phrases.

scholarly

"Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall." (Check the title of the page.)

I've always believed in the final serial comma!

Prof. Bennett Schwartz: "In a tip-of-the-tongue state a part of our cognitive system called metacognition lets us know that even though we can't retrieve something at the moment it's probably there stored on our memory, and if we work at it we'll get it... the conventional idea is sort of like your brain's, like, a big complicated filing cabinet. This is telling us that that's not so true. You can't just go to the J file and find John there."

Prof. Jeff Zachs: "When they're reading the story, they're building simulations in their head of events that are described by the story... language itself is a powerful form of virtual reality, that there's an important sense in which when we tell each other stories that we can control the perceptional processes that are happening in each other's brains."

"The most Chinese of Chinese ideograms was identified as 和 (pronounced 'huh' and typically Romanized as 'he')-the character for an indistinct concept often (though clumsily) translated as "peace" or "togetherness.""

"The first recorded use of OK in the March 23, 1839, edition of the Boston Morning Post, where it appeared as "o.k.," with a clarifying "all correct" immediately following. Actually, "o.k." stood for "oll korrect": There was a craze in the late 1830s not just for abbreviations but for abbreviations of mangled spellings. Of these faddish coinages, only OK and "the three R's" (reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic) survive."

Essay/study by Deborah Tannen: "So the key to why having sisters makes people happier - men as well as women - may lie not in the kind of talk they exchange but in the fact of talk. If men, like women, talk more often to their sisters than to their brothers, that could explain why sisters make them happier." See also discussion on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2739 (they advise us to be wary of overstating the significance of the results)

if you really want to understand it at the molecular level

narrated lecture by a teacher

a good model for critical reading of research design