language
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Hacking Away at Old Saws
In an interview with NPR about his new book, It’s Been Said Before: A Guide to the Use and Abuse of Cliches, Orin Hargraves acknowledges the utility of well-worn shorthand even as he counsels against its use. Clichés work because…
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500 Years of Drunk
How many different words are there for “intoxicated”? Quite a lot, as it turns out—writers have been inventing new words to describe inebriation for just about as long as they’ve been drinking. A new book exploring the history of synonyms…
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Banish the Bae
No one holds a monopoly on cranky admonishments of popular parlance, but Lake Superior State University’s annual “List of Banished Words” does hold the distinction of admonishing longest. The 40th year’s list is now out, featuring words in the “get…
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Weekly Geekery
What do machines take from us? Hacking the police. Saving Egyptians. Do headlines change the way we read? The Internet is real.
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Ways of Speaking
In his seminal book Ways of Seeing, critic and novelist John Berger deconstructed the framework of presuppositions through which we view visual images. Over at the Guardian, he reminds us that language is also a process, one in which layers…
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Willful Ignorance
Over at the New Yorker, Alaksandar Hemon reads a slice of Nabokov; afterward, he chats about the foreignness of language, learning English from Pnin, and the book’s “complicated innocence” towards America.
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Language Wars
Most writers aspire to clarity in language. Politicians, of course, are the exception. Legislators are turning to language to obscure their intentions, claims Steven Poole over at the Guardian. Poole cites a trade deal between the EU and the United…
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The Year of Vaping
The Oxford Dictionaries “Word of the Year” has been announced, and young people around the world will be called upon to explain the word “vape”—and its significance as part of cultural shifts surrounding marijuana and tobacco—to their older relatives in…
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Reviving Tongva
Pamela Munro on reviving a language no one speaks: It’s hard to find information on Tongva. There are no audio recordings of people speaking the language, just a few scratchy wax cylinder recordings of Tongva songs. There are additional word…
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Grammar As You Like It
Everybody has that one friend who insists they know good grammar. They’re probably wrong—Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker insists strict rules just don’t matter because language is fluid. Mother Jones explains the grammatically anti-authoritarian position: …language is never set in…
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Sharing Our Words
Writers often overuse a few unique words, creating a linguistic fingerprint. Vocabulary words are also exchanged between social groups. Some people contribute new words, while others adopt them. The process is not entirely random, though: Diana Boxer, a professor at…
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This, That Mean More Than You Think
The words we never think about reveal a lot about what we’re saying. Filler words—this, though, I, an, and, that, and there—are so common we never really think about them, but they give away a lot of information. Psychologist James…