language
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A Whole Jar of Change
Make your way to The New Yorker, where Elif Batuman makes an inquiry into what has become a dominant American disposition: awkwardness. “Awkwardness,” Batuman argues, “is the consciousness of a false position.” Here is the top-rated definition of awkward in…
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Creating New Words
The act of creating new words helps make language more precise. George Orwell once proposed a ministry responsible for inventing new words for precisely that reason, explains The Airship Daily. However, the shortcomings of language and the new words created…
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From Metaphor to Consciousness
Neuroscientists are examining metaphors and finding that they’re essential to language. Modern brain scanning has allowed scientists to look at brain activity as the brain employs metaphors from language. What has been found is that the brain interprets metaphors literally.…
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Weekly Geekery
The marriage of metaphor and your mind. Coming to terms with Nothingness. The revealing science of word choice. Time-lapse video and how we document the world around us. The words of the future.
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Again from the Ground Up
Before the mid-1970’s, Somalia had no written alphabet to speak of. In 1972, the Somali government introduced a standard written alphabet, and literacy rates climbed from a measly 5% to nearly 60%. Unfortunately, as an effect of the civil war,…
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Properly Blootered
The New Republic has taken the task of dissecting our collective drunkenness; or at least the words we’ve used to describe it: There seems to be a universal trend to avoid stating the obvious. To describe someone as simply drunk, in…
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Everything in Its Right Place
The rules come so naturally to us that we rarely learn about them in school, but over the past few decades language nerds have been monitoring modifiers, grouping them into categories, and straining to find logic in how people instinctively…
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Not All Books Are Novels
People have taken to using the terms “book” and “novel” interchangeably, but non-fiction books are not novels, Ben Yagoda explains over at Slate. The shift might be attributed to the post-modern zeitgeist that blends fact and fiction into a fuzzy…
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Weekly Geekery
THIS. THIIIISSSSS. And this history of “This.” Can Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) save the crumbling ivory towers of higher education? “Tech companies, in their many guises, always tell stories about the future of the world.” Kids these days are…
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The Life and Death of Twerk
The American Reader has a new series examining the lifespan of American slang. In the first installment, Michael Reid Roberts looks at the history of “shade” and “twerk.”
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Spellbound
Unaccustomed, vicious, onomatopoeia… We all have that one word we can never spell correctly. Paris Review blogger Sadie Stein’s was “Wednesday.” “It’s like a mental block,” she writes, “or maybe, an increased reliance on technology.” Read the rest of the…
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Literary Namesakes
Sometimes, an eponym has a literary origin from a famous character. Over at the Guardian, Paul Anthony Jones takes us on a tour of literary eponyms and introduces us to the original brainiac, gargantuan, and svengali.