linguistics
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English Is Not Dying, You Elitists
Pop linguist Gretchen McCulloch unpacks the many wrongful assumptions about language behind the idea that emojis will cause the “death” of the English language: No, English is in ruddy good health. In fact, it’s not only not under threat, it’s…
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Women Shouldn’t Stop Saying ‘Sorry’
At The Establishment, Amelia Shroyer pushes back against the idea that women must self-police their language in order to sound more ‘professional’ (read: like men): Society has always valued the words of men more than those of women, to the…
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The Fine Point of Communication
At Aeon, Thom Scott-Phillips compares words and images, literature and visual art, to reveal their complementary nature in getting to the point.
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The Person to Whom Things Happen
The question of what posture to take toward our own pain is unexpectedly complicated. How do we understand our own suffering—with what words and to what ends? For the New York Times Magazine, Parul Sehgal questions the terminology we use…
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The Sound of White Flight
Over at Catapult, Kashana Cauley explores the origins of the Midwestern accent and discovers its roots in racial segregation: Apparently it wasn’t enough for GLVS [Great Lakes Vowel Shift] speakers to move very far away from minorities in order to…
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Losing Language
At JSTOR Daily, linguist Chi Luu looks at language loss in victims of trauma, specifically trauma in wartime. Luu’s case studies range from a monolingual teenaged prisoner isolated in Guantanamo Bay to POWs in Russia isolated from their native cultures…
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The Singular They
For the New York Times, Amanda Hess gives us a brief history of the increasingly prominent and ambiguously-gendered singular they, from usage in Shakespeare to Girls and The Argonauts.
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Digging Deep into a Jawn
The word “jawn” is unlike any other English word. In fact, according to the experts that I spoke to, it’s unlike any other word in any other language. It is an all-purpose noun, a stand-in for inanimate objects, abstract concepts,…
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How to Write Emoji
For Guernica, Elisa Gabbert explores the incorporation of emoji into language and fiction. Gabbert also addresses the idea of diachronic translations, i.e. translating fiction from one historical era to another, and what place hyper-specific contemporary technology like emoji have in…
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Examining the Dictionary for Sexism
We need to know that the dictionary, as an institution, has a cultural power beyond the sum of its parts…And that does carry with it a responsibility to realize that we exist within that tension, and to not always hide…
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The Art of Inventing Language
Chi Luu writes for JSTOR Daily on the popularity of invented languages, ranging from the mystical language created by a 12th century abbess to contemporary constructed languages such as Esperanto and Klingon. Invented languages found in literature are really examples…
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It’s Literally Fine
At the Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance defends teenagers’ ever-maligned contributions to the lexicon, citing a recent student that examines the extent to which teens influence linguistic change: And the thing about linguistic changes is they can’t exactly be stopped in any…