Anthropologists find that the use of "emotional" words in all sorts of books has soared and dipped across the past century, roughly mirroring each era’s social and economic upheavals. And psychologists say this new form of language analysis may offer a more objective view into our culture.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/04/01/175584297/mining-books-to-map-emotions-through-a-century
Susan Schaller believes that the best idea she ever had in her life had to do with an isolated young man she met one day at a community college. He was 27-years-old at the time, and though he had been born deaf, no one had ever taught him to sign. He had lived his entire life without language—until Susan found a way to reach out to him.
Charles Fernyhough doesn’t think that very young children think—at least not in a way he’d recognize as thinking. Charles explains what he means by walking us through an experiment in a white room. And Elizabeth Spelke weighs in with research from her baby lab—which suggests a child’s brain begins as a series of islands, until it can find the right words and phrases to bridge the gaps.
James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar at Columbia, argues that Shakespeare behaved more like a chemist than a writer: by smashing words together—words like eye and ball—he created new words, and new ways of seeing the world.
It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But in this hour of Radiolab, we try to do just that.
We meet a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke, and retrace the birth of a brand new language 30 years ago.
"Big Data" had just as much to do with President Obama’s victory as phrases like "Etch A Sketch" and "47 percent," says linguist Geoff Nunberg. Big Data is also behind anxieties about intrusions on our privacy, whether from the government’s anti-terrorist data sweeps or the ads that track us on the Web.
http://www.npr.org/2012/12/20/167702665/geoff-nunbergs-word-of-the-year-big-data
Action a part of the craft that often goes unnoticed, but smartly-written action pays dividends, helping readers see the movie you want them to make.
Get out your skinny jeans and pass the PBR! Martha and Grant discuss the definition of the word hipster. Also, what happens when you pull a brodie? And why do we describe something cheap or poorly made as cheesy? Also, sawbucks, shoestring budgets, the origins of bootlegging, and cabbie lingo, including the slang word bingo.
We have collective nouns for animals, like “a gaggle of geese,” “a pride of lions,” and “an exaltation of larks.” So why not collective nouns for plants? How about a “greasing of palms,” or a “pursing of tulips”? Also, the difference between further and farther, the proper use of crescendo, how Shakespeare sounded, and why a child’s runny nose is sometimes referred to as lamb’s legs.
Tagged with language linguistics words collective nouns
Why do spelling bees include such bizarre, obsolete words as cymotrichous? Why is New York called the Big Apple? Also, the stinky folk medicine tradition called an asifidity bag, the surprising number of common English phrases that come directly from the King James Bible, three sheets to the wind, the term white elephant, in like Flynn, Australian slang, and what to call foam sleeve for an ice-cold beverage can.
Simon Winchester discusses his book The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Video here: http://ww3.tvo.org/video/177526/simon-winchester-his-book-meaning-everything
When The Associated Press said it would no longer condemn the use of the adverb "hopefully" in its style guide, most people shrugged. But the announcement was a red flag to people who have made the adverb the biggest bugaboo of English usage over the past 50 years.
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/30/153709651/the-word-hopefully-is-here-to-stay-hopefully
Tagged with npr language words linguistics
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