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Language and gender on the internet. Millions of people around the world take part in large-scale group discussions on the internet. These discussions have been likened to very large-scale conversations. We might wonder, therefore, whether the same kinds of gender differences exist in computer-mediated discussions as have been noted in face-to-face discussions. Susan Herring set out to investigate this question by analysing four public computer-mediated discourse samples from three academic discussion lists. In some of the online discussions there were more male than female participants, while in others there were more female participants. Herring points out that we might expect to find a ‘one-at-a-time floor’ in computer-mediated discussions.

Herring, S.C. (2010) Who’s got the floor in computer-mediated conversation? If Obama had been Lincoln: 10 lines from Obama’s Second Inaugural Address that wouldn’t have been used in 1865. When writing his screenplay for the film Lincoln, playwright Tony Kushner used his copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to check for possible anachronisms, seeking to impart the flavor of 19th-century English to the script. How much has the vocabulary of English changed since Abraham Lincoln’s presidency?

About 25% of the OED’s entries are for words which entered the English language after Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, including racism (1926), leftist (1924), and boycott (1880). The chart below shows the OED’s headwords by decade of their first recorded date, highlighting the surge of new words in the late-19th century. Of course, that doesn’t mean that 25% of English in contemporary use consists of words adopted since 1863. It goes without saying that many of the ideas expressed in Obama’s speech—gay rights, expansion of the information infrastructure, the very fact of there being an African American president—would have been unimaginable in the 1860s. 1. 1941 F. 3. 4.

The state of our union is … dumber: How the linguistic standard of the presidential address has declined | World news. Mitt Romney vs. the English Language. My favorite moment of the 2012 presidential debates came at the beginning of the final confrontation Monday night. The moderator, Bob Schieffer, invited both candidates to “give your thoughts” on the Middle East. Republican nominee Mitt Romney went first and began with a typical stumbling attempt to be charming, almost successful in its very failure: Something about an earlier “humorous event” (it was the annual Al Smith dinner for the archdiocese of New York, at which politicians tell jokes) and how “it’s nice to maybe be funny this time, not on purpose.

We’ll see what happens.” Huh? Then he moved into the mode where he sounds like a college freshman padding a term paper. (The other way to pad a term paper -- which Romney and I both learned at Cranbrook School in suburban Detroit in the 1960s -- is to stud it with irrelevant but impressive factoids, “swotted up,” as the Brits say, for the occasion. Disturbing Developments Back to the debate. Trust Matters. READABILITY. Advertising Archives - Vintage illustrations Adverts Posters Magazine Covers. Adflip.com ^ Ads archive, greeting cards of automobile, celebrity, audio magazines advertising and more! Retronaut - See history. #Tweet #Tweet. Founded in 2006, Twitter is the online social networking service that allows its users to communicate via text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as ‘tweets’.

Communication in Twitter is fast-paced and it can be difficult to keep track of the talk that emerges, so a convention has arisen among Twitter users whereby a hashtag (#) can be used as a prefix to make the term searchable and then others can search for tweets that have that same topic. So, for instance, a search of #LFW this week in Twitter should produce a list of tweets relating to London Fashion Week. Anyone can start off a term with a hashtag and if it catches on and is used with sufficient frequency it can become what is known as a ‘trending topic’.

To get an item into the list of trending topics is, according to researcher Ruth Page, a ‘signal of status and influence’. Overall, Page found that corporations and celebrities most frequently use hashtags. Representing gender in children's reading materials. Would a boy have been shown with flowers in the 1970s? Are girls and boys portrayed differently in children’s reading materials today than in the past? During the 1970s and 80s, studies of children’s reading materials found that males not only featured more than females but also they tended to take the lead roles and were more active than their female counterparts, who were often restricted to traditional stereotyped roles. Many of these earlier studies of gender in children’s reading material analysed the texts based on their content, which meant that researchers made their own judgements about what was sexist and what was not. Now, however, advances in computer and electronic technology mean that ‘corpus linguistics’ can be used to analyse texts more systematically.

Using this method, John Macalister set about answering the question of how far gender roles in writing for children had changed since the 1970s.

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Fiske's Discs. Ngram Viewer. Ideas Illustrated » Blog Archive » Visualizing English Word Origins. I have been reading a book on the development of the English language recently and I’ve become fascinated with the idea of word etymology — the study of words and their origins. It’s no secret that English is a great borrower of foreign words but I’m not enough of an expert to really understand what that means for my day-to-day use of the language.

Simply reading about word history didn’t help me, so I decided that I really needed to see some examples. Using Douglas Harper’s online dictionary of etymology, I paired up words from various passages I found online with entries in the dictionary. For each word, I pulled out the first listed language of origin and then re-constructed the text with some additional HTML infrastructure. The HTML would allow me to associate each word (or word fragment) with a color, title, and hyperlink to a definition.

The results look like this: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. A second example shows more variety: Passage #1: American Literature. Concordle - Not so pretty cousin of Wordle. Readability-Score.com - Free Online Readability Calculator - Flesch Kincaid, Gunning Fog and more ...