Languages. Funny words English vs. German. The 10 Coolest Foreign Words The English Language Needs. Means: Somebody who has nothing but bad luck.
Have you ever found yourself at the end of a sequence of events that started with ordering a Big Mac, and ended with being roughly sodomized on national television? Fortunately most people will not experience this. Magazine: Language. Connecting sound and meaning in words. For more than 100 years the standard view among traditional language theorists was that, with the exception of onomatopoeia like "fizz" and "beep," the sound of a word tells us nothing about how it is used.
This seemingly arbitrary relationship between words and their meaning in human language is hailed as singular to our species. A new Cornell study takes that view to task. "What we have shown is that the sound of a word can tell us something about how it is used," said Morten Christiansen, associate professor of psychology at Cornell. "Specifically, it tells us whether the word is used as a noun or as a verb, and this relationship affects how we process such words. " Language.