Embiggening the role of a playful neolexeme. On Language - We. Actress Emma Thompson attacks use of sloppy language. 28 September 2010Last updated at 12:23 Emma Thompson also rules out ever having plastic surgery, saying it is 'dysfunctional' Actress Emma Thompson has spoken out against the use of sloppy language.
The 51-year-old Oscar winner told the Radio Times that people who did not speak properly made her feel "insane". She said: "We have to reinvest, I think, in the idea of articulacy as a form of personal human freedom and power. " Ms Thompson added that on a visit to her old school she told pupils not to use slang words such as "likes" and "innit". Cursebird, all the swearing on Twitter. 27 September '10, 11:05pm Follow Cursebird is a site that shows you all the swearing on Twitter.
Nothing special you might say but they revamped the site and it’s worth to take a look at. The Index of Banned Words (The Continually Updated Edition) Linguistic border security – Fully (sic) James McElvenny writes: Let me start this post by quoting scripture, a first for this godless heathen blog.
The passage is Judges 12:5-6, where the Gileadites have beaten the Ephraimites in battle and are guarding the River Jordan to make sure no surviving Ephraimites can flee back into their homeland. When a Ephraimite refugee asks to be let across the river, the Gileadite soldier asks him to say the word shibboleth, which is Hebrew for “ear of corn”. The gender-neutral pronoun: grammatical necessity, consciousness raiser, and after 150 years still an epic fail, The Web of Language. Entry for 'thon' in Webster's Second New International Dictionary, 1934 Every once in a while some concerned citizen decides to do something about the fact that English has no gender-neutral pronoun.
They either call for such a pronoun to be invented, or they invent one and champion its adoption. Wordsmiths have been coining gender-neutral pronouns for a century and a half, all to no avail. Gender-neutral pronouns: Ne doesn't like tem zeeself. Ant synonyms and linguistics envy. Why dictionaries don’t supply meaning : Miller on communication. At the moment, I am taking a (temporary) break from my furious critiquing of peer review, and have begun working busily on a new series about the workings of human languages.
Writing about this is for a general audience is hard, particularly because I suspect that many people have unexamined intuitive views about language that might be very different from the view I am trying to put forth. Additionally, if you're a linguist, an analytic philosopher, or a psychologist studying language, you will likely have a long-held world view that my writings may challenge.
(It's all rather intimidating, really...) But in any case, one of the serious puzzles that I'll be piecing together in upcoming posts is how on earth we are able to communicate about the wonderful complexity of the world through a noisy, lo-fi channel (speech). Some of the most important questions I'll be asking are : How do we understand what someone means through words?
First) We think of words as having meanings. Quick Note. That Mitchell and Webb Look Series 4 - Episode 1 (Grammar Nazi) ‘Chairperson’ and English lexiculture « Glossographia. In the dark days before there were searchable databases of virtually everything, it was hard to know where exactly to look for early attestations of words.
It wasn’t just blind luck, but one’s preconceptions really did strongly influence where one was likely to look, and thus where one was likely to find such things. So, for instance, the word chairperson is dated in the OED and other sources to 1971, presumably because the lexicographers who first thought to look for it saw it as the product of second-wave (1960s-70s) feminism. At the time, that assumption was reasonable enough. But chairperson isn’t just some ordinary word – rather, it’s a word about which a lot of words have been written, largely negative. 1971 Israel Shenker, ‘Is it Possible for a Woman to Manhandle the King’s English?’ Now, to step back a moment: And then we found chairperson. Conversations really DO take two. You've all heard it takes two to tango.
And it certainly takes two (or more) to argue. And now, apparently it really does take two to have a conversation. Stephens et al. "Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication" PNAS, 2010. We know that real verbal communications requires both a speaker and a listener (often they go back and forth, but not always). The scientists for this study decided to look at this by having two separate people in an MRI. fMRI, or functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, is a technique that scans a persons brain and detects changes in the BOLD signal. The scientists used the fMRI to show what parts of the speakers and listeners brains were more active during speaking and listening. What you can see here is the overlap between activation of a speaker and a listener.