Texting is “miraculous”: 6 ways we are redefining communication John McWhorter asks us to think of texting less as “written language” and more as “fingered speech.” Photo: James Duncan Davidson Texting is not a blight on the English language, says linguist John McWhorter in today’s talk, given at TED2013. Rather, texting is a “miraculous thing”: a novel linguistic mode that’s redefining the way we communicate with each other — for the better. John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. If we think of texting as “fingered speech,” as McWhorter puts it, it also opens our eyes to texting’s distinct linguistic rules, structures and nuances. As the mediums through which we communicate quickly multiply, our modes of communication are following suit. Like “lol,” hashtags started out with a literal function: making topics easy to tag, and thus search for, on Twitter. John McWhorter was a part of TED’s worldwide talent search, giving a shorter version of his talk at the New York stop of the tour.
Twitter shows language evolves in cities - tech - 17 November 2012 WHERE do new words come from? On Twitter at least, they often begin life in cities with large African American populations before spreading more widely, according to a study of the language used on the social network. Jacob Eisenstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and colleagues examined 30 million tweets sent from US locations between December 2009 and May 2011. Several new terms spread during this period, including "bruh", an alternative spelling of "bro" or "brother", which first arose in a few south-east cities before eventually hopping to parts of California. Residents of Cleveland, Ohio, were the first to use "ctfu", an abbreviation of "cracking the fuck up", usage that has since spread into Pennsylvania (arxiv.org/abs/1210.5268). After collecting the data, the team built a mathematical model that captures the large-scale flow of new words between cities. New Scientist Not just a website! More From New Scientist Promoted Stories What is 64-Bit Mobile Computing?
Grexit, drachmail and eurogeddon - the new eurozone words As the eurozone crisis consumes billions of pounds and leaves people fearing for their jobs, it has given people one thing - a totally new vocabulary. MP David Miliband has already warned us of drachmageddon - the chaos which would be caused to us all by the return of the former Greek currency. That then leads us to drachmail - the term coined by our own Economics Editor Faisal Islam, which describes Greece's attempts to secure a better deal from its concerned Euro partners, anxious to save the world from a euro collapse. If the worst comes to the worst, we could have a Grexodus or Grexit which would see the departure of Greece from the euro currency. Italy is also feared to be the next troubled country to leave the single currency - which would make it Quitaly. And what if the entire single currency system collapses? The best Channel 4 News can muster today from its own ranks is "Cont-aegean" - but an you come up with any new terms to describe the euro-crisis?
'Hobbitses' and Frankenstein: how pop culture's words become official | Kory Stamper | Comment is free Water cooler conversation at a dictionary company tends towards the odd. A while ago I was chatting with one of my colleagues about our respective defining batches. "I'm not sure," he said, "what to do about the plural of 'hobbit'. There are some citations for 'hobbitses', but I think they may be facetious uses. I did: "We enter 'hobbit' into the dictionary?" Pop culture is a goldmine of neologisms, and science fiction and fantasy is one rich seam that has been contributing to English for hundreds of years. Don't be surprised. Which brings us to the familiar and more modern era of sci-fi and fantasy, ones filled with tricorders, lightsabers, dark lords in fiery mountain fortresses, and space cowboys. All fields have their own vocabulary and, as often happens, that vocabulary is often isolated to that field. In some cases, the people who gave us the word aren't keen to see it taken outside of its intended world and used with an extended meaning.
How emoji became the first truly global language | Technology | The Observer Emoji: growing in complexity all the time. I sent one this morning. My pal texted to say that she was in that most invidious of contemporary social tangles: someone was offering her a Kate Bush spare but she had already committed herself elsewhere. Me, I was busy thinking about emoji. I didn't have time to deal with someone else's heartache or their moral scruples vis-a-vis ditching an apparently iron-clad prior engagement. Obviously, I could have replied simply: "AAAARGH!!!". But my timid scrunch-face puts me so behind the curve that I might as well start training carrier pigeons. Want to make yourself feel slightly nauseous and utterly baffled? All of which brings us a very long way from the end of the last millennium, when Japanese teenagers started using emoji on their pagers (the word itself consists of e-, picture, mo-, writing, ji, character). Beyoncé (feat.
War of the words: the global conflict that helped shape our language | Mind your language | Media War: the mother of invention. The phrase (a tweak of the proverb “necessity is the mother of invention”) refers to military technology. But a new book demonstrates how it is also true of language. The Word at War: World War Two in 100 Phrases is by Philip Gooden and Peter Lewis, who brought us the fascinating Idiomantics – a thrill-a-page tour of international idioms. Next year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the second world war. The neologisms with which the second world war enriched our language range from the utilitarian to the racy: “The heightened conditions of warfare provide a boost to the human propensity to use jargon, slang and bad language,” the authors say. Spam is a portmanteau of “spiced ham” and, developed in 1937, became popular warfare tucker for the ration-starved masses owing to its long shelf life. The second world war is also responsible for the mugs, tea towels and numerous other souvenirs telling us to Keep Calm and Carry On.
The Linguistics of LOL - Britt Peterson Post Typography When two friends created the site I Can Has Cheezburger?, in 2007, to share cat photos with funny, misspelled captions, it was a way of cheering themselves up. To a linguist, all of this sounds a lot like a sociolect: a language variety that’s spoken within a social group, like Valley Girl–influenced ValTalk or African American Vernacular English. Like lolspeak, other Internet sociolects tend to start as a game or a kind of insider-y one-upmanship, then snowball in complexity. Because online sociolects develop so quickly, and leave such an extensive record, they offer linguists a chance to observe linguistic change with a precision that would be impossible for an oral dialect. Community: Hackers and wannabes (n00bs) trying to disguise their bulletin-board messages in the 1980s; gamers in the ’90s Features: Words deliberately disguised via alternate characters (1337 to write “elite”; plurals ending in z); suffixes like xor and ness Example: “Wow.
WMDs, RGPs, DHS: how the Iraq war transformed the English language | Kory Stamper War leaves indelible marks on our language. How could it be otherwise? Turn on the news anytime in the last 10 years and you were greeted with an alphabet soup of RPGs, UAVs, DHS and the ubiquitous (until we couldn't find them) WMDs. Open the paper, and you'd have to pick your way through the minefield of "sectarian violence", "collateral damage" and "enhanced interrogation techniques". Call your cousin or your mother and the conversation ebbs and flows with "surge" and "drawdown". Lexicographers, too, spent time listening, reading, watching and tracking the words of the Iraq war. Major events spawn new words to talk about those events, and you get an interesting overview of the Iraq war when you survey new dictionary entries in chronological order. Of course, lexicographers base new entries on the full range of a word's edited, public use; that is, a word's reported use. There was one startling, enduring lookup that no one could have predicted: "democracy". It showed.
100 words that define the First World War The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) World War I timeline shows some of the ways in which the events of the First World War left their mark on the English language. For example, the wet and muddy conditions of the first winter of trench warfare were evoked in the term Flanders mud (November 1914), while trench boots and trench coats (both December 1914) were invented to cope with these conditions. By early 1915 the physical and psychological effects of trench warfare were being felt: both trench foot and shell shock are first recorded in January 1915. One linguistically important event was the involvement of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli (1915), which led to the coinage or spread of terms such as Anzac (April 1915), Aussie (1915 as a noun), and the Anzacs’ affectionate term for a British soldier, choom (June 1916). The timeline also highlights developments in military technology, such as the introduction of the tank in 1916.
Super Storm Sandy and Candy Crush Have Changed the English Language actuallythink With so much of our communication happening online, computer scientists now have more resources than ever for tracking when and how a word's meaning changes. While it's unlikely that one person can shift a meaning alone—like poor Gretchen, trying so badly to get “fetch” to happen—sometimes single events or new products can cause a word's meaning to shift. For example, when Hurricane-turned-Super Storm Sandy hit, it moved more than just the beach at Fire Island. Researchers at Stony Brook University have been working out how to best track when and how the meaning of words shifts, and are drawing from some familiar sources. To do any of these things, though, the research drew from decades of computer science. “Part of speech detection is a classical problem in natural language processing (NLP),” said Steven Skiena, the Stony Brook computer science professor who worked on the project. Image: Steven Skiena/Stony Brook
Who, What, Why: What is thundersnow? 14 January 2015Last updated at 07:18 ET Magazine Monitor A collection of cultural artefacts Thundersnow has been reported in parts of the UK. What exactly is this dramatic-sounding weather event? First there was the frostquake. Basically, it is the same as a thunderstorm, except that snow falls instead of rain. Continue reading the main story The answer Like a thunderstorm, except snow is produced instead of rain Brighter, but less noisy, than a typical thunderstorm It can look more spectacular than a normal electric storm. Thunderstorms are more likely to occur in warm, humid conditions and during the summer. Reporting by Jon Kelly
English language is changing faster than ever, research reveals • How 2014 became the year of the emoji (tiny aubergine anyone?) And 'fear of missing out' - commonly abbreviated to 'FOMO' - also leaves parents scratching their heads. The study was led by the English language expert Professor John Sutherland was commissioned to mark the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S6 phone. The results point to a seismic generational gap in how we use and understand modern informal text speak while also suggesting older style abbreviations and acronyms such as TXT are now so old they are considered antiquated by the younger generation. The poll found that 86 per cent of all British parents think teenagers speak an entirely different language on social media and mobile messaging. The top 10 also featured the popular Instagram term TBT (Throw Back Thursday), used for posting old images on the social media network, alongside the phrase 'Thirsty' used to describe people who are looking for attention. • Do you understand text-speak?
You Won’t Believe What Word This Column Is About! What happens when a dictionary adds the word “clickbait” to its pages and publicizes the news with a bit of clickbait? Last week, Merriam-Webster said it had added 1,700 new entries to its Unabridged Dictionary. It defined “clickbait,” one of the words featured, as “something (such as a headline) designed to make readers want to click on a hyperlink, especially when the link leads to content of dubious value or interest.” And in a move that poked fun at the conventions of clickbait itself, Merriam-Webster shared a link to the announcement on Twitter with the come-on, “You won’t believe what we just added to the dictionary!” (Other additions include “emoji,” “meme” and “jegging.”) Not everyone was amused. But neologisms like “clickbait” show how English continues to reinvent itself—even if one objects to the cultural practice that “clickbait” labels. The two parts of the word, “click” and “bait,” have been with us for many centuries. “Bait” has long worked well in slangy compound words.