‘Basic’: the biggest insult of 2015
You know what it means to call someone “basic”, right? You are basic if you pride yourself on possessions or preferences that you consider to be cool or aspirational, but which are in fact commonplace or obvious. Being basic is liking what it is typical to like.
On the evening of Sunday 7 June, an easyJet flight from Bodrum, Turkey landing at Luton airport was met by police who escorted passenger Kate Moss from the plane for disruptive behaviour. The internet discussed little else for days, for this was a story with many talking points.
Kate Moss flies easyJet, for a start. Kate Moss carries vodka in her handbag (allegedly). And controversy: was Moss throwing her weight around on the flight, demanding attention from the crew because of her celebrity? Or did easyJet throw the rulebook at Moss because she was a woman in the public eye who had had a few drinks?
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How to transliterate to Tamil script
The Tamil transliterator is a tool I developed to enable me to convert Tamil written in the Roman alphabet into Tamil script.
Some understanding of the Tamil sound system will help you to use the tool. It is important to note that, although you are using the Roman alphabet, you must use the letters in accordance with the pronunciation key provided with the tool – which largely corresponds with international phonetic rules.
Young women, give up the vocal fry and reclaim your strong female voice
What’s heartbreaking about the trend for destructive speech patterns is that yours is the most transformational generation – you’re disowning your power.
This article is from theguardian.com by Naomi Wolf
Patriarchy is inventive. The minute a generation of women has figured out how to not be enslaved by Ideology A, some new cultural pressure arises in the form of Internalisation B, making sure they don’t get too far too fast. The latest example: the most empowered generation of women ever – today’s twentysomethings in North America and Britain – is being hobbled in some important ways by something as basic as a new fashion in how they use their voices. Read more →
Hearing words, writing sounds: examining the author’s brain
This article is from theguardian.com by Richard Lea.
The novelist Kamila Shamsie measures out her life as an author in chapters, punctuated by a familiar ritual.
“Usually at the end of writing every chapter I’ll print out and read aloud,” she says. It’s something she’s been doing since university, she continues, citing the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali, who told her “there are things the ears pick up which the eyes don’t”. As she sits on the lookout for repeated words, unexpected clunks or unwanted dissonances, it “feels like listening”.
“I don’t know how to say that any better. It’s about the sound of the sentences.” After years of “developing your ear for the sounds of language” she doesn’t have to think about “why a particular clump of syllables sounds wrong to my ear. I just know that it does.” Read more →
The World’s Most Spoken Languages And Where They Are Spoken
This post is from http://www.iflscience.com/ by Morenike Adebayo
This beautifully illustrated infographic, designed by South China Morning Post’s graphics director Alberto Lucas Lopéz, shows the most spoken known languages in the world and where they’re spoken by the 6.3 billion people included in the study. Read more →
Did Wittgenstein use silly points to make profound ones?
Fiddle, fish, fence, flick, grope, glance, poke, prod, nurdle, tickle, turn, squirt, biff, bash, slash, smash … just a few of the options open to a batsman. No wonder the philosopher of language and cricket fan was impressed.
This article is from theguardian.com by James Gingell.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, it is said, loved cricket. Curious, perhaps, for such a famously serious Austrian to have affection for so trivial and English a game, but I have a theory as to why. Read more →
Vape is the new selfie: what the 2014 word of the year says about our times
Oxford Dictionaries has crowned ‘vape’ word of the year, with ‘normcore’ and ‘contactless’ as runners-up. But what do these choices tell us about who we are – and where we’re going?
This article is from theguardian.com by Steven Poole.
Lindsay Lohan, Katy Perry, Barry Manilow and Ronnie Wood all do it, and now it’s Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year. Vape: to suck on an electronic cigarette. If you vape, you are a “vaper” (for obvious reasons, no one thought “vapist” was a good idea); and the act of doing so – perhaps in a “vaporium” – is “vaping”. (In fact, “vaping” was coined as long ago as 1983, when such devices were as yet a pipe-dream.)
Associated vape-vocab noticed by Oxford includes “e-cigarette”, “e-juice” (the nicotinous liquid inside), and the pleasing retrospective formation “tobacco cigarette”, so people will know what you mean when referring to what used to be just a “cigarette”. Technically, this is called a retronym, as when people began to say “landline” when mobile phones were invented; or when restaurants began to offer “hen’s eggs” once foodists had moved on to scoffing the eggs of ostriches and probably ants. Read more →
‘Lost’ first languages leave permanent mark on the brain, new study reveals
MRI scans show Chinese babies adopted by French-speaking Canadian families retain ‘unconscious’ knowledge of their mother tongue.
This article is from theguardian.com by Holly Young.
“Lost” first languages leave a permanent mark on the brain, a report this week has found. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in the US, challenges the existing understanding that exposure to a language in the first year of a child’s life can be “erased” if he or she is moved to a different linguistic environment.
The study showed that Chinese children, adopted at 12 months to French-speaking families in Canada, responded to Chinese tones, despite having no conscious understanding of the language. Read more →
English is not the lingo of the successful British exporter
Our reluctance to learn other languages is not just arrogant: it’s holding back the UK’s economic performance.
This article is from theguardian.com by Katie Allen.
As François Hollande reshuffled the French cabinet last week, he was handed a report warning of hundreds of thousands more job losses. For a president grappling with political crisis and record unemployment it will have made grim bedtime reading after a day spent revamping his government for the second time this year.
The warning came from Jacques Attali, former special economic adviser to François Mitterrand, who had been asked by Hollande to look into ways the global reach of the French language could help drag the country out of its economic quagmire. Read more →
