The Educator's Notebook

language

Cambridge Dictionary’s Word Of The Year 2023: Hallucinate
Guardian - 11/15/23
“How ‘Blue’ And ‘Green’ Appeared In A Language That Didn’t Have Them”
MIT - 11/2/23
New Support For The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis That Language Can Shape Thought
Scientific American - 11/1/23

“All human brains are of course the same, Nordlinger emphasized. But when people are putting thoughts into words, their mental processes may be different, depending on the language they are using.”
“Latinos’ Views Of And Experiences With The Spanish Language”
Pew Research - 9/20/23
“Which Languages Take The Longest To Learn?”
Economist - 9/18/23

View remaining articles (172)

“The Early Days Of American English”
Lapham’s Quarterly - 9/15/23
How Hip-Hop Changed The Way We Speak, Focus On Five Words
New York Times - 8/9/23
Klingon, High Valyrian, Na’vi? Who Makes Up All These Languages?
Guardian - 7/7/23

“If a language offers clues to the culture of its speakers, then the experience of learning Game of Thrones’s High Valyrian on Duolingo conjures visions of a bustling historic civilisation in which owls stalk the skies, magic abounds, and the spectre of death forever haunts the imaginations of the living.”
Concrete Vs Abstract Language: When To Use Each And Why
Behavioral Scientist - 3/13/23

“While concrete language is great for increasing understanding, or for making complex topics easier to comprehend, when it comes to things like such as describing a company’s growth potential, abstract language is better, because while concrete language focuses on the tangible here and now, abstract language gets into the bigger picture.”
On Lakota, Grammar, And Reviving Lost Languages
New York Times - 3/2/23
Spoken Latin Is Making A Comeback
Smithsonian - 2/14/23
Revisiting Roget’s Thesaurus: It’s Much Deeper Than Synonyms
Austin Kleon - 2/7/23
Feeling Crambazzled? Case Of The Mubble-Fubbles? Here’s To Good Old Words.
CBC - 1/14/23
Are Accents Changing In America? Does That Happen?
Salon - 1/7/23
“Ancient Grammatical Puzzle Solved After 2,500 Years”
Phys - 12/14/22

“I had a eureka moment in Cambridge. After 9 months trying to crack this problem, I was almost ready to quit, I was getting nowhere. So I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer, swimming, cycling, cooking, praying and meditating. Then, begrudgingly I went back to work, and within minutes, as I turned the pages, these patterns starting emerging, and it all started to make sense. There was a lot more work to do but I'd found the biggest part of the puzzle.”
Five Different 2022 Words Of The Year
BuzzFeed - 12/6/22
OED 2022 Word Of The Year: “Goblin Mode”
New York Times - 12/4/22
“Y’all” Seems To Be Going Mainstream
The Conversation - 11/29/22
How Social Media Platforms Are Driving New Vocabulary
New York Times - 11/19/22
What Does A.I. Tell Us About Universal Grammar?
THE Conversation - 10/19/22
On Vocabulary, And Finding The Words To Say What We Mean
American Scholar - 9/28/22
An Animated History Of The Spanish Language
TED - 9/15/22
“Knowledge Of Foreign Languages Lasts A Lifetime”
York University - 8/25/22
What’s Up With English Spelling?
New York Times - 7/26/22
A Brief History Of Esperanto, The “Language of Peace”
Smithsonian - 7/26/22
How Sign Language Changes As The World Changes
New York Times - 7/26/22
Henry Louis Gates Jr. To Edit An Oxford Dictionary Of African American English
New York Times - 7/21/22

“A project of Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and Oxford University Press, the dictionary will not just collect spellings and definitions. It will also create a historical record and serve as a tribute to the people behind the words.”
“How Speaking Other Languages Changes Your Brain”
BBC - 7/20/22
Inside The OED Offices: How They Define Every Word
New Statesman - 6/22/22
McWhorter On Euphemism, Lingo, And Lexical Drift
New York Times - 5/24/22
Chimpanzees Have Their Own Language, Words, And Sentences
Salon - 5/22/22
“Inshallah” How An Arabic Phrase Spread All The Way To Presidential Debates
New York Times - 1/25/22
The Rhythmic Magic Of Meter
Psyche - 11/3/21
Bad Grammar, Or New Forms Of Expressiveness?
New York Times - 11/2/21
“Tutnese” - The Secret Language Of American Slaves - Returns On TikTok
NBC News - 8/16/21
John McWhorter Writes About Profanity
Literary Review - 8/1/21
“How Are Languages Formed?”
THE Conversation - 4/6/21
“It’s All Greek To Me” — In A Few Dozen Languages
Twitter - 2/4/21
The New Online Historical Dictionary Of Science Fiction
New York Times - 1/26/21
A Truly Amazing Tour Of U.S. Accents - And Their Linguistic Histories
YouTube/Wired - 1/21/21
“You”: People Are More Engaged When You Speak In The Second Person
PNAS - 11/23/20
Oxford 2020 Word Of The Year: They Couldn’t Pick Just One
New York Times - 11/22/20
Linguistics Experts Assess Modern Day Memes
JStor - 8/5/20
Language Began With Gesture, So Why Is It Now Mostly Speech?
Aeon - 7/24/20
On The Value Of Idioms. Especially With Swear Words.
JStor - 6/3/20
"The Search For New Words To Make Us Care About The Climate Crisis”
New Yorker - 2/21/20
“Garbage Language: Why Do Corporations Speak The Way They Do?”
Vulture - 2/20/20

“The meaningful threat of garbage language — the reason it is not just annoying but malevolent — is that it confirms delusion as an asset in the workplace.”
The NYT Spelling Bee: A Quick, Fun, Boggle-Like Word Game
Slate - 2/19/20
On The Cultural Force Of Black English (African American Vernacular English)
JStor - 2/12/20

“All along, while standard American English was busy convincing everyone that it was a superior dialect, it’s Black English that’s been a true cultural and linguistic force in contemporary society. Standard English is in fact deeply indebted to this so-called impoverished speech. It’s Black English that has left its mark on the popular culture we participate in, sliding seamlessly into the language of art, music, poetry, storytelling, and social media. Perhaps no other variety of speech has been quite so significant, innovative, and influential to the development of standard American English.”
A Visualization Of The 100 Most Spoken Languages In the World
WordTips - 2/1/20
Examining The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Behavioral Scientist - 1/9/20
College Publishes Tongue-In-Cheek List Of Words To Ban
Inside Higher Ed - 1/2/20

“The most nominated word or phrase for 2020 was quid pro quo.”
Google Interpreter Mode Comes To Phones”
Gizmodo - 12/12/19
“How Linguists Are Using Urban Dictionary”
JStor - 11/13/19
On Constructed Languages
Slate - 10/30/19
“How World Language Teaching Has Evolved”
Cult of Pedagogy - 9/29/19
Languages Differ In Speed, But Are Consistent In Information Density
Science - 9/4/19
Benjamin And Wittgenstein On How Words Have Meaning
Aeon - 9/3/19
A Deep Look At, Like, The Use Of The Word Of The Word “Like”
THE Conversation - 8/20/19

“To shed light on like’s grammar, I’ve built what is known in linguistics as a corpus. A corpus is a representative sample of language as used by certain speakers. We can then examine this corpus to understand how language is used – rather than relying on our perceptions, opinions and memories.”
Facts And Figures About Emojis
Quartz - 8/16/19
“Internet Slang Makes People Better Writers”
Atlantic - 8/10/19

“The only languages that stay unchanging are the dead ones.”
“How Carpe Diem Got Lost In Translation”
JStor - 8/7/19
A Tribute To The Semicolon
New Yorker - 7/15/19
Gopnik On Aphorisms
New Yorker - 7/15/19
Alfa-Bravo-Charlie: A Deep Dive Into The History Of The Phonetic Alphabet
Atlas Obscura - 7/12/19
Ecolinguistics: The Relationship Between Language And Environment
JStor - 7/10/19
A Striking Multimedia Experience About Preserving Indigenous Languages
Emergence Magazine - 7/8/19
“The Cryptic Language Of Non-Verbal Communication”
Medium - 6/25/19

“The feet are the most honest part of the body. If you’re not confident, you tend to turn them away, toward the exit.”
Some Efforts To Reconstruct The Sound Of Old English, Even Casual Speech
Open Culture - 6/7/19
“In Turkey, Keeping The Language Of Whistles Alive”
New York Times - 5/30/19
The Resurgence Of Tongva, The Original Language Of Where LA Is Today
LA Times - 5/9/19
“What You Can (And Can’t) Learn From A Language App”
New York Times - 5/4/19
Fleek, Baes, Baos: Scrabble Adds 2,800 New Words
Irish Times - 5/2/19
Adults Speaking Like Children Is Good For Language
Atlantic - 5/1/19
Merriam-Webster Adds 640 New Words
Merriam-Webster - 4/21/19
Winners Of The NYT Student 15 Second Vocabulary Video Contest
New York Times - 3/27/19
Is Direct Instruction Of Vocabulary Better Than Reading In Context?
Stephen Krashen - 3/21/19
Against Computer Code As A Foreign Language
New York Times - 3/17/19
"When Did The Verb ‘To Be’ Enter The English Language?”
JStor - 2/28/19
There Are Many, Still-Emergent Sign Languages
Digg - 2/26/19
How Google Translate Demonstrates Wittgenstein’s Theories On Language
Quartz - 2/13/19
MLA Reports Closure Of 651 Foreign Language Programs In 3 Years
Chronicle of Higher Education - 1/22/19
Doctor Has A Stroke, Then Can’t Stop Rhyming. Becomes Rap Legend.
Atlantic - 1/16/19

“Like many other survivors of stroke, he sometimes stuttered, and his speech became slurred. His personality also seemed to change. He suddenly became obsessed with reading and writing poetry. Soon Hershfield’s friends noticed another unusual side effect: He couldn’t stop speaking in rhyme. He finished everyday sentences with rhyming couplets.”
A Tribute To Old English, And Kennings
New York Times - 1/4/19
On Duolingo And Language Learning
Atlantic - 12/1/18
Comma Queen Returns: Let’s Get “Who” vs “Whom” Right [Grammar]
New Yorker - 11/23/18

“I have been avoiding this subject for months, because of an overwhelming feeling that in the current climate, actual and political, no one cares. But we have come to a sorry state when the news itself discourages us from caring about the way it’s conveyed.”
Oxford 2018 Word Of The Year: Toxic
New York Times - 11/14/18
Black Twitter Is The Biggest Source Of Linguistic Innovation In English
Quartz - 9/20/18
On Jargon, Synonyms, And The Vastness Of The English Language
JStor - 9/12/18
“They" As A Gender Neutral Pronoun. John McWhorter Chimes In
Atlantic - 9/4/18
"The Mystery Of People Who Speak Dozens Of Languages”
New Yorker - 9/3/18
Irony Poisoning: When Being Ironic Turns Into — Or Masks — Real Problems
New York Times - 8/23/18
A (Surprisingly Deep) Look At Alternatives To “Hey, Guys!”
Atlantic - 8/23/18
Another Punderful Review Of That Book About Pun Competitions
Economist - 8/10/18

"In New York a monthly event called Punderdome features jokesters with pseudonyms such as “Punder Enlightening”, “Jargon Slayer” and “Words Nightmare” who compete over the course of four increasingly absurd rounds.”
On The Surprising Virality Of False Etymologies
Atlantic - 8/2/18
“On The Unlikely Etymology Of ‘Orange’”
Literary Hub - 7/27/18

"Shakespeare knows the color orange; at least he knows its name. Chaucer doesn’t. Shakespeare’s sense of orange, however, is cautious. His orange exists only to brighten up tawny, a dark brown. Orange doesn’t make it as a color in its own right. It is always “orange tawny” for Shakespeare. He uses the word “orange” by itself only three times, and always he uses it to indicate the fruit.”
On The Global Spread Of The English Language
Guardian - 7/27/18
How Likely Is “Likely” or “Probably” or “Maybe”? Here Are The Numbers
Harvard Business Review - 7/3/18
A Brilliant Lecture By Arundhati Roy On Language And Translation
RAIOT - 6/28/18

“Writing screenplays—I wrote two—taught me to write dialogue. And it taught me economy. But then I began to yearn for excess… It was only after writing The God of Small Things that I felt the blood in my veins flow more freely. It was an unimaginable relief to have finally found a language that tasted like mine. A language in which I could write the way I think… Less than a year after The God of Small Things was published… I wrote my first political essay, “The End of Imagination.” My language changed, too. It wasn’t slow-cooked. It wasn’t secret, novel-writing language. It was quick, urgent, and public. And it was straight-up English.”
Three Types Of Constructed Languages: Gibberish, Consistent, Naturalistic [video]
YouTube/Slate - 5/30/18
"Verbing And Nouning Are Fine And Here’s A Quiz”
Stan Carey - 5/16/18
Using Nouns (Instead Of Verbs) Slows Us Down
New Yorker - 5/15/18
Is Gesture A Kind Of Universal Language?
Aeon - 5/14/18

“Some preliminary points are in order. A first is that the act of gesturing is certainly universal, as far as we know... A second preliminary point its that evidently not all gestures are universal.”
Start Languages Earlier For Greater Mastery
Economist - 5/10/18
Visualizing All The World’s Language Proportional To Population
Visual Capitalist - 5/5/18
At What Age Do Language Acquisition Skills Diminish?
Scientific American - 5/4/18
Ten Translators On What Makes A Good Translation
Scroll.In - 4/30/18
Practicing Speaking A 2nd Language Makes You Better At Understanding It…
University of Wisconsin-Madison - 4/11/18
How The Pervasiveness Of English Affects Us All In Small Ways
The Conversation - 4/3/18
Are Millennials Really Reinventing Language With Textspeak?
Mashable - 4/2/18
How Metaphor Changes Our Thought More Than Politics Does
Quartz - 3/31/18

“Emerging psychological research tells us that something as simple as a single metaphor can have consequences for how we think. They can also be powerful tools in the hands of those looking to shape our opinions.”
“Dumpster Fire” Enters The Merriam Webster Dictionary
Washington Post - 3/7/18
Merriam-Webster Adds 850 New Words in 2017, Including “Embiggen”
io9 - 3/5/18
Oxford Comma Dispute Settled For $5 Million
New York Times - 2/9/18

"Ending a case that electrified punctuation pedants, grammar goons and comma connoisseurs, Oakhurst Dairy settled an overtime dispute with its drivers that hinged entirely on the lack of an Oxford comma in state law. The dairy company in Portland, Me., agreed to pay $5 million to the drivers, according to court documents filed on Thursday.”
Who Knew That Lewis & Clark Added 1,000 Words To The Lexicon?
Atlas Obscura - 2/8/18
A Long Look At “The Shallowness Of Google Translate”
Atlantic - 1/30/18
Classics Instruction: What Colleges Can Learn From High Schools
Eidolon - 1/18/18
Dictionary Dot Com Word Of The Year Is “Complicit”
Washington Post - 11/27/17
Did Dumbiedykes Play Bizzumbaw? Harry Potter Translated To Scots
NPR - 11/23/17
A Reflection On The Pervasiveness Of English, And What That Means
LA Review of Books - 10/5/17
Language Grammar and Lexicons Evolve Separately
Phys - 10/2/17
The Dictionary Of American Regional English Comes To An End
New Yorker - 9/22/17
We Must Define “Violence” To Understand If Speech Is Violence
JStor - 8/30/17

"What, then, is the meaning of a word? If you were one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy students, this question would have occupied the preponderance of your term, as it did Wittgenstein’s academic life.”
Palimpsest: Ancient Parchment Yields More Ancient Poetry Beneath
Atlantic - 8/9/17
We Use Profanity In Print 28 Times As Much As In The 50s
Pacific Standard - 8/4/17
This Sign Language Is Representative, Not Symbolic
Nautilus - 6/20/17
The Starling Bureau: An Agency Of Literary Translators
World Literature Today - 6/6/17
Two Polyglots Meet Randomly, Converse In 15 Languages
YouTube - 6/5/17
A Short Look At The Linguistic Purpose Of Uptalk
Lifehacker - 5/31/17
Black English And The Ethics Of Language
New Yorker - 5/15/17
Language, Lies, Politics, And Meaning (Orwell Redux)
New York Review of Books - 5/13/17

"Using words to lie destroys language. Using words to cover up lies, however subtly, destroys language. Validating incomprehensible drivel with polite reaction also destroys language. This isn’t merely a question of the prestige of the writing art or the credibility of the journalistic trade: it is about the basic survival of the public sphere.”
Some Reflections On Learning Vocabulary Outside Of School
Science Journal - 5/3/17
A History Of A Wicked Awesome Word: “Wicked”
Merriam-Webster - 4/27/17
Cormac McCarthy On The Origins Of Language And The Unconscious
Nautilus - 4/20/17
3 Reasons To Learn A Second Language
Quartz - 4/13/17
The Second Most Popular Language In Each Country
Digg - 4/12/17
“A Journey Into The Merriam-Webster Word Factory”
New York Times - 3/22/17
Does Learning A Second Language Boost Empathy?
Fast Company - 3/2/17
Memoir Of A Lexicographer: Old English And Love
Longreads - 3/1/17
Oxford Dictionaries Add ‘Clicktivism’ ‘Otherize’ And More
Guardian - 2/24/17
Google Graphs And Charts 2016’s Top Word Searches
Google Trends - 1/26/17
An Amazonian Language Challenges Chomsky’s Universal Grammar
Aeon - 1/10/17
Jimmies Vs. Sprinkles, Wicked Vs. Hella: Maps Of Word Use
Quartz - 12/15/16
A Foray Into The Grammar Wars: Descriptive V. Prescriptive
Smart Set - 12/14/16
The Movie “Arrival,” Language, And The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Smithsonian - 12/2/16
What Is The Hardest Language? The Economist Explores…
Medium - 12/1/16
Language Evolves. Don’t Let (Linguistic) Ideology Hold You Back
Salon - 11/29/16
Revisiting The Brain Benefits Of Bilingualism
NPR - 11/29/16
On College Language Requirements: Keep Them, Please
Slate - 11/28/16
34 Surprising Reasons to Learn a 2nd Language, Prompted By Research
Custom-Writing - 11/16/16
Apparently We Order Consecutive Adjectives In A Very Specific Way
The Wire - 9/10/16
Chomsky’s Universal Grammar Seems To Be… Wrong.
Scientific American - 9/7/16
Meditation On Emojis As Language
Quartz - 8/31/16
A Deep Dive Into The Benefits Of Bilingualism
Digg - 8/8/16
Does Using Profanity Build Trust?
Quartz - 8/4/16
On The Efficiency Of Different Languages
Atlantic - 6/29/16
On The Death (And Birth?) Of Languages, And The Online Space
Priceonomics - 6/14/16
A Convoluted Reminder Of How Language Shapes Thought
Prospect Magazine - 3/24/16
Bilingualism May Have Benefits, But Science Struggles to Prove It
Atlantic - 2/10/16
#jesuiscirconflexe: French Schools Drop Accent From Many Words
CBC - 2/4/16
On The Pleasure Of Constructed Languages
JStor - 1/26/16
Jhumpa Lahiri: Writing In A New Language Changes Who You Are
New Yorker - 12/7/15
OED 2015 Word Of The Year… Is Not A Word…!
Oxford Dictionaries - 11/16/15
Map Of The Descent Of The Word “Two” In Indo-European Languages
Silly Linguistics - 11/14/15
“English Is Not Normal”: Origins And Stories Of A Crazy Language
Aeon - 11/13/15
Why We Have Such A Small Vocabulary For Smells
Atlantic - 11/6/15
World Languages: Here Are The Economic & Demographic Trends
Washington Post - 9/24/15
Oxford Dictionaries Add ‘Awesomesauce’ ‘Butt-Dial’ And More
Oxford Dictionaries - 8/27/15
“Netflix and Chill” Becomes Teen Euphemism: History Of A Meme
Fusion - 8/27/15
Ugh! Bah. Ay! How Non-Words Span Languages
Quartz - 7/31/15
The Emergence of Brand New Words Can Be Tracked On Twitter
Quartz - 7/29/15
What Do Brain Scans Tell Us About Learning A 2nd Language?
Guardian - 9/4/14
Why “Mor” Is Such An Evil Sound. (It’s More Than Just “Death”)
The Week - 3/12/14
Mispronunciation: How the English Language Has Evolved
Guardian - 3/11/14
Infographic: Word Origins in the English Language Over Time
Slate - 3/10/14
MIT Media Lab Maps Human Emotion Through Gifs
Quartz - 3/10/14
An Animated History Of The English Language
YouTube/Open University - 11/8/11

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