english

I was pleased to learn from Current Archaeology #330 (p. 65) that Chris Catling shares my distaste for the habit scientists have recently picked up of prefixing their answers to interview questions with ”So...”. Q: Where did you find the new exciting fossil? A: So we found it in Mongolia. Q: How old is it? A: So it's from the Early Cretaceous. What annoys me about this isn't just that it's new. I know that us speakers change language over time. My irritation is down to the fact that I reserve ”So”, when used in this position in a phrase, for two other purposes. Either to mean ”thus, ergo, it…
Testing behemoth ETS announced a re-revised SAT for 2015, trying to stay one step ahead of its rival and the legions of teenagers who game standardized tests. Suggesting the vocabulary section was intended as "a proxy test for wide reading," Chad Orzel says memorizing obscure words is "dumb and pointless, but probably takes less time than getting a large vocabulary the 'right' way." Indeed, in the contemporary college prep atmosphere of clubs, sports, musical instruments, and hours of homework, who has time to read anyway? Even English students are likely to stick to SparkNotes (whose…
This is nice. Karl Eccleston and Fiona Pepper are amazingly good actors. The writing is excellent as is the directing. The subtext. THE SUBTEXT IS BRILLIANT. When I was living with the Efe Pygmies in the Ituri Forest, they would imitate French and English speakers while ranting about specific people who had annoyed or amused them. It was easy to tell which they were doing ... French vs. English. But it only sounded like people imitating people, it didn't sound like the real thing. I remember Sid Caesar doing this as part of his regular routine in several languages, and talking about…
"When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images." -Niels Bohr Although I may write to you exclusively in English, I am fully aware that around half of my readership comes from outside the United States, and that English is the first language of only about 40% of you. Like most Americans, I learned Spanish as my second language when I was in school, and then studied a few other in college, formally, and tried to pick up the language of any country I traveled to. But I am by no means fluent…
"So when the cat has got your tongue, there's no need for dismay! Just summon up this word and then you've got a lot to say! Pick out those eighteen consonants and sixteen vowels as well, And put them in an order which is very hard to spell..." -Supercalifragilisticexpialadocious, The Sherman Brothers There's something mysterious about foreign languages that we do not speak; the word barbarian comes from the ancient Greeks, who thought that the speech of the Medes and Persians sounded like "bar bar bar" to them. While we might be quick to dismiss such sounds as gibberish, Italian entertainer…
For the annals of humorous translation mistakes, this package from a digital antenna we bought last fall promises to . . . do something. I'm not sure what. For John O, who enjoys terrible advertising.
Most of us could easily distinguish between spoken English and French. But could you tell the difference between an English and a French speaker just by looking at the movements of their lips? It seems like a difficult task. But surprising new evidence suggest that babies can meet this challenge at just a few months of age. Young infants can certainly tell the difference between the sounds of different languages. Whitney Weikum and colleagues from the University of British Columbia decided to test their powers of visual discrimination. They showed 36 English babies silent video clips of…