Archive for the 'Linguistics' Category
There are good reasons for saying hello
Posted on March 2, 2010 - Filed Under Linguistics | Leave a Comment
Flannel and tight jeans enthusiast Charles Hagman sent this article my way on why you should always start a phone call with “Hello” or another recognizable word with one or more vowels. The gist of it is that vowels are relative. The “a” sound that we produce is understood as a tone that is made [...]
The Power of Words
Posted on February 13, 2010 - Filed Under Linguistics | 1 Comment
An NYT/CBS Poll recently asked people all over the country their opinions on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and got surprising results. It turns out that a great deal of people support gay men and lesbian women in the military, but far less support homosexuals joining the military. What?
The wording of the question proved to make [...]
Agatha Christie
Posted on December 15, 2009 - Filed Under Linguistics | Leave a Comment
Neato study here gang. A bunch of Computational Linguistics over at the University of Toronto, oh I’ve lost you? Whatever. Some guys scanned some works over the range of Christie’s career, from the age of 28 to 82, and made some generalizations about the phrases she uses and her vocabulary. Here is the data in [...]
Lego nomenclature
Posted on December 10, 2009 - Filed Under Linguistics | 1 Comment
Hey gang. I am still ebullient from this morning’s Festivus Miracle. Nimby is sleeping it off. I actually just got back from a walk because I needed to clear my head. Anyways, this is an old article, but my inner linguist can’t let it go. Remember when you had that big box of random legos, [...]
