In linguistics, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis claims that language affects thought.

The hypothesis postulates that language influences the habitual thought of its speakers: that different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of perfectly representing the world with language, because it implies that the mechanisms of any language condition the thoughts of its speaker community.

{ Sapir–Whorf hypothesis | Wikipedia }

Faced with pictures of odd clay creatures sporting prominent heads and pointy limbs, students at Carnegie Mellon were asked to identify which “aliens” were friendly and which were not.

The students were not told that the aliens fell naturally into two groups, although the differences were subtle and not easy to describe.

Some had somewhat lumpy, misshapen heads. Others had smoother domes. After students assigned each alien to a category, they were told whether they had guessed right or wrong, learning as they went that smooth heads were friendly and lumpy heads were not.

The experimenter, Dr. Gary Lupyan, added a little item of information to one test group. He told the group that previous subjects had found it helpful to label the aliens, calling the friendly ones “leebish” and the unfriendly ones “grecious,” or vice versa.

When the participants found out whether their choice was right or wrong, they were also shown the appropriate label. All the participants eventually learned the difference between the aliens, but the group using labels learned much faster. Naming, Dr. Lupyan concluded, helps to create mental categories.

The finding may not seem surprising, but it is fodder for one side in a traditional debate about language and perception, including the thinking that creates and names groups.

In stark form, the debate was: Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world?

The latest research changes the framework, perhaps the language of the debate, suggesting that language clearly affects some thinking as a special device added to an ancient mental skill set. Just as adding features to a cellphone or camera can backfire, language is not always helpful. For the most part, it enhances thinking. (…)

Language also has a significant role in seeing and remembering where objects are in space. Dr. Dedre Gentner at Northwestern and her colleagues conducted experiments on the spatial reasoning of hearing children and children who “home-sign.”

Home-signers have hearing parents, but they are congenitally deaf and have never been taught a sign language. The gestural language they develop is invented solely by themselves. (…)

The children were shown two side-by-side boxes. Internally, each box was divided in three. In each space was a card.

During each trial, the experimenter took a card from the first box and showed the child that it had a special star on the back. Replacing it in the first box in the same space, the experimenter asked the child to find where the special card would be in the second box. Essentially, the children were asked to map the position of the target card in the first box to the same position in the second.

The researchers found that children without words for spatial relationships, whether young or home-signers, had much more trouble finding the special card in the second box than older hearing children who had learned the relevant words.

For young hearing children, exposure to spatial language in the experiment strongly influenced the success rate. If the experimenter used spatial terms when speaking to a child, saying, “I’m putting the card in the top” (or “middle” or “bottom”), as opposed to, “I’m putting the card here,” the children were much likelier to find the correct spot in the second box.

The effect lasted not just through the experiment, but until at least two days later, when the children were retested.

“By giving us a framework for marshaling our thoughts, language does a lot for us,” Professor Gentner said. “Because spatial language gives us symbols for spatial patterns, it helps us carve up the world in specific ways.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Rominita }

13,000 people talk Anal (mostly in India and Myanmar). Not to be confused with Anus language, spoken in Indonesia.

It’s a genuine pleasure to address the Virginia Association of Economists here at Washington and Lee University on an important issue in monetary policy.

Some of you may be wondering about the meaning of my speech title — “Comfort Zones, Shmumfort Zones.” Well, putting the “shm” before a word is a way to cast a bit of skepticism on it. Thus, if your friend tells you that you are “fancy, shmancy,” then you might be overdressed for the occasion. And if you exclaim, “Email, shmemail!” then you’ve just found your inbox overloaded.

Of course, there’s also a significant distinction between the expressions “shlemiel” and “shlimazel,” but that’s more-advanced material that I will defer until another speech.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

photo { Andy Warhol and Joan Collins, 1984 | Zwirner & Wirth }

Is “bullshit,” then, a synonym for “lie”? Not exactly. Frankfurt asks us to consider an anecdote told about Ludwig Wittgenstein wherein the great philosopher phones a friend named Fania Pascal who’s just had her tonsils removed. How are you, Wittgenstein asks. Like a dog that’s been run over, Pascal answers. Wittgenstein then replies testily, “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.” In effect, Frankfurt argues, Wittgenstein is suggesting that Pascal is spouting bullshit. (A more reasonable person, Frankfurt concedes, would reach the charitable conclusion that Wittgenstein’s friend is merely expressing herself through the use of allusive or at worst hyperbolic language.) (…)

Is Pascal lying? No. She isn’t trying to deceive Wittgenstein about how she really feels, and she isn’t trying to deceive Wittgenstein about how a dog would feel if run over. Her error, Frankfurt concludes, isn’t that she conducted a faulty inquiry into how a dog would feel if run over, but that she conducted no inquiry at all (in this case, because none is possible).”It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit.”

{ Slate | Continue reading }

L’esprit d’escalier (literally, stairway wit) is a French term that describes the predicament of thinking of the right comeback too late. Originally a witticism of Denis Diderot, the French encyclopedist, in his Paradoxe sur le Comédien.

The phrase can be used to describe a riposte to an insult, or any remark that comes to mind too late to be useful—when one is on the “staircase” leaving the scene.

The nearest English expression would be “being wise after the event”.

{ wikipedia }

To grass someone or to grass someone up means to report them and their activities to the police. While the expression is almost completely unknown in North America, in Britain and Australia no explanation is needed in the press and on televised police dramas.

There’s also a noun, grass, a person who tattles, and supergrass, someone who tattles so much that criminal empires crumble.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, grass is a shortening of grasshopper, which a hundred years ago was current rhyming slang for copper, meaning police.

However, it could also be rhyming slang for shopper, meaning a person who trades information to the police in exchange for favours. To shop someone to the police means to offer up evidence of their wrongdoing.

{ The Lexicographer’s Rules | Continue reading }

Just seven years ago, climate change wasn’t listed as a potential hazard in Threatened Birds of the World. Now it gets its own heading in the annual book, and with good reason: a new study finds that climate change may trigger the extinction of 30 percent of land bird species by the year 2100. (…)

Using the elevation of species’ ranges, the newest suite of climate predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a set of habitat-loss scenarios, the researchers calculated the extinction risk of more than 8400 species of land birds in the world. In the most likely outcome—a rise of 2.8 degrees Celsius by the turn of the century, according to the IPCC—400-550 birds could go extinct. If temperatures climb even more, that number would increase drastically.

This is due in part to what the researchers call the “escalator effect.” Climate change can cause range shifts as species are forced to leave their current locations when conditions become inhospitable. The most familiar of these shifts are poleward—things in the northern hemisphere move north, and things in the southern hemisphere head south. But on a climate escalator, species that live at higher altitudes may have nowhere to go but up. And up. And up some more, until they reach the highest point available to them. Once that’s topped, there’s often nowhere for them to go but extinct.

{ Conservation Magazine | Continue reading }

illustration { Charley Harper }

The word pimp is of unknown origin. It first appeared in English around 1600 and was used then as now to mean “a person who arranges opportunities for sexual intercourse with a prostitute.” The figurative meaning, “a person who panders to an undesirable or immoral impulse,” was found by the middle of the 17th century. The verb to pimp dates from the early 17th century.

But the word has seen a renaissance of sorts, with a strong increase in use in recent years. Media attention to (and glamorization of) the stereotype of the inner-city pimp brought such terms as pimpmobile and pimp walk—an ostentatious swagger affected chiefly by African-American men—to public attention in the 1970s. More recently, we’ve seen the advent of a range of benign figurative uses. We can now pimp our possessions, making them flashily decorated or customized, a use mainstreamed by MTV’s car-detailing show, Pimp My Ride. An attractive or appealing man may be called a pimp, and this is viewed as a positive description. To describe something using the accolade pimping is to mark it as wonderful or exciting. Jay-Z’s 2001 hit “Big Pimpin’” used the term as shorthand for a livin’-large lifestyle.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

…saying “goodbye.” In the 1980s, “I’m out of here” became “outta here” which became the interjection “audi,” spelled after the car brand, and, therefore, sometimes rendered as “Audi 5000.” Although it’s a bit old-fashioned, some folks still use it where “so long!” might have been used in the 1940s.

In the 1960s, you might have said, “I’m gonna jet” meaning “I’m going to leave.”

In the 1980s, “to blaze” was another way of saying that you’re leaving. Like “audi” and “jet” you still hear it from time to time. It may never be very popular, though, because its space is blocked. A newer, more common meaning for “to blaze” has arisen: “to smoke marijuana.”

And that’s just as well. One of the key traits of slang—what distinguishes it from standard English, from jargon, and from simple humorous wordplay—is its synonymy. (…)

Slang doesn’t need “to blaze” to say “to leave.” It has, for example, “to bounce” with the same meaning. “Roll” is another one. “We’re done here. Let’s roll.” (…)

…a term for “drunk”—”tore up” or “torn up.” My colleague Connie Eble at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, collects slang from her students every semester. “Tore up” appears on her list from autumn 2006, defined as “extremely drunk,” and given with the synonyms “plastered,” “smashed,” “trashed,” and “wasted.”

Yet, that term was already in use in the 1950s.

“Bomb,” as in “to fail an examination,” is also on the 2006 list, yet dates to the early 1960s. “To bone someone” meaning to have sex with them, which dates to at least as early as the 1970s, is also on the minds of young people in 2006. I wonder if those students know they’re using slang that is older than they are?

{ The Lexicographer’s Rules | Continue reading }

Spurius Carvilius Ruga (possibly 230 BC) was a freedman living in Rome who allegedly invented the letter G. His invention would have been quickly adopted in the Roman Republic because the letter C was, at the time, confusingly used both for the /k/ and /g/ sounds. Ruga was also the first man in recorded history to open a private elementary school.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

related { Gucci unveiled its largest store in the world }

previously { Man created a fake ad for Gucci using a photo of himself, asked the Swiss weekly SonntagsZeitung to run it and to send the $50,000 bill to Gucci }

cgi { Ora-ito’s Gucci Villa, 2004 }

MORE »