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October 20 2010

In defense of descriptivism

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but… [d]o they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe.

A couple of years ago, Stephen Fry put together a glorious defense of descriptivism (audio). More recently, Matt Rogers rendered it as kinetic typography. The results are inspiring.

(via Laughing Squid)

September 06 2010

By any other name

You make two paper bags and put a rose in each… [Y]ou mark one of the bags “Rose” and the other bag, although it also has roses inside, you label “Mowed Grass”… Then you invite people to sniff each bag… They they have to rate how pleasant the smell is, how sweet the smell is… And it turns out that a rose by another name—Mowed Grass—does not smell as sweet. People overwhelmingly said that the bag marked rose smelled to them, sweeter.

NPR has a fantastic interview with Lera Boroditsky, in which she describes this and a few other experiments she and her students have performed. She’s also written How Does Language Shape the Way We Think?, which goes into more detail (though not about the rose experiment).

(via Lost in Translation)

August 29 2010

August 27 2010

June 25 2009

April 28 2009

Why you should have a Website
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