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POPSYour Brain On Words There is no one brain part which when taken away would suddenly rob you of your ability to read. We rely on the same old brain — the same brain that we inherited from our Homo Sapiens ancestors 200,000 years ago when they appeared in Africa. This means that the same brain that hunted wildlife and walked thru Ice Ages is the same brain that can now read a book a day.
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POPSWorld's Biggest Thesaurus Born His team began transcribing information from the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (OED) on to slips of paper. They plugged away for more than a decade, and disaster almost struck in 1978 when the building housing the only copy of their work caught fire. The entire building was gutted, but the slips remained intact because they were stored in metal filing cabinets. After that the slips were written in triplicate and stored in three different locations. As technology developed, the work in progress was microfilmed, and eventually computers were used.
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POPSPeople May be Able to Taste Words He and his co-author, Cesare Parise, tested 12 volunteers in trials during which an image flashed up on a screen at a slightly different time to one of two tones - one low-pitched and one high-pitched - being played. There were two sets of image: a large and a small black dot, or an angular and a very rounded shape, Dots of a certain size match tones of a certain pitch. People associate the low-pitched sound with the larger dot
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POPSJudging Honesty by Words, Not Fidgets In part, the work grows out of a frustration with other methods. Liars do not avert their eyes in an interview on average any more than people telling the truth do, researchers report; they do not fidget, sweat or slump in a chair any more often. They may produce distinct, fleeting changes in expression, experts say, but it is not clear yet how useful it is to analyze those. Nor have technological advances proved very helpful. No brain-imaging machine can reliably distinguish a doctored story from the truthful one, for instance; ditto for polygraphs, which track changes in physiology as an indirect measure of lying.
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POPSThe Web of Language But in 2004 the FCC started going after stations not just for repeated obscenity, but also for any single off-hand f-word, for example when Cher said of her critics during a Billboard Music Awards show, “So f*** ‘em,” or when Bono said during the Golden Globes, “This is really, really, f***ing brilliant.” Cable is not covered by the rule, nor are FBI wiretaps, so when Illinois ex-Gov. Blagojevich called his power to sell Pres. Obama’s vacated senate seat “f***ing golden,” his use of an expletive wasn’t illegal, though that proved to be the least of the indicted governor's problems.
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POPSPun For The Ages
Odds are that a restaurant with a punning name — Snacks Fifth Avenue, General Custard’s Last Stand — hasn’t acquired its first Michelin star. How have the great comic writers regarded puns? Jane Austen puns once, in “Mansfield Park,” and it serves to impeach the moral character of the offender. Mark Twain’s first book, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” enamored reviewers with its punlessness. There are “no contortions of words,” said a London paper. “His fun is entirely dependent upon the inherent humor in his writings.” The 20th century’s finest humorist, P. G. Wodehouse, doesn’t use them. Shakespeare, however, does. Many are bawdy: puns operate, after all, on double entendre. Yet the poet is guilty less of punning than wordplay, which Elizabethan taste considered more a sign of literary refinement than humor; hence “puns” in seemingly inappropriate places, like a dying Mercutio’s “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” The true punster’s mi
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POPSNine Words Women Use here - This is true, unless she says 'Thanks a lot', which is PURE sarcasm and she is not thanking you at all. DO NOT say 'you're welcome' - that will bring on No. 7). 7. Whatever: Is a woman's way of saying, "F-- YOU!" 8. Don't worry about it, I got it: Another dangerous statement, meaning this is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but is now doing it herself. This will later result in a man asking 'What's wrong?' For the woman's response refer to No. 4. 9. Nothing: This is the calm before the storm. This means something, and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with nothing usually end in "Fine". Send this link to the men you know, to warn them about arguments they can avoid if they remember the terminology. Send this link to all the women you know to give them a good laugh, because we know it's true! (Thanks to James for sending me this.)
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POPS'Oldest English Words' Identified The researchers used the university's IBM supercomputer to track the known relations between words, in order to develop estimates of how long ago a given ancestral word diverged in two different languages. They have integrated that into an algorithm that will produce a list of words relevant to a given date. "You type in a date in the past or in the future and it will give you a list of words that would have changed going back in time or will change going into the future," Professor Pagel told BBC News. "From that list you can derive a phrasebook of words you could use if you tried to show up and talk to, for example, William the Conqueror." That is, the model provides a list of words that are unlikely to have changed from their common ancestral root by the time of William the Conqueror.
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POPSThe Web of Language 4. The presidential election injected all sorts of words into our everyday speech, from maverick, hockey mom, Joe the plumber, and McCainiac to change, hope, postracial, and Obamalama. But after the election, these all faded away, and for those looking forward to Barack Obama's linguistic impact as well as his domestic and foreign policies, one commentator, after reviewing the meager language legacy of presidents Clinton and Bush, predicted that while the new president speaks with a silver tongue, he's not likely to do much more than rebrand the rhetoric of the previous administrations, coming up with his own versions of Bush's "No Child Left Behind" and "War on Terror," and Clinton's memorable phrase, "That depends on what the meaning of is is." Optimists moved by the president-elect's skilful ways with words are hoping for much more. Watch this space for an assessment next year of the language of the New Camelot's first 365 days.
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POPSHappy Birthday Noah Webster (Oct 16) Webster's suggestion of using "tung" instead of "tongue" didn't stick, though. Today Webster's name is synonymous with dictionaries and the date of his birth is observed as Dictionary Day. In his honor, this week we'll present words about words. As Webster said, "the process of a living language is like the motion of a broad river which flows with a slow, silent, irresistible current."
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POPSThe Analytic/Synthetic Distinction Synthetic statements are not necessary. Philosophers use the word contingent to describe something that is not necessary. It is not necessarily true that you are reading this webpage: you could be reading a printout, for example. It is important to make the analytic/synthetic distinction in argument. If you try to argue that something is true you need to be clear about whether you are saying something about the empirical world, or whether you are clarifying the meanings of words. It would do you no good for example to hunt for a bachelor who was married to try and refute the statement. It would be no help to you to try and find a "good murder" to refute the statement that all murder is bad, because murder is by definition bad.
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POPSAmbigram.Matic Type in your word then click go to get an instant ambigram! Note: hitting enter won't do it. Da Vinci Code fans unite!
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POPSWordsmith My favourite daily email, get a word a day in your in box. Try the anagram server!
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