What was that again?

Warning: this post wanders across the gamut of language and grammar.

We use language everyday, often to communicate something to someone.  Yet relatively few treat the language they use as a skill to be developed, honed, and sharpened.  Then there's texting and internet speak vs. writing.  (To look up grammar questions, I like Grammar Girl.)

Why is grammar important?  Without it you can get this:

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unhealthy, Grammar Fails #5, Meme Center

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unhealthy, Grammar Fails #3, Meme Center

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readingisfun, Grammar, Meme Center

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Oh, and don't forget globalization (channel is Smoukahontas Official) ... 

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In closing, here's an interesting discussion: What Will Globalization Do to Languages?

 -- Marge

Twitter: soundless sound, meaning evolving

Tomas Castelazo, "Birds on the wire," Wikimedia

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Linguists are finding untold treasure in the twitterings of Twitter.

According to an article (subscription needed) in TIME magazine, "What Twitter Says to Linguists:"

For researchers studying the use of language in today's networked world, social media is an invaluable tool.

...Gone are the days when a language researcher had to interview subjects in a lab or go door to door in the hope of gaining a few insights about a limited sample of people. Academics in the U.S. and Europe are using the seven-year-old microblogging platform to put millions of examples under the microscope in an instant. "It's unprecedented," says Ben Zimmer, the executive producer at Vocabulary.com "the sheer amount of text you can look at at one time and the number of people you can analyze at once." Hidden in tweets are insights about how we portray our identity in a few short sentences. There are clues to long-standing mysteries, like how slang spreads. And there is a new form of communication to study. If language is the archive of history, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, social media should get its own shelf.

If you're fascinated by language and how it evolves, take a look Ben Zimmer's (producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com) Language Log, which documents and discusses Twitter's lingual developments and news about the phenomenon.  For a primer on Twitter usage, there's Lauren Hockenson's article, "The complete guide to Twitter’s language and acronyms."

And speaking of language, how about Pixar's "For the Birds:"

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-- Marge

Truthiness and the art of Stephen Colbert

Last week Stephen Colbert reported in his "Who's Honoring Me Now?"(August 9, 2012) segment of the Colbert Report that a study reported in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review verified his concept of  "truthiness."  The researchers, scientists from Canada and New Zealand, said about their work:

"We wanted to examine how the kinds of photos people see every day — the ones that decorate newspaper or TV headlines, for example — might produce ‘truthiness,’” the lead researcher, Eryn J. Newman of Victoria University of Wellington, explained. “We were really surprised by what we found."

You can read about their project and findings in the article -- Cognitive researchers find truth in Colbert’s ‘truthiness’ -- by Eric W. Dolan at the Raw Story.

Stephen Colbert

Political satirist Stephen Colbert can sometimes be hard to watch -- he does his satire very well.  Truthiness was the subject of a segment called "The Word," presented during the pilot episode of his weekly program.  You can view that episode on his site Colbert Nation.
Since that initial broadcast the word "truthiness" has gained a foothold in the English language:

Merriam-Webster's #1 Word of the Year for 2006:

1. truthiness (noun)
1 : "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," October 2005)

2 : "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true" (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

And it has been analyzed in the NY Times by Ben Zimmer in his column "On Language."

Not bad for an improv comedian from South Carolina.

-- Marge