Light swearing at the start or end of a persuasive speech can help influence an audience.

The problem is that we run the risk of losing credibility and appearing unprofessional.

To see whether swearing can help change attitudes, Scherer and Sagarin (2006) divided 88 participants into three groups to watch one of three slightly different speeches. The only difference between the speeches was that one contained a mild swear word at the start: “…lowering of tuition is not only a great idea, but damn it, also the most reasonable one for all parties involved.” The second speech contained the ‘damn it’ at the end and the third had neither.

When participants’ attitudes were measured, they were most influenced by the speeches with the mild obscenity included, either at the beginning or the end.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

Is expressing thanks a powerful motivator or just a social nicety?

According to positive psychologists, saying ‘thank you’ is no longer just good manners, it is also beneficial to the self.

Studies have suggested that being grateful can improve well-being, physical health, can strengthen social relationships, produce positive emotional states and help us cope with stressful times in our lives.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

artwork { Roy Lichtenstein, Grrrrrrrrrrr, 1965 }

In principle, to be cool means to remain calm even under stress. But this doesn’t explain why there is now a global culture of cool. What is cool?

The aesthetics of cool developed mainly as a behavioral attitude practiced by black men in the United States at the time of slavery. Slavery made necessary the cultivation of special defense mechanisms which employed emotional detachment and irony. A cool attitude helped slaves and former slaves to cope with exploitation or simply made it possible to walk the streets at night. During slavery, and long afterwards, overt aggression by blacks was punishable by death. Provocation had to remain relatively inoffensive, and any level of serious intent had to be disguised or suppressed. So cool represents a paradoxical fusion of submission and subversion. It’s a classic case of resistance to authority through creativity and innovation. (…)

In spite of the ambiguity, it seems that we remain capable of distinguishing cool attitudes from uncool ones. So what is cool? Let me say that cool resists linear structures. Thus a straightforward, linear search for power is not cool. Constant loss of power is not cool either. Winning is cool; but being ready to do anything to win is not. Both moralists and totally immoral people are uncool, while people who maintain moral standards in straightforwardly immoral environments are most likely to be cool. A CEO is not cool, unless he is a reasonable risk-taker and refrains from pursuing success in a predictable fashion. Coolness is a nonconformist balance that manages to square circles and to personify paradoxes. This has been well known since at least the time of cool jazz. This paradoxical nature has much to do with cool’s origins being the fusion of submission and subversion. (…)

In ancient Greece, the Stoic philosophers supported a vision of coolness in a turbulent world. The Stoic indifference to fate can be interpreted as the supreme principle of coolness, and has even been been viewed as such in the context of African American culture. The style of the jazz musician Lester Young, for example, was credible mostly because Young was neither proud nor ashamed.

{ Philosophy Now | Continue reading }

photo { Randy P. Martin }

{ 1. Joseph Jastrow’s Duck-Rabbit, 1899, based on drawing published in German humor magazine Fliegende Blatter, 1892 | 2. Taxidermed rabbit–duck | via Richard Wiseman }

I noticed a depiction of the famous “duck-rabbit” figure, described as an “illusion” and attributed to Wittgenstein (Malach, Levy, & Hasson, 2002).
 
Technically, the duck-rabbit figure is an ambiguous (or reversible, or bistable) figure, not an illusion (Peterson, Kihlstrom, Rose, & Glisky, 1992). The two classes of perceptual phenomena have quite different theoretical implications. From a constructivist point of view, many illusions illustrate the role of unconscious inferences in perception, while the ambiguous figures illustrate the role of expectations, world-knowledge, and the direction of attention (Long & Toppino, 2004).

For example, children tested on Easter Sunday are more likely to see the figure as a rabbit; if tested on a Sunday in October, they tend to see it as a duck or similar bird (Brugger & Brugger, 1993).

But the more important point of this letter concerns attribution: the duck-rabbit was “originally noted” not by Wittgenstein, but rather by the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow in 1899.

{ John F. Kihlstrom, | Continue reading }

SCUBA: Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus

RADAR: Radio detection and ranging

HSBC: Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation


JPEG: Joint photographic experts group

RSVP: Répondez s’il vous plaît

photo { Stanley Donwood, Teeth, 2006 }

In a recent fMRI study, researchers showed that Cantonese verbs and nouns are processed in (slightly) different parts of the brain than English nouns and verbs in bilinguals. (…)

Chinese nouns and verbs showed a largely overlapping pattern of cortical activity. In contrast, English verbs activated more brain regions compared to English nouns. Specifically, the processing of English verbs evoked stronger activities of left putamen, left fusiform gyrus, cerebellum, right cuneus, right middle occipital areas, and supplementary motor area. The cognition of English nouns did not evoke stronger activities in any cortical regions.

This is truly language affecting thought, no? The point of general interest to linguist is that bilingual speakers seem to process words in their two languages differently. Cantonese words are processed using diffuse brain regions and English words are processed using localized regions (this is a simplified explanation of course).

{ The Lousy Linguist | Continue reading }

painting { Miriam Cabessa, Little Black 2, 2008 | oil on linen }

A Michigan company announced that for the low, low price of $1.99, you could have a lifetime license to use something you might not have thought you needed - a new punctuation mark.

It’s called the SarcMark, and it looks like a reversed “at” sign.

{ Boston Globe | Continue reading }

Some of the italicised words are pure slang and have no place in respectable writing – celebs and nookie, for example. Others come under the heading of coy or vulgar euphemism – toyboy, love child, love nest, cheating and stunner are what might more directly be called gigolo, illegitimate child, flat, committing adultery and mistress .

Some are simply failures of terminology: those who ride horses go riding, not horse riding; and those who shoot or hunt practise field sports. (…)

The main objection to most of the tabloid language highlighted above is that it devalues the currency. If somebody is devastated because his football team has lost a match, how does he feel when he gets home and finds his wife and children have been killed in a fire?

{ Simon Heffer on The language of tabloid exaggeration | The Guardian | Continue reading }

The grammar of Interlingua is an international auxiliary language first publicized by IALA. It follows the usage of the original grammar text (Gode & Blair, 1951), which is accepted today but regarded as conservative.

The grammar of Interlingua is based largely on that of the Romance languages, but simplified, primarily under the influence of English. However, all of the control languages, including German and Russian, were consulted in developing the grammar. Grammatical features absent from any of the control languages were dropped. For example, there is neither adjectival agreement (Spanish/Portuguese gatos negros ‘black cats’), since this feature is absent in English, nor continuous verb tenses (English I am reading), since they are absent in French.

There is no systemic marking for parts of speech. For example, nouns do not have to end in any particular letter. Typically, however, adjectives end in -e or a consonant, adverbs end in -mente or -o, while nouns end in -a, -e, -o or a consonant. Finite verbs virtually always end in -a, -e, or -i, while infinitives add -r: scribe, ‘write’, ‘writes’; scriber, ‘to write’.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ unsourced image }

Is it “Ms.” or “Miss”?

A rare occurrence of “Ms.” in 1885 suggests that the term is an abbreviation of “Miss.”

Ever since “Ms.” emerged as a marriage-neutral alternative to “Miss” and “Mrs.” in the 1970s, linguists have been trying to trace the origins of this new honorific. It turns out that “Ms.” is not so new after all. The form goes back at least to the 1760s, when it served as an abbreviation for “Mistress” (remember Shakespeare’s Mistress Quickly?) and for “Miss,” already a shortened form of “Mistress,” which was also sometimes spelled “Mis.” The few early instances of “Ms.” carried no particular information about matrimonial status (it was used for single or for married women) and no political statement about gender equality. Eventually “Miss” and “Mrs.” emerged as the standard honorifics for women, just as “Mr.” was used for men (“Master,” from which “Mr.” derives, was often used for boys, though it’s not common today). While “Miss” was often prefixed to the names of unmarried women or used for young women or girls, it could also refer to married women. And “Mrs.,” typically reserved for married women, did not always signal marital status (for example, widows and divorced women often continued to use “Mrs.”). The spread of “Ms.” over the past forty years both simplifies and complicates the title paradigm.

{ OUP | Continue reading }

Psychologists and philosophers have long debated whether language shapes the way we think. While the most drastic viewpoint – that thought can’t exist without language — has fallen out of favor, psychologists still study more subtle effects.

The first study has to do with gender in language. Many languages assign genders to words. For example, in Spanish, the word for “key” is feminine, while the German word for” key” is masculine. Gender for the most part is arbitrary and varies from language to language, which allows for some interesting experiments. (…) German speakers described keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, and useful, while Spanish speakers described them as golden, intricate, little, lovely, and shiny. (…)

In a second experiment, Boroditsky looked at language and the conception of time. English speakers primarily speak of time in horizontal terms. For example, we talk about moving meetings forward, or pushing deadlines back. Mandarin speakers, on the other hand, use up/down metaphors as well. So a Mandarin speaker would refer to the previous week as “up week” and next week as “down week.”

{ Livia Blackburne | Continue reading }

Central banks usually strengthen the economy through a single, vastly powerful tool — lowering interest rates. When the Federal Reserve makes it cheaper for banks to borrow money, that stimulus generally flows through the entire economy, as the banks make loans that in turn stimulate economic activity.

But when times are so dire that banks are reluctant to lend whatever the cost, interest rate cuts lose their punch. That happened in Japan after the bursting of its real-estate bubble in 1991, and happened again in the wake of the credit crisis that upended Wall Street in the fall of 2008. In those circumstances, central banks turn to what economists call “quantitative easing” — unorthodox methods of pumping money into an economy and working to lower interest rates that central bankers do not usually control. Their effect is the same as printing money in vast quantities, but without ever turning on the printing presses.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

If you have any interesting projects you’d like to promote, hiring needs, etc., send them to me and I’ll include them in the next edition of SpiersList, which is read by “affluent, well-educated influencers.” Which is new media code for “small.” But you never know.

{ Elizabeth Spiers newsletter, August 2, 2010 }

illustration { Bessy & Combes }

A recent study of an ancient language provides new insights into the nature of linguistic evolution. (…)

Dr. Kiparsky’s research focuses on the reasons why languages change over time, and the mechanisms by which this change occurs. Linguistic change differs from biological evolution and socio-cultural change because of the way language is organized and learned. Languages are passed on by example, but each is governed by a coherent set of rules that conform to a common set of organizing principles. Linguistic change is typically initiated by children as they make “intelligent” errors in seeking the simplest way of navigating the languages they are learning. By studying linguistic change, we gain new insights into how language is organized and how children learn language.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

How to Prevent Language Extinction

The 7 billion inhabitants of Earth currently speak about 6000 different languages. That may seem a healthy multitude but it turns out that just five of these languages dominate. More than half the population speak English, Russian, Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish. These together with the next hundred most popular languages account for 95 per cent of speakers. A mere 5 per cent of the global population speak the rest and two thirds of these lingos are in danger of extinction.

That’s a perilous state of affairs. With the death of a language, the planet loses an irreplaceable cultural phenomenon. The fear is that the big five may crush all before them, pushing weaker languages into oblivion and leaving a cultural desert in their wake.

That fear has been exacerbated by mathematical models describing how one language can dominate another and showing how easily extinctions happen.

Today, however, there is better news. The relentless march of dominant languages may not be as inevitable as these early models seemed to show.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

photo { Emma Hardy }

In the social sciences (following the work of Michel Foucault), a discourse is considered to be a formalized way of thinking that can be manifested through language, a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic, or, as Judith Butler puts it, “the limits of acceptable speech”—or possible truth.

Discourses are seen to affect our views on all things; it is not possible to escape discourse. For example, two notably distinct discourses can be used about various guerrilla movements describing them either as “freedom fighters” or “terrorists.” In other words, the chosen discourse delivers the vocabulary, expressions and perhaps also the style needed to communicate. Discourse is closely linked to different theories of power and state, at least as long as defining discourses is seen to mean defining reality itself. It also helped some of the world’s greatest thinkers express their thoughts and ideas into what is now called “public orality.”

This conception of discourse is largely derived from the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault (see below).

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Kalvar }

So, this is about the word “so.” (…) “So” may be the new “well,” new “um,” new “oh” and new “like.” No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning, where it can portend many things: transition, certitude, logic, attentiveness, a major insight.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Last year, grammatical tragedy struck in the heart of England when Birmingham City Council decreed that apostrophes were to be forever banished from public addresses. To the horror of purists and pedants alike, place names such as St Paul’s Square were banned and unceremoniously replaced with an apostrophe-free version: St Pauls Square.

The council’s reasoning was that nobody understands apostrophes and their misuse was so common in public signs that they were a hindrance to effective navigation. Anecdotes abounded of ambulance drivers puzzling over how to enter St James’s Street into a GPS navigation system while victims of heart attacks, strokes and hit ‘n’ run drivers passed from this world into the (presumably apostrophe-free) next.

Why the confusion? Part of the reason is that apostrophes are not particularly common in the English language: In French they occur at a rate of more than once per sentence on average. In English, they occur about once in every 20 sentences. So English speakers get less practice.

But the rules governing apostrophes are also more complex in English. In both French and English, apostrophes indicate a missing letter, such as the missing i in that’s or the v in e’er. But in English, apostrophes also indicate the possessive (or genitive) case. They are used to show that one noun owns another: St James’s Street is the street belonging to St James.

The complexity is compounded because in English, the plural is often formed by adding an s. So the word boys means more than one boy. How then do you form the possessive to indicate, for example, a ball belonging to the boys? Is it the boy’s ball or the boys’s ball or the boys’ ball?

And then there are the exceptions. Pronouns, for example, do not take a possessive apostrophe: you can’t say I’s ball or me’s bat. The truth is that knowing when to use an apostrophe is not always easy.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading | Mind your p’s and q’s: or the peregrinations of an apostrophe in 17th Century English | PDF }

photo { Marco Ovando }

What kids searched for this summer. Seeing “sex” and “porn” at #4 and #6 reminds me of how, from age 10 to 15, I looked up “fuck” every time I picked up a dictionary. Some terms you might also need to Google:

• Webkinz (#16)
• Runescape (#37)
• Nigahiga (#99)
• Miniclip (#18)
• Poptropica (#54)
• Hoedown Throwdown (#61)
• naked girls (#86)

{ Fimoculous | Kids’ Top 100 Searches of 2009 }

Marginalia are notes, scribbles, and comments made by readers in the margin of a book, as well as marginal decoration, drolleries, and drawings in medieval illuminated manuscripts, although many of these were planned parts of the book. True marginalia is not to be confused with reader’s signs, marks (e.g. stars, crosses, fists) or doodles in books. The formal way of adding descriptive notes to a document is called annotation. The scholia on classical manuscripts are the earliest known form of marginalia.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Auto-Urine Therapy | Enlarge | Read more: Urine therapy }

“You” and “I” need to talk about “us”: Linguistic patterns in marital interactions

Links between pronoun use, relationship satisfaction, and observed behavior were examined during 2 problem-solving interactions in which 134 distressed and 48 nondistressed couples participated. Results supported hypotheses that distressed and nondistressed couples would use pronouns at significantly different rates, and that rates would also differ for partners depending on whose topic was being discussed. Actor–partner interdependence models (APIMs; D. A. Kenny, 1996) revealed actor and partner effects of pronoun use on satisfaction and observed positivity and negativity. Interestingly, I-focus pronouns were found to be linked with satisfaction in distressed partners and dissatisfaction in nondistressed partners. The pattern of findings was otherwise largely consistent across topics and levels of distress.

{ Personal Relationships, Vol. 17 Issue 1 | via InterScience }

photo { Sarah Mclean }

{ Elliott waves. Bull Market: Left to centre. Bear Market: Right to centre. | The Elliott Wave Principle is a detailed description of how financial markets behave. The description reveals that mass psychology swings from pessimism to optimism and back in a natural sequence, creating specific wave patterns in price movements. Each pattern has implications regarding the position of the market within its overall progression, past, present and future. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }