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Wish
there were words to describe how you feel while you travel the globe?
The Lonely Planet blog coined some brand new travel-related words that
may come in handy in your next journey:
automobilogic n.
The state of mind unique to road trips that convinces travelers that gummi bears and fried onion rings count as a daily serving of fruits and vegetables. Studies indicate that this may lead to automobesity.bratpacker n.
Someone who believes they have a revolutionary system for packing luggage and insists on explaining it to anyone who will listen.comeuppants n.
When an obnoxious person loses their luggage and has no change of clothes.crankophone n.
Someone who tries to make themselves understood in a foreign country simply by speaking louder in their own tongue.filibluster v.
To cause pointless delay by creating a scene in the airport security line to prove some point about personal privacy rights that no one behind you cares about.
Come to think of it, I know a few crankophones! Read more at the Lonely Planet Blog: Link
Maybe
so, according to psychologists studying convicted murderers. In a new
study of previously diagnosed psychopaths and non-psychopathic murderers,
the researchers were able to discern who are psychopathic by analyzing
their word choices:
Psychopaths were far more likely to say they committed the crime because of personal needs, like food and money, and they described their deeds in the past tense, suggesting it happened a long time ago and there was little that the perpetrator could do to prevent it. They seemed emotionally detached from the murder, and as might be expected, they showed no remorse. [...]
The non-psychopathic killers, by contrast, were far more likely to describe their past in terms that reflected social needs, like family, religion and spirituality.
"In the context of a committed murder, it is likely that the non-psychopaths were aware of and affected by the profound effects their crime would have had on their own families and the victim's family," the study says. No such concern was shown among the psychopaths.
The bottom line: "Psychopaths operate on a primitive but rational level," say the researchers.
Previously on Neatorama: Psychologist: Leaders Are Four Times as Likely as the Average Person to Be Psychopaths
In his newest work, Word
as Image
Laughing Squid has the animated video of Ji Lee's work. Not to be missed: Link
WordCount isn’t a new website (it won the 2003 American Institute of Graphic Arts’ award for Information Design and the 2005 People’s Choice Webby Awards), but it sure is a fun website for those of you who haven’t seen it before. WordCount creator Jonathan Harris of Number 27 explains:
WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.
The fun starts when you type in your favorite word, and see the words that are ranked next to it:
Observing closely ranked words tells us a great deal about our culture. For instance, “God” is one word from “began”, two words from “start”, and six words from “war”. Another sequence is "america ensure oil opportunity". Conspiracists unite! As ever, the more one explores, the more is revealed.
Though "Neatorama" isn’t in the archives, "neat" currently sits at 4808, with the string" neat magazines burn whisky pond."
Link – via Book of Joe
Why do Aussies like to shorten words? That’s the research question that Nenagh Kemp of University of Tasmania (or Uni of Tassie) is asking:
"What we’d like to find out is how people feel when they’re listening to someone using those kinds of shortenings, compared to someone who’s not," doctor Nenagh Kemp told AFP from Hobart.
"It might tell us more about whether people think it makes you sound more friendly or more intelligent or more casual, and also differences."
Kemp said while abbreviations were present in all forms of English, they were more common in Australia, where tradesmen are "tradies", firemen are "firies", ambulance workers are "ambos" and service stations are "servos".
She believes that the shortenings are a way of conveying a sense of informality in a country known for its egalitarian ethos.
"I think it does set up a feeling of companionship or casualness and friendliness," she said.
"You might use that to say, ‘hey, I’m on the same level as you. I’m not being too pretentious."
Friend/Enemy Ambigram, by Naguib and Fadilah of Nagfa
English, she’s a’changin’. The latest edition of the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary are 100 words that you may already be using:
There are words such as locavore (one who eats foods grown locally), frenemy (someone who acts like a friend but is really an enemy), waterboarding (an interrogation technique use to induce the sensation of drowning), vlogs (a blog that contains video material) and webisode (a TV show that can be viewed at a website).
There’s also flash mob (a group of people summoned electronically to a designated spot at a specified time to perform an indicated action before dispersing) and green-collar (involving actions for protecting the natural environment).
Some words that just now made the cut have been around for generations. The term "sock puppet" — a false online identity used for deceptive purposes — was tracked to 1959 but has taken on new popular use with people using fake IDs on social networking sites.
A
new English word is created about every 98 minutes, according to the website
The Global Language Monitor. Based on that rate, English passed the millionth
word mark earlier today.
Here are the 10 latest words in the English language:
For the full story, visit the GLM website: Link1,000,000: Web 2.0 – The next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you.
999,999: Jai Ho! – The Hindi phrase signifying the joy of victory, used as an exclamation, sometimes rendered as “It is accomplished”. Achieved English-language popularity through the multiple Academy Award Winning film, “Slumdog Millionaire”.
999,998: N00b — From the Gamer Community, a neophyte in playing a particular game; used as a disparaging term.
999,997: Slumdog – a formerly disparaging, now often endearing, comment upon those residing in the slums of India.
999,996: Cloud Computing – The ‘cloud’ has been technical jargon for the Internet for many years. It is now passing into more general usage.
999,995: Carbon Neutral — One of the many phrases relating to the effort to stem Climate Change.
999,994: Slow Food — Food other than the fast-food variety hopefully produced locally (locavores).
999,993: Octomom – The media phenomenon relating to the travails of the mother of the octuplets.
999,992: Greenwashing – Re-branding an old, often inferior, product as environmentally friendly.
999,991: Sexting – Sending email (or text messages) with sexual content.
Mark Pagel, evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, and colleagues have identified some of the oldest words in the English language using computer analyses:
Reading University researchers claim "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years. [...]
At the root of the Reading University effort is a lexicon of 200 words that is not specific to culture or technology, and is therefore likely to represent concepts that have not changed across nations or millennia.
"We have lists of words that linguists have produced for us that tell us if two words in related languages actually derive from a common ancestral word," said Professor Pagel. [...]
For example, the words "I" and "who" are among the oldest, along with the words "two", "three", and "five". The word "one" is only slightly younger.
William the Conqueror (Getty)
Time-travellers would find a few sounds familiar in William’s wordsThe word "four" experienced a linguistic evolutionary leap that makes it significantly younger in English and different from other Indo-European languages.
Meanwhile, the fastest-changing words are projected to die out and be replaced by other words much sooner.
For example, "dirty" is a rapidly changing word; currently there are 46 different ways of saying it in the Indo-European languages, all words that are unrelated to each other. As a result, it is likely to die out soon in English, along with "stick" and "guts".
Verbs also tend to change quite quickly, so "push", "turn", "wipe" and "stab" appear to be heading for the lexicographer’s chopping block.
