The Best Articles in Language

“OK” is thought to be the most widely recognized word on the planet. We use it to communicate with each other, as well as our technology. But, it actually started out as a language fad in the 1830’s.…

Classical music mastermind Benjamin Zander concluded his 2008 TED Talk by recounting the heartrending story of an Auschwitz survivor and her brother. This short animated piece highlights that story,…

Solve these puzzle questions to level up your Wordle game.

This conversational habit seems like interrupting but it's actually not.

When I was in fifth grade, our class was joined by a boy who had the most exquisite handwriting. It was astonishing to watch, and worse, he had no idea how good he was at it. Penmanship in elementa…

Eudaimonia, Arete, and much more...

In October 2013, I wrote a post arguing that computing was disrupting language and that this was the Mother of All Disruptions. My specific argument was that human-to-human communication was an ove…

On the unexpected joys of Denglisch, Berlinglish & global Englisch. « My own language, made camp. »

An endangered language family suggests that early humans used their bodies as a model for reality

MRI scans of nearly 100 native speakers of either German or Arabic revealed differences in how the language circuits of their brains are connected.

Shared by 473, including Steven Pinker

«hyperstition is a belief which becomes true if people believe it’s true»

Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?

We have power over words, not vice versa.

«The impact of the former, as potentially harmful as it may seem, lies purely in the mind of the listener. Not so for physical violence»

Shared by 340, including Albert Ràfols

The meter-tall stone that has come to be called the Mesha Stele, its smooth, black basalt carved some sixteen centuries before it was unearthed from the packed, red sand of Dhiban, Jordan in 1868, …

Sleep has a more powerful role in language-learning than was previously thought. What does this reveal about our night-time brain?

Making a new paragraph is as easy as drawing a thin line in the margin.

«eachers was so many years behind the practice of the writers. Edwin Herbert Lewis, A History of the English Paragraph (1894) [T]here is no such thing as a paragraph. That is, there is no item in an outline, no branch of a tree, no unit of discourse that consistently corresponds to a block of text delimited by a blank line or an indentation. Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style (2015)»

“Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds.”

On nominative determinism and the power of names