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.

As impressive as his conversance with English history is Garner’s awareness of present-day trends. The “like” entry notes not only traditional uses of...

The resurrection of Carne-Ross’s book should give a little bit of hope

“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.”

I grew up in a community where the phenomenon of speaking in tongues (called glossolalia by linguists) is more than just some loaves-and-fishes Sunday School curiosity.

‘Sometimes it can look like spending six hours searching for 10 words.’

The words we use can have a powerful effect on our moods and confidence. Here are some negative phrases to ditch if you want to think more positively, according to behavioral scientists, researchers…

Speaking a second or even a third language can bring obvious advantages, but occasionally the words, grammar and even accents can get mixed up.

«our languages aren't just static throughout our lives but shifting, actively competing and interfering with each other.»

Sure, kids imitate their parents, but that’s just a small part of the story

by David J. Lobina (This is Part 2 of a brand new series of post, this time about the relationship between language and thought; Part 1 is here) A provocative title, perhaps, and perhaps also…

«The point I want to make in this post is that no-one thinks in any natural language; not in English, or Italian, or whatever, but in a language of thought, an abstract, unconscious and moreover inaccessible, conceptual representational system of the mind»

Also featuring two custom typefaces from Matt Willey, the project is based on an official 83-page glossary put together by the FBI to help decipher the most obscure social media chatter imaginable.

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)»

On nominative determinism and the power of names

An artificial intelligence system trained on words and sentences alone will never approximate human understanding.

We’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.

Bengali was the language of home and of intimacy. Yet somewhere along those years, with a sigh drowned out by babel, the language left me.