Language
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Past Lives of the Paragraph
hedgehogreview.com • 19+ min
Making a new paragraph is as easy as drawing a thin line in the margin.
Why Navajo is the world’s hardest language to learn
bigthink.com • 6 min
According to many linguists, the most difficult language in the world isn’t Mandarin or Basque or Hungarian or Xhosa, spoken in South Africa, but Navajo.Concentrated in Arizona and New Mexico, the…
You Had Me At Meow: On the Hidden Language of Cats
lithub.com • 11+ min
“That one in there—he just sits and hisses.” The school caretaker pointed to a hole underneath the old building. I crouched down, peered in, and said, “Hello there,” to the dirty, scrawny little ca…
A Theory of the Modern Exclamation Point!
annehelen.substack.com • 5 min
Doing the Work of Tone
How To Know If You're An Interrupter Or A 'Cooperative Overlapper'
www.huffpost.com • 4 min
This conversational habit seems like interrupting but it's actually not.
J.R.R. Tolkien on Fairy Tales, Language, the Psychology of Fantasy, and Why There’s No Such Thing as…
www.themarginalian.org • 11+ min
“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.”
Lessons from Auschwitz: The power of our words
ed.ted.com
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,…
How to Exclaim!
themillions.com • 5 min
Noisy. Hysterical. Brash. The textual version of junk food. The selfie of grammar. The exclamation point attracts enormous amounts of flak...
Why we say “OK”
ed.ted.com
“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.…
Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence
lithub.com • 13+ min
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, …
A polyglot explains the tips (and myths) of learning new languages
bigthink.com • 4 min
When I visited Buenos Aires last year, I thought the six semesters of Spanish I took in school would pay dividends. The fast flow of Spanish from Argentinians quickly killed that delusion. I realized…
A very short history of the F-word
bigthink.com • 6 min
The oldest unambiguous use of the F-word comes from De Officiis, a treatise on moral conduct by Cicero. No, the Roman philosopher didn’t gift English its soon-to-be favorite obscenity. Rather, in…
A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows: How Groups of Birds Got Their Names, with…
www.themarginalian.org • 5 min
Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of blue and the wonder of being…
How different languages laugh online
restofworld.org • 4 min
Laughter is universal, but lol is not.