Juxtapose. Obfuscate. And of course, absquatulate.
All these words appear in a new dictionary for young people. It’s The Dictionary of Difficult Words, and we’re talking to the author, lexicographer Jane Solomon.
Activate your sesquipedalian …
Category: decipherment
What happens to language when newcomers move in?
Language isn’t just for communication — it also signals membership in a group, and this is especially clear in a gentrifying community in Washington DC. Black residents are using African-American English to stake …
British and American English have always had a love-hate relationship.
British people (and Australians) often blame Americans for somehow tarnishing the language, and they fret about creeping Americanism. But people are terrible at identifying what the Americanisms actually are. How …
Does grammar matter?
On one side: the language sticklers, who hold that good grammar is a necessity for communication, and even a matter of upholding standards and courtesy. But there’s another side: that grammar rules are often just made up, …
What would an alien language be like?
The new trailer for the film Arrival has got us pretty excited, and there’s even a whole field of study called xenolinguistics. How will we know what to say when we make …
When we think of endangered languages, we tend to think of those with a small number of speakers in remote areas.
We don’t usually think of Cantonese.
And yet this language with millions of speakers on multiple continents is facing …
The written word lasts longer than speech, at least in principle.
But what happens when a writing system is lost in the mist of history? Lost writing can be deciphered, but these scripts have resisted all attempts.
Linguist Daniel Midgley…
Emotions are fleeting. But when they’re captured in language, we can study how they spread from person to person, and even through time.
What impact does the emotional language of others have on you? And how many emotions are there …
The Voynich Manuscript is 600 years old, written in a strange script, and it’s never been deciphered.
Is it a guide to the universe, a book of secrets, or is it just pages and pages of gibberish? Modern techniques are …
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