Language // Current

In What Language Does Your Baby Cry?

http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE5A43TA20091105 Excerpt: The... more

Vierotchka
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6 days ago
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Language translation glasses revealed by NEC

Glasses which 'hear' a foreign language and automatically translate what's being said,... more

hpseaton
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7 days ago
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16 comments

The Language of 30 Rock

http://www.good.is/post/the-language-of-30-rock/ "Since it’s debut in 2006, there... more

St_Alia_10191
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13 days ago
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Creating A Japanese Video to Study With

Hoolan made a very helpful post on how to find, download and than put together all... more

TurningOtaku
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14 days ago
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Informal Past Tense Lesson

DumbOtaku who has a real passion for verb conjugation gives a lesson which by the end... more

TurningOtaku
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15 days ago
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Super Mario X Japanese Lesson

Gakuranman found a hilarious mario parody and somehow turned it into a Japanese... more

TurningOtaku
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Why Premium Lang-8 Is The Best

Tofugu reviews why you should sign up today for Premium Lang-8 membership!... more

TurningOtaku
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How To Speak In Japanese Without Knowing The Words.

Rainbowhill goes over how to sound fluent in Japanese while not really knowing the... more

TurningOtaku
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15 days ago
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The War on Language

This emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate... more

stuknda70s
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15 days ago
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Glasses that translate languages

The need for translations i a big problem today, especially with more people... more

Skyscraper08
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16 days ago
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13 comments

Coalition Launches National Campaign Against CNN’s Lou Dobbs

Coalition Launches National Campaign Against CNN’s Lou Dobbs El Semanario de Nuevo... more

YouthOutlookMultimedia
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23 days ago
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First free dictionary application for BlackBerry phones released

Dictionary.com rolled out the first free dictionary application for BlackBerry today,... more

admillios
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29 days ago
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'Whatever' Tops List of Most Annoying Words

"So, you know, it is what it is, but Americans are totally annoyed by the use of "whatever" in conversations.

The popular slacker term of indifference was found "most annoying in conversation" by 47 percent of Americans surveyed in a Marist College poll released Wednesday.

"Whatever" easily beat out "you know," which especially grated a quarter of respondents. The other annoying contenders were "anyway" (at 7 percent), "it is what it is" (11 percent) and "at the end of the day" (2 percent).

"Whatever" -- pronounced "WHAT'-ehv-errr" when exasperated -- is an expression with staying power. Immortalized in song by Nirvana ("oh well, whatever, nevermind") in 1991, popularized by the Valley girls in "Clueless" later that decade, it is still commonly used, often by younger people.

It can be an all-purpose argument-ender or a signal of apathy. And it can really be annoying. The poll found "whatever" to be consistently disliked by Americans regardless of their race, gender, age, income or where they live.

"It doesn't surprise me because 'whatever' is in a special class, probably," said Michael Adams, author of "Slang: The People's Poetry" and an associate professor of English at Indiana University. "It's a word that -- and it depends how a speaker uses it -- can suggest dismissiveness."

Adams, who was not involved in the poll and is not annoyed by "whatever," points out that its use is not always negative. It also can be used in place of other, neutral phrases that have fallen out of favor, like "six of one, half dozen of the other," he said.

But the negative connotation might explain why "whatever" was judged more annoying than the ever-popular "you know," which was recently given a public workout by Caroline Kennedy during her flirtation with the New York U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton. "You know," Adams notes, is a way for speakers to seek assent from others.

Pollsters at the Poughkeepsie, N.Y. college surveyed 938 U.S. adults by telephone Aug. 3 - Aug 6. The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points. The five choices included were chosen by people at the poll discussing what popular words and phrases might be considered especially annoying, said spokeswoman Mary Azzoli.""So, you know, it is what it is, but Americans are totally annoyed by the use of... more

St_Alia_10191
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1 month ago
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What word gets on your nerves? 'Whatever' tops the list

The great void will be full of the sublime indifference of Whatever, the ghost of a shrug and an everlasting yawn. The boredom of it would kill the most die-hard nihilist, for so much of nihilism is pure talk.

A tiny survey, conducted by an American college with 938 adult Americans, has found that nearly half the people questioned said whatever was the word that got on their nerves the most. Close on its heels came you know, anyway and at the end of the day. What is it about the word that annoys even the Americans? Perhaps it stands for a kind of urban cool that the iPodding, netting, texting, chatting, not-so-bright young thing has perfected to a First World stereotype: a bored and sullen teen shading into a virtual, chat-engine avatar, indifferent to the pleasures and responsibilities of nuanced verbal communication. The link with America and the First World is only historical. Whatever rules the world. A Singaporean soft drink is called Whatever (the other brand is called Anything), and Oasis has a song called “Whatever”, which goes, “I’m free to be whatever I/ Whatever I choose… I’m free to say whatever I/ Whatever I like…”

Another little survey, also made in the West, is relevant here. Among finalists in genetics at London’s Imperial College, the British students were found to make three times as many errors in their English compared to their overseas classmates from China, Singapore and Indonesia (surprisingly, there seems to have been no Indian in that class). This is a different bracket of youngsters, more Facebook than iPod, more expensively educated and among the toppers in their specialist subjects (usually in the sciences or technology), but their language skills woefully inadequate. Perhaps this has got more to do with modes of competitiveness in the global higher-education scenario, and in the way English becomes the primary vehicle of such competition. For native speakers, English is the language in which they make themselves understood to one another, primarily in conversation or through means in which the niceties of spelling, grammar or vocabulary do not matter. But for overseas students in the Anglophone West, good English is a matter of survival and, increasingly in Britain, of integration. They cannot afford to shrug it all off with the hated W-word. Whatever is still not Whoever.The great void will be full of the sublime indifference of Whatever, the ghost of a... more