These 23 words link modern and extinct languages. You would have been understood if you used them 15,000 years ago.

Advice about college essays from the winner of a top prize for children’s literature: Kelly Barnhill encourages teens to write about experiences that are uniquely their own, from a point of view that is theirs and no one else’s. Plus, why do we say that someone who’s fortunate has the luck of the Irish? And […]

Cultural quirks have a hand in making the same name the favorite for dogs and cats in annual study. Japan’s most famous fictional cat might be the one named Kitty, but when it comes to actual pets, owners tend to get a little more creative with their choices. To investigate what Japan’s most popular pet […]

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Gesture: every language has them, but what do they have to do with the emoji on your phone?

Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about Lauren’s new book ‘Gesture: A Slim Guide’ from Oxford University Press in our episode 'A hand-y guide to gesture’

Listen to the full episode here: https://soundcloud.com/lingthusiasm/103-a-hand-y-guide-to-gesture

lingthusiasm:

Sometimes, you’re talking with someone and you just seem to click. Other times, you just can’t seem to get comfortable: they’re standing too close or too far away for comfort, making too much or too little eye contact, touching or not touching you in a way that just doesn’t quite feel right. But where do our senses of what feels comfortable in a conversation come from, and how…

You'll never see "by the way" and "of course" the same way again.

The post Linguist clearly demonstrates how ‘thinking is walking’ in English and it’s just so cool appeared first on Upworthy.

bookshop:

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The Elation and Anxiety of Reading Fic in Your Native Tongue

Our latest piece is live! The brilliant Soila Kenya writes about the dominance of English in fandom and especially fanfiction spaces, and why for her and the fellow fans she interviewed from Kenya, Nigeria, and Burundi, this is partly about the global dominance of…

The entries are in, and Apple has chosen 350 Swift Student Challenge winners and highlighted four distinguished winners and their apps. The entries hailed from 37 different countries and winners, and of those 350, 50 have been invited to attend the company’s WWDC event in June, 2026. The four distinguished winners, per AppleInsider: Steady Hands […]

Source

From Myles Davis to Bad Bunny, cool is still king while other slang fizzles out.

The post Expert reveals the linguistic quirk that explains why every generation loves the word ‘cool’ appeared first on Upworthy.

High school students in Alabama share some favorite slang terms. If someone tells you to touch grass, they’re telling you to get a reality check — but the last thing you’d actually want to touch is dog water! Also, the history of the word hangover, and the many names, in several languages, for the effects […]

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What do you do when the only records that remain of a language were made by someone who had absolutely horrendous views of the people who spoke it?

In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about a crossover episode with Claire Aubin of This Guy Sucked! Lauren’s Guy who Sucked is Daisy Bates, who did a lot of early 20th century work documenting over 100…

Following our conversation about unusual ways to answer the phone, listeners share several others: One guy answers with animal noises, another responds, “Hello, you’re on the air,” and a third simply greets callers with the “On the phone.” This is part of a complete episode.

Summer in Japan keeps getting hotter and forces linguistic evolution. As we get into the back half of spring, it’s time to start getting ready for summer, doing things like taking your linen shirts out of storage, hitting the gym to get your beach body ready, and creating new vocabulary words for when the weather […]

Language serves as a generational marker, leaving speakers of different ages with mutual misunderstandings of pop culture references and idioms. We look at the historical lack of distinction between the words done and finished, clarify the origins of the American use of entrée for a main course, and give guidance on prepositions for telling time […]

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I’m noticing some interesting choices with regards to pronouns in Laura Pohl’s translation of All Systems Red. See, in Portuguese we don’t have object pronouns like “it/its” and neutral neopronouns like “elu/delu” are considered more analogous to the English “they/them”, so gendering Murderbot the way that it is gendered…

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I once chatted with a guy from Hawaii, we started talking about languages. I mentioned that while I’ve heard very little of it and hardly seen more of it written down, the Hawaiian language seems to have extremely similar balance of vocals and consonants as Finnish does, so it’s actually pretty likely that there are some…

rattlesnek:

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the parallel w/ germanic bear is interesting but it must be said that “brown one” is vastly inferior to “cutie pie”

my nickname “guy who doesn’t attack people” is raising a lot of questions that are already answered by the nickname

the-greatest-taste-around:

> nice outfit LOSER. 1443 called but in a dialect of Early Modern English that hadn’t experienced the Great Vowel Shift yet so i don’t know what it said

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lingthusiasm:

We’re taking you on a journey to new linguistic destinations, so come along for the ride and don’t forget to hold on!

From ‘Welcome back aboard the metaphor train’, the episode where we get enthusiastic about our unlocked bonus episode on metaphors!

Listen to the full episode here.

lingthusiasm:

Bonus 110: The pink-collar labour of colour words - Part II with Kory Stamper | Lingthusiasm

Bonus 110: The pink-collar labour of colour words - Part II with Kory Stamper

The dedication at the beginning of TRUE COLOR by Kory Stamper is “For Margaret”. When we started reading it, we assumed that Margaret was someone important to Kory herself. But midway through, we got…

Requirement to be added to “jobs in which Japanese is used.” For foreigners wanting to work in Japan, one of the most common paths into the country is through a Specialist in Humanities/International Services visa. Among other professions, it’s the visa issued to foreign nationals working as English teachers, either as ALTs at regular schools […]

When a chip isn't a chip and a flapjack isn't a flapjack.

The post 14 English words students learn differently if their teacher is American vs. British appeared first on Upworthy.

The bullet belongs to a well-documented tradition of human psychological warfare.

Fake police officer targets possibly the worst person, phone transcript isn’t so great either. In this article, we’ve got two things to talk about. Both of them are pretty dumb, but we’ll start with the one that’s illegal. On March 16, the Iwate Prefectural Police released an audio recording of a conversation that took place […]

lingthusiasm:

Lingthusiasm Episode 114: Begonia, average coral, and sea pink - Defining colour terms with Kory Stamper

begonia: a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral (see ‘coral’ 3B), bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than sweet William, called also ‘gaiety’.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about…

Today's links Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment: Synergizing the strategic inflection points on the global data network. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bluetooth headsets; Fruit sticker decoder; iPod batteries v DRM; Bruces's SXSW keynote; Piracy isn't funding terrorism; Hope v optimism; Identical twin time-travel prank; Prisoners draw…

In each installment of “Senior Scaries,” Erin Ye ’26 confronts her senior-year fears in her final three quarters at Stanford. You’ll hear about the triumphs and tribulations of tackling the Senior Bucket List™, and hopefully feel less alone in the never-ending soul search that comes with growing up.

The post Senior Scaries: 100 days to graduation appeared first on The Stanford Daily.

Let’s take a look at that growing stack of books in your room. You know the one: the pile that seems to grow faster than you can read it. It might look like neglect, but it actually says something about your curiosity and hopefulness. Did you know there’s a Japanese word for this? It might […]

The post ‘Tsundoku’: The 146-year-old Japanese word for your pile of unread books appeared first on…