This is the first in a series of profiles of Latino entrepreneurs, a preview of Joe Kutchera's forthcoming book, Pursuit of the American Dream: Success Stories of Today's Immigrant Entrepreneurs

Luis von Ahn's new company, Duolingo, has set two very large goals: help users learn a language for free while simultaneously translating the Web. The start up may very well transform both the translation and language-learning industries in the process.

Needless to say, von Ahn has a stellar track record for Internet start-ups. He sold two previous companies to Google and solved massive challenges in the process - reducing spam, digitizing books, and improving the quality of image search - all by applying his research in crowdsourcing.

Luis von Ahn moved from his native of Guatemala to the U.S. to study mathematics but found computer science more appealing, eventually obtaining his PhD in the subject from Carnegie Mellon University. Today, as an assistant professor in computer science at his alma mater, he juggles his entrepreneurial work with research and teaching.

With Duolingo, he hopes to solve two enormous problems for the developing world: bring down the incredibly high-price of computer language learning to nothing and improve the quality and quantity of online content in languages other than English.

"Growing up in Guatemala has definitely influenced my work. $500 dollars is an insane amount of money for somebody in Guatemala to spend on language-learning software, like Rosetta Stone. It isn't possible unless you are super rich. It's a lot here in the U.S. too, but most people can afford it. Because of that, I realized that the only way people would use it from countries like Guatemala is if it's totally free. So we're committed to making everything free," says Professor von Ahn.In addition, he also sees a need for more and better content online in Spanish. "If you ever use the web in Spanish, you realize it's ten times worse: the websites, design, content. Everything's a few years behind in comparison to the U.S.," says von Ahn.

A quick glance at Wikipedia's home page confirms a dearth of content in Spanish. The open source encyclopedia features over 3,831,000 articles in English but only 854,000 articles in Spanish. That equals only twenty two percent of the content in Spanish as of that in English.

Duolingo currently offers beta users classes in Spanish and German and plans to roll out French, Italian and Mandarin shortly.

If you have ever re-typed two squiggly words on websites like Craigslist, Facebook, or Ticketmaster during an online registration or purchase process, then you already know one of von Ahn's previous start-ups. reCAPTCHA reduces spam on email and social media sites as well as e-commerce fraud by preventing automated bots from signing up for thousands of new accounts, hence the acronym CAPTCHA, which stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart."



Little do web users know that as they re-type those annoying, squiggly words, they are actually digitizing old printed material, one hard-to-read word at time. Computer scanning systems for old books or newspapers, like those used by the New York Times, fail to recognize around ten percent of the words on scanned pages due to water or pencil marks or even scratches and tears. Fortunately, humans can interpret the words. More than 40,000 Web sites utilize the reCAPTCHA widget to collectively transcribe over two hundred million words every day.

By "outsourcing" this tedious job to the "crowds" on the web (hence the name "crowdsourcing") his system has been able to digitize old texts far more cost effectively and quickly than any other previously existing system. Google found von Ahn's company so useful that it bought reCAPTCHA both for its security features and to facilitate the digitization of its Google Books project.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-kutchera/translate-the-web-while-l_b_1183710.html

Each year on Sept. 30, a holiday is observed by people all around the world that has been celebrated since 1953. It's a feast day that was originally designated for a patron saint (Saint Jerome), but it has grown to transcend all barriers of religion or geography. This year, I am personally sending out greetings to thousands of people in 70 different countries in observance of this important day -- that's far more than I send out for any other holiday.

Yet, if you're like the majority of people, you've probably never heard of this cause for global celebration until now. It's International Translation Day. You might not think about how translation affects your everyday life, but in reality, there is hardly anything in your life that isn't touched in some way by translation. As I explain in my new book, Found in Translation (co-authored with Jost Zetzsche), here are 10 reasons why translation is so significant:

1. Translation saves lives. Did you know that right this very minute, a massive translation project is scanning the international news to catch words that help identify and contain global health outbreaks, protecting the lives of you and your loved ones? And, countless medical interpreters work in health care facilities, whether it's a wealthy patient visiting from overseas and paying for treatment at the world-renowned Mayo Clinic, or a refugee who is being treated after surviving violence and other horrors.

2. Translation prevents terror. Intelligence gathering is critical for terror prevention, but no matter how helpful the information obtained, it is useless if no one can understand it and analyze its potential impact. Just consider the fact that the words "Tomorrow is zero hour" were intercepted in Arabic on Sept. 10, 2011, but were not translated until Sept. 12, the day after the 9/11 attacks. As you read this message, foreign media analysts are scanning all kinds of information from Iran, Syria, North Korea, and other important hotbeds of potential conflict. They translate that information in order to help prevent terrorist attacks from actually being carried out.

3. Translation keeps the peace. International diplomacy would simply not be possible without translation. The interpreters and translators at the United Nations and the Department of State do far more than just convert speeches and official documents. Translators are often involved in helping draft the exact wording to be used in peace treaties so that it will be agreeable to both sides. Interpreters are involved in conversations and communications between world leaders, and have the power to nurture relationships, providing insight and guidance to prime ministers and presidents, preventing them from making cultural faux pas and helping them to make the best possible impression for themselves and the nations they represent.

4. Translation elects world leaders. In many countries -- such as the United States, where one out of every five people speaks a language other than English at home -- translation plays a significant role in politics. It's no accident that both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have translated versions of their websites in Spanish, and routinely rely on interpreters to communicate with voters who speak other languages. The U.S. government also requires precincts with large percentages of non-English speakers to provide ballots in other languages. These language specialists have the important task of safeguarding democracy by helping people vote correctly, even in situations where a term like "hanging chad" can barely be understood in English.

5. Translation creates jobs. The translation market is worth $33 billion in 2012, as a recent report from Common Sense Advisory shows. There are more than 26,000 companies throughout the world that sell translation and interpreting services. Most of these are small businesses, a vital contributor to any healthy economy. Not only do these companies employ translators, but people who work in finance, sales, technology, marketing, project management, and even engineering.

6. Translation fuels the economy. Global businesses cannot sell their products and services without translation. Pick any Fortune 500 company, visit their website, and chances are it's multilingual. If not, those companies are likely to employ workers who speak other languages, even if they only cater to domestic markets. Without translation, these companies would be unable to meet the expectations of customers -- and shareholders.

7. Translation entertains us. Whether you're a fan of soccer, baseball, hockey, or some other sport, just look at your home team, and chances are you'll find an interpreter or translator on the field or the court. Sports are becoming more international than ever before, and geography is no barrier to recruiting the best possible athletic talent, but language is. That's why professional athletes rely on interpreters when moving from country to country. But other important sources of entertainment, like movies and books, also require translation. How successful would The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have been if everyone were forced to read it in Swedish?

8. Translation tests our faith. Many people read a translation every night before they go to bed, in the form of a sacred text. While some holy books are read in their original language, most followers of religions are not able to access those sources of spiritual information without translation. Indeed, translation is often the source of controversy in religion, whether it's a discussion of whether the Quran should be translated or left in its original Arabic, or whether a new translation indicates that Jesus was married.

9. Translation feeds the world. The people who work in the fields where food is grown often speak different languages from the people who buy the produce picked by their hands. The same is true of meat processing plants. And, major food and beverage companies like McDonald's, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks sell their products globally, but only thanks to translation. All of these businesses rely on translation to communicate with workers who speak other languages, which means that human resource manuals, training software -- and sometimes, worker's compensation cases -- must be translated to put the food on the table.

10. Translation makes us fall in love. Yes, people fall in love thanks to translation. Whether it's thanks to a translated love poem by Pablo Neruda or a translated Hallmark greeting card, translation can help ignite a spark between two people. Having worked as an interpreter for countless "cupid calls," in which two people in love defy the odds by engaging in sweet talk across languages, I can attest that love knows no barriers -- as long as there is translation to hold people together.

And speaking of love, this word seems to be an appropriate way to describe the translation profession. When we polled translators and interpreters for our book, we saw that they love their jobs -- 96.4 percent of respondents reported that they were satisfied with their work.

So, to do your part for International Translation Day, take a moment to consider this profession that is often overlooked, but critical to society as we know it. And perhaps even say thank you to a translator or an interpreter. They're out there, each day, touching your life in ways that are unseen, but that truly make the world go 'round.

Posted: 06/28/2013 11:24 am


What (and how much) gets lost in translation? How does the translator operate the difficult task of rendering an author's words and stylistic choices into often completely different languages? How do politics, aesthetics and culture influence and affect translation? The answer to these and other fascinating questions are presented in this new anthology of diverse and enlightening essays by some of the world's leading writers and translators including Haruki Murakami, José Manuel Prieto, Eliot Weinberger, Peter Cole and David Bellos. Readers may be surprised to find out for example that translation has alternately been considered a sign of divine grace for its exactitude (as in the Greek biblical translation known as the Septuagint), or instead punishable by death for changes deemed to be unacceptable or sacrilegious. The Italian witticism "Traduttore, Traditore" ("Translator, traitor") sums up the historical view of translation as a subversive or treacherous practice.

The anthology is intelligently edited by Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky and also presents pieces on and literary history that will be of interest to the general reader as well. In one of her two essays here ("The Will to Translate: Four Episodes in a Local History of Global Cultural Exchange") Allen, a noted translator of Spanish and French and a tenured professor at Baruch College, ties in the history of English language translation of Latin American texts to President Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy in fascinating ways.

Allen's co-editor Susan Bernofsky, perhaps the world's most noted German-English translator also makes a sensible contribution with her essay on translating Walser and Kafka: "Translation and the Art of Revision." In it, she reviews her own process of translation in some detail: Bernofsky admits to producing no less than four edits of any text. Maureen Freely's essay on translating Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk amidst threats from the so-called Turkish "deep state" is enlightening for the politics involved as well as the difficult linguistic choices she has made over the years. Perhaps the most playful read comes at the end of the anthology in the form of Clare Cavanagh's witty essay "The Art of Losing: Polish Poetry in Translation."

Cavanagh introduces Elizabeth Bishop's villanelle One Art and its translation or "re-creation" into Polish by her sometimes co-translator Stanislaw Baranscak as a starting point for an extended commentary on the necessary "losses" and creative metamorphoses that the translator must employ in order to create any noteworthy new text. Good translations it turns out are almost never entirely "faithful to the original" -- the whole art form can turn in fact on knowing instead when to move away from an original and seemingly immutable sentence structure or etymological choice -- it's the translator's own artistic license, one might say.

There's a little bit for everyone to enjoy when reading In Translation. If you have ever wondered exactly what a translator does beyond the obvious (i.e. translate): what choices he/she must make, how he or she chooses between one word form or phrasing rather than another, but also how translators often resolve (or not) often difficult relationships with editors, writers and even readers at times, then you are most likely to find this a most useful volume. Granted, these types of questions may not keep the average American up late at night, but they are fascinating nonetheless.


In Translation, Edited by Esther Allen and Susan Bernoksky, Columbia University Press, New York, 2013 is available at: here

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-atamian/when-you-cant-read-the-original_b_3507039.html

 January 28th, 2013 by Maria Khodorkovsky, Contributing Writer

Legalese – the bone-dry and tortuous language of the law – can be as mystifying as it is ubiquitous. To help our readers parse some of the more common and curious legal terms, below are their Latin roots.


a posteriori: A phrase used to describe an argument derived from experience, it means “from later.”

a priori: A phrase used to describe an argument that is independent of experience and relies on previous knowledge, it means “from earlier.”

ad coelom: An abbreviation of a longer phrase, it means “to the sky” and represents the principle that whoever owns a plot of land owns it “up to Heaven and down to Hell.”

ad hoc: A phrase used to designate a solution or group gathered to address a specific issue, it means “for this.”

ad hominem: A phrase describing an attack on an opponent’s character rather than a response to the argument presented, it means “at the person.”

ei incumbit probation qui dicit: This phrase, meaning that the burden of proof is on the person who asserts a crime rather than denies it, is the basis of the principle of innocent until proven guilty.

exempli gratia: Usually abbreviated as “e.g.”, this phrase means “for the sake of example.”

flagrante delicto: A phrase that refers to the act of committing a crime, it means “blazing offense.”

mens rea: This phrase refers to one of two requirements for proving guilt: a “guilty mind”, or criminal responsibility.

modus operandi: Abbreviated as M.O. in colloquial English, this phrase means “manner of operation” and refers to a person’s particular way of doing something.

persona non grata: A phrase used to refer to unwelcome persons, usually in a diplomatic capacity.

pro bono: Meaning “for the public good”, this phrase refers to work done for free.

quid pro quo: A phrase designating an exchange of goods, services, or money, it means “this for that.”

sine qua non: A phrase that refers to an event essential to all subsequent consequences, it means “without which, nothing.”

subpoena: A common summons, it refers to an action done necessarily “under penalty” for failure to do so.

veto: A word referring to executive power to prevent an action, it means “I forbid.”

–

Un nuovo interessante e ricco glossario in lingua inglese da Mobile Cuisine vi aiuterà a districarvi tra parole come Asafoetida, Entrecôte o Puy Lentils . 


Buone ricette e buone ricerche  su  : http://mobile-cuisine.com/gourmet-glossary/new-mc-content-gourmet-glossary/

Our 12 words of 2012
Posted by Collins Language @ Wednesday 19 December 2012



 Here are the CollinsDictionary.com words of 2012 (drum roll please):


• January: Broga – January brought the launch of a new form of yoga tailored distinctly to men. The word “broga” comes from the combination of “bro” and yoga. [Current status: published]


• February: Legbomb – During the Oscars, actress Angelina Jolie posed with her right leg jutting out of her high-slit dress. The unusual pose prompted a new word, “legbomb,” and led to many parody images being created. [Current status: under review]


• March: Eurogeddon – In 2012, Europe was abuzz with the threat of “Eurogeddon” as the economic situation in the Euro zone worsened. A second bailout package was announced for Greece in March, which fuelled fears and debate across the region. [Current status: candidate]


• April: Mummy Porn – With the launch of the “50 Shades of Grey” book series in April, erotic fiction was given a new name. [Current status: published]


• May: Zuckered – In May, Facebook launched its initial public offering (IPO), and its share plummeted almost immediately after hitting the public market. This failure led to the word “zuckered,” named after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. [Current status: rejected]


• June: Jubilympics – The summer of 2012 was filled with exciting events in the UK. In June, Brits were preparing to host the London Olympics and celebrated the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. [Current status: under review]


• July: Romneyshambles – When U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney travelled to London, his serial gaffes led to a new word, “Romneyshambles.” [Current status: rejected]


• August: Games Makers – London’s vast team of Olympic volunteers were dubbed “Games Makers”. [Current status: under review]


• September: 47 per cent – Romney was secretly taped at a private fundraiser saying that 47 percent of Americans would vote for Obama no matter what because they are dependent on the government. The video and phrase spread virally and “47 percent” became a key phrase of the election. [Current status: under review]


• October: Superstorm – In late October 2012, Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc in portions of the Caribbean, the Mid-Atlantic and the northeastern United States. [Current status: candidate]


• November: Gangnam Style – South Korean musician PSY’s catchy song became the most viewed video on YouTube in November with close to a billion views. It has since spawned many spoofs in countries across the globe. [Current status: candidate]


• December: Fiscal cliff – As 2012 draws to a close, the U.S. government faces a “fiscal cliff,” or a sharp decrease in the government spending and an increase in taxes that could throw the economy back into recession. [Current status: candidate]


Which words do you think define each month? Post your suggestions on our facebook page or tweet @collinsdict.



To find out more about new word submissions visit www.collinsdictionary.com/whatsyourword.

http://www.collinsdictionary.com/words-and-language/blog/our-12-words-of-2012,62,HCB.html

Simultaneous translation by computer is getting closerJan 5th 2013 

IN “STAR TREK”, a television series of the 1960s, no matter how far across the universe the Starship Enterprise travelled, any aliens it encountered would converse in fluent Californian English. It was explained that Captain Kirk and his crew wore tiny, computerised Universal Translators that could scan alien brainwaves and simultaneously convert their concepts into appropriate English words.

Science fiction, of course. But the best sci-fi has a habit of presaging fact. Many believe the flip-open communicators also seen in that first “Star Trek” series inspired the design of clamshell mobile phones. And, on a more sinister note, several armies and military-equipment firms are working on high-energy laser weapons that bear a striking resemblance to phasers. How long, then, before automatic simultaneous translation becomes the norm, and all those tedious language lessons at school are declared redundant?

In this section

• Conquering Babel
• Toxic medicine
• Hysterectomy

Reprints
Related topics

• Google
• Artificial intelligence
• Communications
• Electronics
• Star Trek

Not, perhaps, as long as language teachers, interpreters and others who make their living from mutual incomprehension might like. A series of announcements over the past few months from sources as varied as mighty Microsoft and string-and-sealing-wax private inventors suggest that workable, if not yet perfect, simultaneous-translation devices are now close at hand.

Over the summer, Will Powell, an inventor in London, demonstrated a system that translates both sides of a conversation between English and Spanish speakers—if they are patient, and speak slowly. Each interlocutor wears a hands-free headset linked to a mobile phone, and sports special goggles that display the translated text like subtitles in a foreign film.

In November, NTT DoCoMo, the largest mobile-phone operator in Japan, introduced a service that translates phone calls between Japanese and English, Chinese or Korean. Each party speaks consecutively, with the firm’s computers eavesdropping and translating his words in a matter of seconds. The result is then spoken in a man’s or woman’s voice, as appropriate.

Microsoft’s contribution is perhaps the most beguiling. When Rick Rashid, the firm’s chief research officer, spoke in English at a conference in Tianjin in October, his peroration was translated live into Mandarin, appearing first as subtitles on overhead video screens, and then as a computer-generated voice. Remarkably, the Chinese version of Mr Rashid’s speech shared the characteristic tones and inflections of his own voice.

Que?

Though the three systems are quite different, each faces the same problems. The first challenge is to recognise and digitise speech. In the past, speech-recognition software has parsed what is being said into its constituent sounds, known as phonemes. There are around 25 of these in Mandarin, 40 in English and over 100 in some African languages. Statistical speech models and a probabilistic technique called Gaussian mixture modelling are then used to identify each phoneme, before reconstructing the original word. This is the technology most commonly found in the irritating voice-mail jails of companies’ telephone-answering systems. It works acceptably with a restricted vocabulary, but try anything more free-range and it mistakes at least one word in four.

The translator Mr Rashid demonstrated employs several improvements. For a start, it aims to identify not single phonemes but sequential triplets of them, known as senones. English has more than 9,000 of these. If they can be recognised, though, working out which words they are part of is far easier than would be the case starting with phonemes alone.

Microsoft’s senone identifier relies on deep neural networks, a mathematical technique inspired by the human brain. Such artificial networks are pieces of software composed of virtual neurons. Each neuron weighs the strengths of incoming signals from its neighbours and send outputs based on those to other neighbours, which then do the same thing. Such a network can be trained to match an input to an output by varying the strengths of the links between its component neurons.

One thing known for sure about real brains is that their neurons are arranged in layers. A deep neural network copies this arrangement. Microsoft’s has nine layers. The bottom one learns features of the processed sound waves of speech. The next layer learns combinations of those features, and so on up the stack, with more sophisticated correlations gradually emerging. The top layer makes a guess about which senone it thinks the system has heard. By using recorded libraries of speech with each senone tagged, the correct result can be fed back into the network, in order to improve its performance.

Microsoft’s researchers claim that their deep-neural-network translator makes at least a third fewer errors than traditional systems and in some cases mistakes as few as one word in eight. Google has also started using deep neural networks for speech recognition (although not yet translation) on its Android smartphones, and claims they have reduced errors by over 20%. Nuance, another provider of speech-recognition services, reports similar improvements. Deep neural networks can be computationally demanding, so most speech-recognition and translation software (including that from Microsoft, Google and Nuance) runs in the cloud, on powerful online servers accessible in turn by smartphones or home computers.

Quoi?

Recognising speech is, however, only the first part of translation. Just as important is converting what has been learned not only into foreign words (hard enough, given the ambiguities of meaning which all languages display, and the fact that some concepts are simply untranslatable), but into foreign sentences. These often have different grammatical rules, and thus different conventional word orders. So even when the English words in a sentence are known for certain, computerised language services may produce stilted or humorously inaccurate translations.

Google’s solution for its Translate smartphone app and web service is crowd-sourcing. It compares the text to be translated with millions of sentences that have passed through its software, and selects the most appropriate. Jibbigo, whose translator app for travellers was spun out from research at Carnegie Mellon University, works in a similar way but also pays users in developing countries to correct their mother-tongue translations. Even so, the ultimate elusiveness of language can cause machine-translation specialists to feel a touch of Weltschmerz.

For example, although the NTT DoCoMo phone-call translator is fast and easy to use, it struggles—even though it, too, uses a neural network—with anything more demanding than pleasantries. Sentences must be kept short to maintain accuracy, and even so words often get jumbled.


Microsoft is betting that listeners will be more forgiving of such errors when dialogue is delivered in the speaker’s own voice. Its new system can encode the distinctive timbre of this by analysing about an hour’s worth of recordings. It then generates synthesised speech with a similar spread of frequencies. The system worked well in China, where Mr Rashid’s computerised (and occasionally erroneous) Mandarin was met with enthusiastic applause.

A universal translator that works only in conference halls, however, would be of limited use to travellers, whether intergalactic or merely intercontinental. Mr Powell’s conversation translator will work anywhere that there is a mobile-phone signal. Speech picked up by the headsets is fed into speech-recognition software on a nearby laptop, and the resulting text is sent over the mobile-phone network to Microsoft’s translation engine online.

One big difficulty when translating conversations is determining who is speaking at any moment. Mr Powell’s system does this not by attempting to recognise voices directly, but rather by running all the speech it hears through two translation engines simultaneously: English to Spanish, and Spanish to English. Since only one of the outputs is likely to make any sense, the system can thus decide who is speaking. That done, it displays the translation in the other person’s goggles.

At the moment, the need for the headsets, cloud services and intervening laptop means Mr Powell’s simultaneous system is still very much a prototype. Consecutive, single-speaker translation is more advanced. The most sophisticated technology currently belongs to Jibbigo, which has managed to squeeze speech recognition and a 40,000-word vocabulary for ten languages into an app that runs on today’s smartphones without needing an internet connection at all.

Nani?

Some problems remain. In the real world, people talk over one another, use slang or chat on noisy streets, all of which can foil even the best translation system. But though it may be a few more years before “Star Trek” style conversations become commonplace, universal translators still look set to beat phasers, transporter beams and warp drives in moving from science fiction into reality.


From the print edition: Science and technology

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21569014-simultaneous-translation-computer-getting-closer-conquering-babel

The default answer to the above is surely "making it worse." When it comes to social networks, grammar, syntax, spelling, and all the rest of it give way to decomposed bites of, hopefully, meaning. If meaning is sustained, what difference do the materials make? Just the other day my dad was ripping on me for using bad grammar in a text message (note: it wasn't that bad), with my reply being something along the lines of, it's just a text message.

I don't really believe that answer, understanding well enough why rules of language exist, but that worry dominates most of the conversation about language and social media, and even digital communication in general. There are other, more interesting possibilities for language in the new world.

One of those is the possibility of rapid language fragmentation, or new online subgroups generating new languages or language variants. So, rather than the many hundreds of years it took for all of the different languages of the Germanic people settling Great Britain to melt together into English, we have very fine-tuned communities coming together in zero time, relatively speaking, and spending tons of time communicating with each other online.

Groups of Twitter users based on language, from Bryden et al.
So, you could view our current situation as language evolution in fast-forward, and now it seems that we have some proof. A trio of researchers led by the University of London's John Bryden has a new paper out suggesting that, based on language analysis, Twitter users are separating into communities (the Guardian says "tribe," rather unfortunately).

In the author's words, "... we were able to predict the network community of a user, a purely structural feature, by studying his or her word usage, and we found that this was possible with rapidly growing accuracy for relatively few words sampled."

So, based on things like word length, words, and word-fragments, the team was able to pick out which online communities were which, or even that those communities exist. No hashtags needed. Most of the paper's discussion has to do with information/belief spread and community identification--and new, better ways of doing so--and less so with language development, but it's interesting to consider Twitter communities in the more distant future and what they means for words. I can think of obvious anecdotal stuff like 4chan slang or whatever, but this seems to suggest something more natural.

If we can pick out online communities--perhaps so-far undefined communities--by the words they use and how they use them, define them by language, it would seem those divisions should influence the development of that language. 

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/what-is-social-networking-doing-to-language

A study comparing mood-related words in U.S. and British books shows that Americans increasingly use emotional words more often.
By Shaunacy FerroPosted 03.22.2013 at 12:58 pm2 Comments

Mood Madness Intgr via Wikimedia Commons
If you pick up a British book, a few cultural differences might easily differentiate it from a member of the American canon -- a penchant for spelling words with an extra "u," an unfamiliar slang word...and perhaps the literary equivalent of a stiff upper lip. According to new research, over the last half a century, American writing has shown a significant uptick in emotional wordscompared books written by our friends across the pond.

A study published in PLOS ONE this week examined books from the last century in Google'sNgram Viewer, a database that visualizes the frequency of certain keywords in more than 5 million tomes, and found that since the mid-century, American and British word usage has diverged.

Tracing the usage of words that convey six moods (joy, surprise, anger, sadness, fear, disgust), the authors found that in general, words that indicate mood have decreased over time -- except fear, a mood that has been enjoying a resurgence since the 1970s. Usage of words that indicate positive and negative emotions also corresponded to larger historical trends. There was an increase in joy during the roaring '20s and the swinging '60s, for example, but a drop toward sadness in during World War II.


Spikes In Emotion: Usage of positive and negative mood indicators corresponded to historical trends. During World War II, negative emotional words were more prevalent.  Acerbi et al.


During the first half of the 20th century, British books were similar in emotional content -- or even a little more emotional -- than American books. But since 1960, American literature has had more and more emotional "mood" content than their British counterparts. The same trend was found in American and English usage of content-free words like "and," "but" and "the," suggesting that a larger stylistic difference has emerged.



Decreasing Emotion In Fiction: The decrease in emotional words used in fiction over time. Fear (red) had the highest final value, while disgust (blue) had the lowest.  Acerbi et al.


In a statement from the University of Brisol, co-author Alex Bentley, a professor of archaeology and anthropology, explained one possible reason for the divergence:

We don't know exactly what happened in the Sixties but our results show that this is the precise moment in which literary American and British English started to diverge.  We can only speculate whether this was connected, for example, to the baby-boom or to the rising of counterculture.

In the USA, baby boomers grew up in the greatest period of economic prosperity of the century, whereas the British baby boomers grew up in a post-war recovery period so perhaps 'emotionalism' was a luxury of economic growth.


However, the authors write that while the study certainly reflects a trend in published language, it's uncertain whether or not that trend is present in the population at large. 


It has been suggested, for example, that it was the suppression of desire in ordinary Elizabethan English life that increased demand for writing “obsessed with romance and sex." So while it is easy to conclude that Americans have themselves become more ‘emotional’ over the past several decades, perhaps songs and books may not reflect the real population any more than catwalk models reflect the average body; the observed changes reflect the book market, rather than a direct change in American culture.
So it's possible we're not a complete emotional mess. We just want to read about people who are.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-03/american-english-has-become-way-more-emotional-british-english

ENGLISH IDIOMS AND THE WORLD OF FASHION0 2/10/12

The language of fashion is often as creative and diverse as the garments it describes. However, there are a number of English idioms that pop up again and again when talking about clothing and trends. The following list entails 32 of them: 

1. au courant
The term au courant refers to ❛something that is up-to-date and/or reflects the latest styles and trends❜. 
Example: Fashion magazines are full of glamorous pictures of au courant clothing and accessories.

2. avant-garde
When something is avant-garde, it is ❛very modern and revolutionary❜.
Example: What one person might describe as avant-garde, another might find over-the-top and silly.

3. blast from the past
The English idiom a blast from the past refers to ❛something that makes you think of the past❜.
Example: These polyester jumpsuits are a real blast from the past. My mother wore similar ones in the 1970s.

4. can’t hold a candle to someone/something
When something can’t hold a candle to someone or something, he, she or it is ❛not as good❜ in comparison.
Example: This season’s fashion show can’t hold a candle to those from last year. It was phenomenal.

5. to blaze a trail /to be a trailblazer
Someone who blazes a trail, i.e. a trailblazer, is ❛a leader or revolutionary in a certain field❜ .
Example: Is Lady Gaga a fashion trailblazer?

6. cheap and cheerful
Clothing that ❛does not cost much but is attractive❜ can be described as cheap and cheerful.
Example: If you like cheap and cheerful fashion, this clothing line is the right one for you.

7. Clothes make the man.
This English idiom implies that ❛people will judge you by your clothes❜, i.e. good clothes will make people respect you more.
Example: Why did Sam go to the job interview looking like that? Doesn’t he know that clothes make the man?

8. fashion victim
A fashion victim is ❛someone who wears fashionable clothes even when they do not look good on him❜.
Example: Those capri pants might be in style, but they don’t look good on you, Louise. Don’t be a fashion victim!

9. free and easy
The term free and easy refers to something that is ❛unconstrained and informal❜, i.e. the opposite of stiff and formal.
Example: This summer’s designs are free and easy.

10. fashion faux pas
A fashion faux pas is ❛a fashion mistake❜.
Example: Wearing green and yellow tennis shoes to the wedding was a fashion faux pas that Bernice will never forget.

11. to be a cut above
Something that is a cut above is ❛superior❜ or ❛better❜ than something else.
Example: The workmanship of this dress is a cut above.

12. to be a slave to fashion
Someone who is a slave to fashion is ❛someone who wears clothes and accessories solely because they are in style❜.
Example: Too many people are slaves to fashion. Forget about trends - wear what looks good on you!

13. to be all the rage
Something that is all the rage is something that is ❛in❜ or ❛currently fashionable❜.
Example: Floor-length dresses are the latest rage.

14. to be dressed to the nines
When you are dressed to the nines, you are ❛wearing fashionable, fancy or attractive clothes that make you look very good❜.
Example: Did you see Beverly at last night’s reception? She was dressed to the nines.

15. to be in (style)
When something is in or is in style, it is ❛fashionable at the moment❜.
Example: I didn’t know that harem pants were in last year.

16. to be striking / stunning
When something is striking or is stunning, it ❛attracts attention because it is exceptionally beautiful, different or unusual❜.
Example: The blouse’s asymmetrical neckline is stunning.

17. to be out (of style)
When something is out or is out of style, it is ❛no longer fashionable❜.
Example: I didn’t know that harem pants are out this year.

18. to catch on
The English idiom to catch on means ❛to become popular or fashionable❜.
Example: A-line skirts have really caught on, although I, personally, prefer pencil skirts.

19. to catch someone’s eye / to be eye-catching
If something catches your eye or is eye-catching, it is ❛exceptionally attractive or noticeable❜.
Example: This year’s bright colors are very eye-catching.

20. to come into fashion
If something comes into fashion, ❛it becomes fashionable❜.
Example: He wondered whether leather hats will come into fashion again.




21. to cut a fine figure
If you cut a fine figure,you ❛look good and cause others to admire your appearance❜.
Example: Bruce cut a fine figure in his new black suit.

22. to dance to someone else’s tune
Someone who dance’s to someone else’s tune ❛does what he is told or in the same way that others have done before him❜.
Example: A revolutionary designer does not dance to anyone else’s tune. He dances to his own tune.

23. to each his / her own
The idiom to each his own means that ❛people have different tastes❜.
Example: In my opinion, the colors were not complementary. To each his own, I guess.

24. to fit like a glove
When something ❛fits very well❜ or ❛ fits perfectly❜, it fits like a glove.
Example: Her wedding dress fit like a glove 3 months before the wedding, but it needed to be let out just before the ceremony.

25. to go out of fashion
When a style our item of clothing goes out of fashion, it is ❛no longer fashionable❜.
Example: Shoulder pads went out of fashion in the late 1980s.

26. to go overboard (on something)
The expression to go overboard (on something) means ❛to use or do too much of something❜.
Example: I love, glamor and shine, but it is not a good idea to go overboard on the glitter.

27. to have had its day
When something has had its day, it is ❛old, no longer useful, no longer successful or outdated❜. In the world of fashion, this expression could apply to a piece of clothing, a trend or a person working in the industry.
Example: I think that Dad’s checkered suit has had its day. It’s time to buy a new one.

28. to have had one’s fill of something
If you have had your fill of something, you ❛have had too much of it and don’t like it anymore❜.
Example: I have had my fill of pastel colors. From now on, I only want to wear black.

29. to make a fashion statement
If you make a fashion statement, you ❛wear something that expresses your personal taste and/or is attention-grabbing❜.
Example: Michael’s pink plaid pants made a fashion statement at work last week.

30. to turn heads / to be head-turning
When something or someone turns heads or is head-turning, it ❛gets people’s attention❜.
Example: The designer’s polka-dot patterns and bright colors were head-turning.

31. to work wonders
The English idiom to work wonders means ❛to improve something a lot❜.
Example: That style works wonders for your figure. You look fabulous!

32. yesterday’s news
The expression yesterday’s news refers to ❛something that everyone already knows❜ or ❛something that no one is interested in anymore❜.
Example: These bold patterns are yesterday’s news. Today, people are wearing solids in subtle colors.

http://www.english-idioms.com/articles/files/fashion-idioms.html