Posted by Jessica Gross on Ted Blog

Texting is not a blight on the English language, says linguist John McWhorter in today’s talk, given at TED2013. Rather, texting is a “miraculous thing”: a novel linguistic mode that’s redefining the way we communicate with each other — for the better.

John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!McWhorter points out that texting shouldn’t be categorized as written language –but as speech. This shift makes the apparent problem of grammatical errors seem misplaced and unimportant.

If we think of texting as “fingered speech,” as McWhorter puts it, it also opens our eyes to texting’s distinct linguistic rules, structures and nuances. McWhorter dives into the example of “lol,” which originally stood for “laughing out loud.” But over the past few years, “lol” has “evolved into something that is much subtler,” signifying empathy and accommodation.

As the mediums through which we communicate quickly multiply, our modes of communication are following suit. After you’ve watched the talk, here are some more examples of new linguistic forms that have developed in tandem with technology.

1. Like “lol,” hashtags started out with a literal function: making topics easy to tag, and thus search for, on Twitter. But in 2010, Susan Orlean, a writer and avid tweeter, pointed out that hashtags had taken on an emotional resonance. Orlean gives this (dated, sorry) example: “Sarah Palin for President??!? #Iwouldratherhaveamoose.” She writes that, while no one would search for “Iwouldratherhaveamoose,” its use here “makes it look like it’s being muttered into a handkerchief; when you read it you feel like you’ve had an intimate moment in which the writer leaned over and whispered ‘I would rather have a moose!’ in your ear.” Hashtags can also be used to indicate a joke, or even — when employed back-to-back –comment on the hashtag that came before. “Amazing how rich and complex 140 characters with a few symbols thrown in can be,” Orlean writes. And how much richer they are now, three years later.
   .
2. GIFs, those omnipresent video loops, are nothing new: they date back to 1987. But in recent years, they’ve started to populate blogs and articles, standing in for written descriptions, often to hilarious effect. Take #WhatShouldWeCallMe (there’s that hashtag again!), a Tumblr started by two friends in law school on opposite sides of the country, where Austin Powers stands in for the boundless joy of discovering your roommate has cleaned and a panda illustrates massive post-party regret. Orthis personal essay about a New Yorker’s experience during Hurricane Sandy, where the accompanying GIFs help make the horrifying event lighter and easier to process.
   .
3. “Fingered speech” though it may be, cellphone communication is generating new avenues for writing, too. In 2008, The New York Times reported from Japan thatcellphone novels (what they sound like: novels written on cellphones) had dominated the previous year’s list of best-selling books. One woman wrote hers, which hit number five on the best-sellers list, during her commute to work. “[M]any cellphone novelists had never written fiction before, and many of their readers had never read novels before, according to publishers,” the Times article notes. (A 2010Los Angeles Times article indicated the trend was still in full force.)
   .
4. More recently, Twitter, too, has been coopted as a tool for fiction. Last year, Jennifer Egan wrote a short story in 140-character nuggets, which were posted on Twitter before they were published in The New Yorker as “Black Box.” A few months later, novelist Elliott Holt wrote her own Twitter story, creating three different avatars/characters and posting from “their” accounts. “The three characters have distinct voices—and by telling the story through them, Holt embraces Twitter for what it is, rather than trying to bend it into some tool that it isn’t,” Slate opined. “With its simultaneous narrators and fractured storyline, this is not the kind of tale that could march steadily across a continuous expanse of white space. It’s actually made for the medium.”
   .
5. Email signoffs, as all things, have their haters: many a screed has implored humanity to dispense with these vulgar written appendages. (Admittedly, this rant inSlate is hilarious: “My transition from signoff submissive to signoff subversive began when a former colleague ended an email to me with ‘Warmest regards.’ Were these scalding hot regards superior to the ordinary ‘Regards’ I had been receiving on a near-daily basis?”) But others among us appreciate the space for expression that signoffs offer. Sadie Stein, in the Paris Review Daily, explains her own choice, “As ever.” And a few years ago, The New York Times offered this survey of signoffs from a bishop’s “+” to Norman Mailer’s “Cheers” to the author’s own “Carpe Diem.”

John McWhorter was a part of TED’s worldwide talent search, giving a shorter version of his talk at the New York stop of the tour. After the talk, he sat down with the TED Blog for this short Q&A »

McWhorter would also like to thank his students at Columbia University for teaching him about the new world of texting: specifically Yin Yin Lu, Sarah Tully, and Laura Milmed for the miracle of “slash.”

Posted by Jessica Gross on Ted Blog 

Economist Keith Chen starts today’s talk with an observation: to say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.

Keith Chen: Could your language affect your ability to save money?“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

1. Navigation and Pormpuraawans
   In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.
   .
2. Blame and English Speakers
   In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.
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3. Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
   Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.
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4. Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
   In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

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

The rise of social media has put "conversation without speech" at the centre of millions of lives, as Tom Chatfield explains

Where once speech was the driving force behind language change, we are moving into an era where writing – or, more precisely, the act of typing on to screens – is a dominant form of verbal interaction. And this has brought with it an accelerating transformation of not only the words we use, but how we read each others' lives.

Consider the emoticon: a human face sketched from three punctuation marks. Born during the course of an early online discussion in 1982, courtesy of computer scientist Scott Fahlman, it addressed one central absence of onscreen words: a human face able to indicate emotional tone.

Fahlman coined two basic expressions – "happy" and "sad" (signalling "joking" and "not joking" respectively) – but further variations almost immediately began to spring up, stretching today into many thousands. Aside from bewildering ingenuity, one thing all of these share is that they are unpronounceable: symbols aimed at the eye rather than at the ear, like an emotionally enriched layer of punctuation.

There's nothing inherently new about such effects. In 1925, the American professor George Krapp coined the phrase "eye dialect" to describe the use of selected mis-spellings in fiction signalling a character's accent without requiring a phonetic rendering of their speech. Mark Twain, for example, used just a handful of spelling variations to convey the colourful speech of his character Jim in Huckleberry Finn (1884), such as "ben" for been and "wuz" for was.

The "z" of Twain's wuz might have a strangely contemporary feel to some readers, courtesy of the so-called "internet z" – a common typo for the letter "s" that has taken on a new life in typed terms such as "lulz", denoting an anarchistic flavour of online amusement via the mangling of the acronym "laughs out loud" (LOL).

While he was a master of visual verbal effects, Twain wouldn't have recognised the strange reversal of traditional relationships between written and spoken language that something like LOL represents. For, where once speech came first and writing gradually formalised its eccentricities, we're now typing some terms and only then learning to speak them.

LOL itself features increasingly in speech (either spelt out or pronounced to rhyme with "doll") together with its partner in crime, OMG (Oh My God!), while some of the more eccentric typo-inspired terms used in online games (to "pwn" someone, meaning to subject them to a humiliating defeat) can't even be said out loud. And if that lies outside your experience, consider the familiarity with which almost all of us now say "dot com" or talk about a "dotcom" business: a web-induced articulation of punctuation that would have inconceivable in any other era.

These may sound like niche preoccupations but, in the past few years, the rise of social media has put what you might call "conversation without speech" at the centre of millions of lives. Every single day sees more than 100 billion emails and 300 million tweets sent. Video, audio and images are increasingly common, too, with more than 72 hours of new video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Yet almost all our onscreen exchanges still begin and end with words, from comments and status updates to typed search queries and the text message.

There's something magnificent about our capacity for cramming emotional shading into even the most constricted of verbal arenas, and making them our own. From text messages with more punctuation appended than most standard paragraphs to tweets with startlingly elaborate subtexts spelled out via hash tags (#gently- selfmocking), our creativity knows few bounds – together with our ability to read between the lines and convert even the unlikeliest sequence of 140 characters into a human story.

Similarly, the democratisation of written words is an astonishing thing, not least because it gifts permanence to so much that has historically been lost – and supplants those speaking on others' behalf with an opportunity to directly encounter every individual's words.

Yet there are hazards and seductions within our ingenuity. As writers, our words belong to the world rather than simply to us, and they can be both read and used in ways we cannot foresee – not to mention aggregated, shared, copied and analysed for far longer than we ourselves may exist.

Then, too, there's the fact that we cannot see or know what the faces behind typed words are actually doing; or what the grand performance of social-media selves conceals as well as reveals. We are, in this sense, vulnerable precisely because of our lavish linguistic talents. We cannot help but read our own meanings into everything we see, forgetting the breadth of the gulf between words and world.

"The man who does not read," Twain once wrote, "has no advantage over the man who cannot read." What might he have made, though, of the man who only reads, or does not know how to listen?

Professionally and personally, we live in an age where the messy self-exposure of speech – of even a conversation by phone or Skype – can seem at once too self-exposing and ephemeral to be useful. Onscreen, typing, the world seems clean and comprehensible; ripe for copying, pasting, sorting and – if necessary – for the most careful construction of even the most spontaneous-seeming quip.

We have never been more privileged as readers and writers, or more finely attuned to the subtexts that can lurk within even a single letter. Yet conversation is an art that must not be supplanted, not least because it reminds us of what the screen cannot say; and of the constant fiction between what is thought, written and understood, and whatever truths lie behind these.

Tom Chatfield's book, 'Netymology: a Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World' is published by Quercus


http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/say-what-you-see-how-language-is-being-transformed-by-the-way-we-type--rather-than-the-way-we-speak-8656187.html

An international study suggests languages shape how we think about the future, and how we plan for it

By Ozgun Atasoy


Does the language we speak determine how healthy and rich we will be? New researchby Keith Chen of Yale Business School suggests so. The structure of languages affects our judgments and decisions about the future and this might have dramatic long-term consequences.

There has been a lot of research into how we deal with the future. For example, the famous marshmallow studies of Walter Mischel and colleagues showed that being able to resist temptation is predictive of future success. Four-year-old kids were given a marshmallow and were told that if they do not eat that marshmallow and wait for the experimenter to come back, they will get two marshmallows instead of one. Follow-up studies showed that the kids who were able to wait for the bigger future reward became more successful young adults.

Resisting our impulses for immediate pleasure is often the only way to attain the outcomes that are important to us. We want to keep a slim figure but we also want that last slice of pizza. We want a comfortable retirement, but we also want to drive that dazzling car, go on that dream vacation, or get those gorgeous shoes. Some people are better at delaying gratification than others. Those people have a better chance of accumulating wealth and keeping a healthy life style. They are less likely to be impulse buyers or smokers, or to engage in unsafe sex.

Chen’s recent findings suggest that an unlikely factor, language, strongly affects our future-oriented behavior. Some languages strongly distinguish the present and the future. Other languages only weakly distinguish the present and the future. Chen’s recent research suggests that people who speak languages that weakly distinguish the present and the future are better prepared for the future. They accumulate more wealth and they are better able to maintain their health. The way these people conceptualize the future is similar to the way they conceptualize the present. As a result, the future does not feel very distant and it is easier for them to act in accordance with their future interests.

Different languages have different ways of talking about the future. Some languages, such as English, Korean, and Russian, require their speakers to refer to the future explicitly. Every time English-speakers talk about the future, they have to use future markers such as “will” or “going to.” In other languages, such as Mandarin, Japanese, and German, future markers are not obligatory. The future is often talked about similar to the way present is talked about and the meaning is understood from the context. A Mandarin speaker who is going to go to a seminar might say “Wo qu ting jiangzuo,” which translates to “I go listen seminar.” Languages such as English constantly remind their speakers that future events are distant. For speakers of languages such as Mandarin future feels closer. As a consequence, resisting immediate impulses and investing for the future is easier for Mandarin speakers.

Chen analyzed individual-level data from 76 developed and developing countries. This data includes people’s economic decisions, such as whether they saved any money last year, the languages they speak at home, demographics, and cultural factors such as   “saving is an important cultural value for me.” He also analyzed individual-level data on people’s retirement assets, smoking and exercising habits, and general health in older age. Lastly, he analyzed national-level data that includes national savings rates, country GDP and GDP growth rates, country demographics, and proportions of people speaking different languages.

People’s savings rates are affected by various factors such as their income, education level, age, religious affiliation, their countries’ legal systems, and their cultural values. After those factors were accounted for, the effect of language on people’s savings rates turned out to be big. Speaking a language that has obligatory future markers, such as English, makes people 30 percent less likely to save money for the future. This effect is as large as the effect of unemployment. Being unemployed decreases the likelihood of saving by about 30 percent as well.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-language-effects-your-wealth-health