Language Museum Blog

I came across a fun word game on Word Dynamo that is intended for American students studying for their SATs. As I read English at university I fancied my chances of attaining a perfect score but a few words managed to stump me. I managed to get 44/47 on the quiz and I thought I would include the words that eluded me and their definitions below.

Assiduous – Showing great care and perseverance.

Perfidious – Deceitful and untrustworthy.

Querulous – Complaining in a petulant or whining manner.

Online word games are a fantastic way to enhance your vocabulary and I am going to try and commit these words to memory so I can use them in day to day speech. The quiz I completed can be found HERE. Why not give it a go and see i you can beat my score.

You wouldn’t imagine the fusty world of dictionaries could spark much controversy but in Australia the definition of the word misogyny has done just that. Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has come under fire for supposedly misusing the word misogyny when critiquing the leader of the opposition. Prompted by this incident, one of Australia’s most respected dictionaries, the Macquarie Dictionary, has decided to update it’s definition of the word. From solely meaning a person that hates women the Macquarie Dictionary has decided to also include it’s common usage meaning “entrenched prejudice against women”.

“Since the 1980s, misogyny has come to be used as a synonym for sexism, a synonym with bite, but nevertheless with the meaning of entrenched prejudice against women rather than pathological hatred,” [Sue Butler, editor of the Macquarie Dictionary] said in a statement.

While the Oxford English Dictionary had reworded its definition a decade ago, staff at the Macquarie had been alerted to the issue only in the aftermath of Gillard’s extraordinary speech in parliament, she said. “Perhaps as dictionary editors we should have noticed this before it was so rudely thrust in front of us as something that we’d overlooked,” Butler told the Associated Press.

[Source – The Guardian]

This story is fascinating to me because it shows how much power dictionary makers have. Redefining a word or merely adding another usage to it’s meaning can have large scale consequences. Amazingly a small alteration of the word misogyny in one dictionary is causing a political firestorm in Australia today.

Acronyms are found everywhere in the English language. Most people know what VIP (Very Important Person), SOS (Save Our Souls) and UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) stand for. Some acronyms no longer require knowledge of what the letters actually stand for though, as they have become words in their own right. SCUBA for instance, as in scuba diving, is an acronym standing for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Similarly the word radar stands for Radio Detection, and Ranging, and laser began as an acronym meaning Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

The amount of acronyms used in everyday speech has increased in modern times because of technology like mobile phones and the internet. LOL (Laugh Out Loud) is perhaps the most well known of all ‘text speak’ acronyms. Below is a handy list I’ve compiled of ‘text speak’ acronyms so when your coworker says, LOL you don’t mistake their appreciation of your hilarity for a declaration of love (Lots Of Love).

BRB – Be Right Back

GTG – Got To Go

FYI – For Your Information

TMI – Too Much Information

TTYL – Talk To You Later

BTW – By The Way

TYVM – Thank You Very Much

What would the English language be like without the letter G?

An intriguing article at dictionary.com explores this question. The letter C used to represent the sounds of both ‘g’ and ‘c’. It was only after the invasion of William the Conqueror and the adoption of French as the lingua franca that the two were represented by different letters.

Both G and C have their origin in the Phoenician letter gimel, which meant “camel,” and looked something like an upside-down V (think of a camel’s hump—which, some believe may have been the inspiration for the letter’s shape). The Phonecians used gimel to indicate a sound that is equivalent to our present-day G (like the sound in “got”).

The Greeks borrowed gimel from the Phoenicians and renamed it gamma. Like the Phoenicians, the Greeks used the letter to represent the guttural G sound. When the Romans adopted gamma from the Greeks, however, they made a significant change. (Source: Dictionary.com)

Could we go back to having no ‘g’? What do you think?

I enjoy playing word games, and recently came across this one on Sporcle.

You’ve got 10 minutes to try and match 26 ‘nonsense’ words to their definition or etymology.

I got a fairly dismal 11 in 3 minutes; can you do better?

Management speak seems to be slowly creeping in to everyday English.

One example is “going forward”, where we used to say “from now on”. Comedian David Mitchell is vehemently against this change, and you can hear his rant in the video below:

I wear glasses all the time, but they serve no purpose other than to correct my extreme short-sightedness.

For the money they cost, surely glasses could do more? Well, a British inventor has created a pair of specs that can do a rough translation during a conversation. Will Powell was inspired by Google’s Project Glass, which aims to create augmented reality glasses, and is still in development. At one point Google’s glasses were predicted to be on sale by the end of the year, but this now looks unlikely.

Take a look at the video of Will Powell’s glasses to see how they work.

We live in a multi-cultural society, so in our everyday lives, it’s likely we’ll encounter someone with an unfamiliar name.

If you work in higher education, it’s likely that you’ll meet international students all day long. So you might become familiar with how to pronounce certain names… but what about others?

California State Polytechnic University in America has produced a handy website if you’re not sure about pronunciation of Asian names. It also links to resources for help with names from around the world. Each page is linked to a particular language and has helpful hints as well as phonetic pronunciations of particular common names. You can also search the site for something specific.

Have you tried the website? It seem that it hasn’t been updated for a while – what do you think?

Research has found that stereotypes evolve in a similar way to languages.

The research, presented at the British Science Festival in Scotland, was carried out by a team at the University of Aberdeen. They found that stereotypes are an “unintended consequence” of information sharing, which evolve as they move between people.

To address the genesis of such stereotypes, Dr Doug Martin and colleagues from the University of Aberdeen’s Person Perception Lab designed an experiment using aliens – an approach previously used to study the origins and evolution of language.

The aliens they invented each had a different colour, shape and set of personality traits; such as arrogance, pushiness or selfishness.

The team then asked a volunteer to learn the characteristics assigned to each one. The information retained by the volunteer was then fed down a communication chain.

What started out as jumbled and complex individual characteristics and traits ended up encompassed in sets of stereotypes.

Character traits became inextricably linked with form and colour – for example, blue aliens might be perceived as arrogant, pushy and untrusting. (Source: BBC News)

The experiment sounds a bit like a game of Chinese Whispers! The researchers will next be looking at if stereotypes can be manipulated.

This interesting infographic from Kaplan International looks at how non-native English speakers learn the language.

One of the things that grabs me from the infographic is the stat that 82% of people said that TV shows helped them learn English (with a focus on American sitcoms like Friends and How I Met Your Mother). This stat is reflected in anecdotal evidence from friends who have learned English – they all say they picked up a lot from watching TV!

It’s perhaps a little harder to find shows in your target language, but it seems like it’s worth the effort. If you enjoy the show you seem to get more language benefits from it!