What’s the weirdest way of delivering information that still sounds like language and what can we learn from it?
We live and breathe language. We take it so for granted that we often don’t realise how amazing it is. Even someone who spends most of their time with language, like me, can still be surprised by things that language does. When I was growing up, language seemed very straight forward, almost boring. If I […]
What “yes” and “no” can tell us about how people think
Sometimes the simplest words can actually turn out to not be simple at all. We only see them as simple because we use them every day, but we don’t realise all the complexity that is involved. There is something humans do quite effortlessly, which is work with commonly held ideas without even realising they are […]
Why “good”, “better”, “best”?
Get instant access to more than 70 issues of our magazine by subscribing here We have “tall”, “taller”, and “tallest”, “high”, “higher” and “highest”, “big”, “bigger” and “biggest”. Why do we not have “good”, “gooder” and “goodest”? Or rather, why is it not something like “bet”, “better”, “best”, where “bet” means “good”? What we have […]
Could A Language Change Families?
If any language in the world could have become something different, it would have been English, the language that seems to beat up others in an alley.
Why do people say “me and my friend”?
Short answer: English probably works differently than we think it does Long answer: People use their native language effortlessly provided they don’t have something physically wrong with their brain or any other sort of mental impairment. Language is an amazingly complex thing. We have adjectives, nouns, pronouns, adverbs, verbs, conjunctions and all sorts of other […]
“bae” does not come from “Before All Else”
Let’s talk about acronyms. There is a story going around that “bae” comes from “Before All Else”. There are similar stories like this and all of them are wrong. Here are some of them. “posh” comes from “Port Out Starboard Home” “fuck” comes from “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” and so on The problem with these […]
