From ‘covidiots’ to ‘quarantine and chill’, the pandemic has led to many terms that help people laugh and commiserate. Throughout history, challenging circumstances have given rise to new ways of expressing those challenges. George Eliot, the 19th Century writer who was famously frustrated by rigid gender and lifestyle norms, is credited with the first recorded use of the word ‘frustrating’. More…
If you find good things without looking for them, serendipity – unexpected good luck – brought them to you. The first noted use of the word ‘serendipity’ in the English language was by Horace Walpole on 28 January 1754. This rare word thus does not come from Latin or Greek, but rather was coined by this British nobleman from an…
BREXIT – for those not following every twist and turn, this is what you need to know: What is Brexit? Brexit – a portmanteau of “British” and “exit” – refers to the withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU). A public vote (known as a referendum) was held on 23 June 2016, when 17.4 million British…
This is a great question, but it is such a hard question that in 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris got sick of people writing about it with nothing more than guesses, and banned articles on the topic. Fortunately, scientific progress in the past 150 years has changed this situation. We don’t have all the answers, but we can make…
Is English a “weird” language? Many of us might feel this is true when we’re trying to explain its complex spelling rules, or the meanings of idioms such as “it’s raining cats and dogs” to someone who is learning it. Teaching or learning any language is, however, never an easy task. But what is a “weird” language anyway? As linguists,…
A short hypnotic video tells the evolution of our species with a dramatic flipbook animation
Time is relative, and there’s even something illusionist about it, and this is especially true when we try to condense the entire history of humanity within a small flipbook. This video does just that. It tells the story of the species: 550 million years of evolution in just a few seconds.
As English takes over the world, it’s splintering and changing – and soon, we may not recognise it at all This article is excerpted from the new book, “The Language Wars: A History of Proper English” from Farrar, Straus and Girous. No language has spread as widely as English, and it continues to spread. Internationally the desire to learn it is…
What do you get if you cross a kangaroo with an elephant? You’ll have to wait for the punchline, but you should already have shards of meaning tumbling about your mind. Now, jokes don’t have to be all that funny, of course, but if they are to work at all then they must construct something beyond the simple words deployed.…
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to eliminate jobs once considered impossible to automate. One series of papers by Oxford researchers ranks jobs by their estimated susceptibility to automation. Among those most rated likely to vanish – because they involve work that AI can increasingly accomplish less expensively – are real estate brokers, insurance claims adjusters and sports referees.…
