An expert in political rhetoric singles out Trump’s repeated use of reification – the tendency to treat people as things – and the role it’s played in his tortured response to the leaked tape.
Auto-translation software has been pretty frustrating to use. But news of vast improvements to Google’s translation software raises the prospect that websites will soon be browsable in any language.
Universities pay too little attention to the knowledge and experiences that students bring to their institutions from different cultures and backgrounds.
Humans have invented many technologies to survive better – spears, pots, calculators, even language. With language, however, the raw material used to fashion the technology is the human body itself.
Schools and universities in post-colonial contexts still operate within the logic of coloniality. This is starkly illustrated by their language policies.
When botany and linguistics collide: pumpkins are fruits and there’s technically no such thing as a vegetable. But try telling that to a five-year-old and see how far you get.
A “passion” was once thought of as a love or desire so irresistible as to take one to the threshold of death. What are we to make, then, of a passion for innovation or management consulting? What’s happening to our words?
Some argue that it would be impossible to understand an alien language, as it wouldn’t have the same grammar as humans use. But others are more optimistic.
For centuries, written communication was tinged with formality and finality. But since the emergence of casual forms like texting, using proper grammar can be fraught with misinterpretation.