Those who object to sexist jokes or other forms of offensive language are often accused of being wowsers, of trying to silence free speech.
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What impact can offensive language have? Is it really a case of ‘political correctness gone mad’?
ICYMI, the ‘air-punch’ has made it into the Oxford English Dictionary.
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From ‘shiok’ to ‘narcocorrido’ to ‘sweary’, the OED’s new words are a linguistic smorgasbord. They include, for the first time, entries from Singapore and Hong Kong English - and an expression dating back to 1723.
Do you remember playing with the red wheel or do you remember a picture of you playing with it?
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Language, culture and brain development all contribute to ‘childhood amnesia’.
Brave new world? We should embrace language that gets things done.
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Going forward, perhaps we ought to cut office patois some slack – it greases the wheels of business, after all.
Learning the language of happiness.
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Could understanding other cultures’ concepts of joy and happiness help us to reshape our own?
Jamie Milpurr translates archived stories told by his grandfather Frank Ambidjambidj with help from his grandmother Margaret Marlingarr. The stories were told in Kun-barlang, a language spoken on Goulburn Island with 20 speakers remaining.
Steven Bird
A clever proces similar to Google’s image search is helping to preserve some of the world’s 7,000 languages that are at risk of disappearing.
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Worried that a shortage of language speakers could be a security risk, the army now gives soldiers cash incentives to learn them.
The Cornish language is part of the land.
Jon Mills
Funding cuts could finally decimate one of Britain’s oldest surviving languages.
Facial expressions may be a universal language. Where does that leave people with facial paralysis?
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What happens when the face is no longer the primary means of expression?
How good are people at interpreting a cat’s meow?
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While cats – with their steely demeanor – have a reputation of being hard to read, humans seem intent on figuring out what they’re thinking and feeling.
Intelligent machines are getting better at understanding our conversation.
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Human communication is complex, rich in nuances and frequently includes non-verbal signs. That’s a challenge if you want an intelligent machine to be part of the conversation.
‘Candidate’ has its roots in the word ‘candid’, to be frank. It’s hard not to believe that we’ve strayed a little from those noble aspirations.
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Many of the most commonly used election terms have a long linguistic history, stretching from ancient Rome to modern-day America and Australia.
European collaboration: great in theory, exclusionary in practice.
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The EU may claim it is “united in diversity” but the reality is very different.
Did Ashkenazi Jews descend from ancient Turkey?
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Yiddish was at one time the international language of Ashkenazic Jews, but it’s exact origin has always been somewhat unclear, until now.
In the past 20 years, budget speeches have been delivered in increasingly less complex language.
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We all know about the ‘jobs and growth’, but there was also ‘tax’ and various forms of ‘new’ – read innovation – in this year’s federal budget.
Babak Fakhamzadeh
If you read a translation of a book, have you read the book? Can language ever really tell you what someone else is thinking? Jhumpa Lahiri navigates these tricky waters in her memoir, In Other Words.
Treasurers throughout Australia’s history have used their budget role to reach out to people.
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As a political speaker, either you pick your key phrases or they get picked for you.
Both Hamlet and ‘True Detective’‘s Rust Cohle make audiences wonder whether they’re deserving of sympathy or blame.
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The psychological complexity of Shakespeare’s characters has rendered them timeless. Today, we see The Bard’s influence in shows like ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘True Detective.’
‘All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost’ - ancient Elvish verse of prophecy.
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Quenya, Sindarin, Klingon and Dothraki – there’s an art to making up languages.
Shakespeare’s use of dialect is a key argument used by those who stand by the traditional author. But these so-called “Warwickshire dialect” words are nothing of the sort.