Month: May 2017

Some languages, like French, have an official body that decides how words can and cannot be used.

English, as a flexible, global language, has no such designated referee.

Therefore, there is no definitive answer to whether you’re using a word “correctly.”

It’s all a matter of taste and context. But there are opinions. And some count more than others.

Steven Pinker is probably as good an expert to ask as anyone. Helpfully, the renowned Harvard linguist and best-selling author recently wrote a book, titled “The Sense of Style,” that aims to help readers improve their use of the English language.

If you’re in the market for an update to, old Strunk and White, it’s probably a good buy. But if you just want to spot-check that you’ve not been making embarrassing language mistakes for years, a monster list of 58 commonly misused phrases covered in the book that recently appeared in the UK’s Independent newspaper is probably a good place to start.

Here are some highlights:

• Adverse means “detrimental.” It does not mean “averse” or “disinclined.” Correct: “There were adverse effects.” / “I’m not averse to doing that.”
• Appraise means to “ascertain the value of.” It does not mean to “apprise” or to “inform.” Correct: “I appraised the jewels.” / “I apprised him of the situation.”
• Beg the question means that a statement assumes the truth of what it should be proving; it does not mean to “raise the question.” Correct: “When I asked the dealer why I should pay more for the German car, he said I would be getting ‘German quality,’ but that just begs the question.”
• Bemused means “bewildered.” It does not mean “amused.” Correct: “The unnecessarily complex plot left me bemused.” / “The silly comedy amused me.”
• Cliché is a noun, not an adjective. The adjective is clichéd. Correct: “Shakespeare used a lot of clichés.” / “The plot was so clichéd.”
• Data is a plural count noun not, standardly speaking, a mass noun. [Note: “Data is rarely used as a plural today, just as candelabra and agenda long ago ceased to be plurals,” Pinker writes. “But I still like it.”] Correct: “This datum supports the theory, but many of the other data refute it.”
• Depreciate means to “decrease in value.” It does not mean to “deprecate” or to “disparage.” Correct: “My car has depreciated a lot over the years.” / “She deprecated his efforts.”
• Disinterested means “unbiased.” It does not mean “uninterested.” Correct: “The dispute should be resolved by a disinterested judge.” / “Why are you so uninterested in my story?”
• Enormity refers to extreme evil. It does not mean “enormousness.” [Note: It is acceptable to use it to mean a deplorable enormousness.] Correct: “The enormity of the terrorist bombing brought bystanders to tears.” / “The enormousness of the homework assignment required several hours of work.”
• Hone means to “sharpen.” It does not mean to “home in on” or “to converge upon.” Correct: “She honed her writing skills.” / “We’re homing in on a solution.”
• Hung means “suspended.” It does not mean “suspended from the neck until dead.” Correct: “I hung the picture on my wall.” / “The prisoner was hanged.”
• Ironic means “uncannily incongruent.” It does not mean “inconvenient” or “unfortunate.” Correct: “It was ironic that I forgot my textbook on human memory.” / “It was unfortunate that I forgot my textbook the night before the quiz.”
• Nonplussed means “stunned” or “bewildered.” It does not mean “bored” or “unimpressed.” Correct: “The market crash left the experts nonplussed.” / “His market pitch left the investors unimpressed.”
• Parameter refers to a variable. It not mean “boundary condition” or “limit.” Correct: “The forecast is based on parameters like inflation and interest rates.” / “We need to work within budgetary limits.”
• Phenomena is a plural count noun — not a mass noun. Correct: “The phenomenon was intriguing, but it was only one of many phenomena gathered by the telescope.”
• Shrunk, sprung, stunk, and sunk are past participles–not words in the past tense. Correct: “I’ve shrunk my shirt.” / “I shrank my shirt.”
• Simplistic means “naively or overly simple.” It does not mean “simple” or “pleasingly simple.” Correct: “His simplistic answer suggested he wasn’t familiar with the material.” / “She liked the chair’s simple look.”
• Verbal means “in linguistic form.” It does not mean “oral” or “spoken.” Correct: “Visual memories last longer than verbal ones.”
• Effect means “influence”; to effect means “to put into effect”; to affect means either “to influence” or “to fake.” Correct: “They had a big effect on my style.” / “The law effected changes at the school.” / “They affected my style.” / “He affected an air of sophistication to impress her parents.”
• Lie (intransitive: lies, lay, has lain) means to “recline”; lay (transitive: lays, laid, has laid) means to “set down”; lie (intransitive: lies, lied, has lied) means to “fib.” Correct: “He lies on the couch all day.” / “He lays a book upon the table.” / “He lies about what he does.”

It should be noted that while it’s always good to polish up your writing, one of the joys of language is that it isn’t fixed in time. It evolves. Nor is there a single “correct” style (in English, at least).

You’d neither connect nor impress if you chose your words like an Oxford don at a rap battle (though, actually, someone please make that YouTube video), and you’d be unlikely to get a job at an investment bank today speaking like Shakespeare. Why is this important? It’s easy to get too caught up in being perfectly “correct” and become a tedious language snob. Remember you probably want to come across as intelligent and thoughtful, not uptight and pedantic. So don’t get so worked up over the little things that you miss the larger point of good writing — to communicate clearly and engagingly with your chosen audience.

Source: Business Insider

Interesting article recently posted on www.mic.com

Being bilingual already has a long list of benefits. Research suggests that it boosts creativity and memory, strengthens multitasking and slows down the onset of dementia. But in case these benefits don’t already outweigh the monotony of memorizing grammar structures and vocabulary lists, here’s one more: Bilingualism seems to give us a more nuanced perception of time.

Scientists asked a group of Spanish-Swedish bilinguals to guess how much time passed after watching a container fill up with liquid or a line grow on a screen. When they asked the question using the word “duración” (spanish for “duration”), participants adjusted their time estimates according to the volume in the container, but not the length of the line on their screen. When scientists used the word “tid” (Swedish for “time”), estimates were shaped by how long the line grew, but not by how much the containers were filled.

Here’s why that’s cool: Despite our frenzied morning commutes or our 15-minute lunch breaks, the way time works is, in some ways, up to our culture and imagination.

“Language can creep into our perception and basically make us experience time in a very language-specific way,” Panos Athanasopoulos, a co-author on the study and a professor at Lancaster University in the U.K., said.

Athanasopoulos compared it to Arrival, a 2016 film about a linguist (played by Amy Adams) who tries to decipher an alien language. In the movie, the way the aliens talk about time gives them the superpower of seeing into the future — so, as Adams begins to understand their language, she also sees what’s next.

“Unlike Hollywood, we’re not claiming that bilinguals can see into the future, but learning a language really does rewire the brain,” Athanasopoulos said in a Skype interview. “Mentally going back and forth between different languages and ways of understanding time is actually brain training. You are sending your brain to the gym.”

Humans understand time spatially or in terms of quantities, but how that happens is largely up to the languages we speak. When discussing how long we rest, for example, Swedish and English speakers tend to say they took a “short” or “long” break while Greek and Spanish speakers will say they took a “small” or “big” one. English speakers say that the future “is ahead of us” and the past “is behind us,” but Aymara speakers say the opposite; the past is in front of us because it’s something we’ve already seen and experienced, whereas the future is still a mystery and therefore is behind us.

“Basically, [bilingualism] makes you aware that there are different perspectives out there and it makes you more flexible in adopting those perspectives,” Athanasopoulos said. A second language literally gives the brain more neural pathways (or connections) to work with.

Not too long ago, it was somewhat unpopular to think that language influences the way we see the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, American linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory that there’s a “universal grammar” among the world’s roughly 7,000 languages rose to popularity. Some started to believe that most languages were the same, barring small differences, and therefore language could not change the way we think. But decades of research couldn’t confirm it.

“The universalism idea kind of took it a little bit too far,” Athanasopoulos said.

So, as science tweaks the way we understand linguistics and our brains, we realize that we’re capable of seeing the world in new ways. All you have to do is learn a second language.

Author: Kelly Kasulis