NLPhilia Blog

Someone dear to me loves her thesaurus. When I read To A Thesaurus today on the Futility Closet blog, I thought of her. Then I thought of you guys! Here’s the first verse:

O precious code, volume, tome,
Book, writing, compilation, work,
Attend the while I pen a pome,
A jest, a jape, a quip, a quirk.

A recent article on the Lingformant blog points to some compelling new research on how we parse gestures:

Your ability to make sense of Groucho’s words and Harpo’s pantomimes in an old Marx Brothers movie takes place in the same regions of your brain, says new research funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), one of the National Institutes of Health.

You can read the synopsis at Words, Gestures Are Translated by Same Brain Regions.

Sorry… there’s just no better title for this post. I’m talking about the punctuation mark that looks like : .

In the spirit of a couple of recent posts on punctuation (the use of the comma and the apostrophe), I’d like to refer you to DumbLittleMan’s Guide to Colon Use.

The high points are the following nine, though there are a few more:

1. To introduce a list
2. To introduce direct speech
3. When showing an example
4. To offer a conclusion
5. To explain something more fully
6. To Introduce a subtitle
7. As a substitution for a conjunction
8. To link independent clauses
9. To Introduce a question

(Hey, I used one to introduce a list!)

Get the full story at The DumbLittleMan Guide to Colon Use.

In the same vein as my previous post on the use of commas, I once again offer you a way to make your writing appear more intelligent: How To Use An Apostrophe, from The Oatmeal (courtesy this post from LifeHacker). It’s a nice, simple, visual guide.

Personally, I think it’s still too complicated. According to Michael D. C. Drout, professor of Linguistics at Wheaton College and author of several of my favorite Modern Scholar Series lectures from Recorded Books, the apostrophe’s job is to indicate that one or more letters are missing. When you understand that English used to have a dative case which was marked with the suffix “-es”, and that languages tend to “lose” the last unstressed vowel in a word over time, you understand why we tag possessives with “’s” now.

For your amusement, check out Apostrophe Abuse.

I once filled out an anonymous survey at work. My manager knew which one was mine. I asked him how he knew. He said it was the only one where everything was spelled and punctuated correctly.

That isn’t a slam on my co-workers, each of whom is a very intelligent person who communicates wonderfully in everyday informal speech. It’s just that my writing is better because I care more about it. My attitude is: if we want to be understood, we have to communicate clearly, even in writing; if we want to be taken seriously, we have to communicate clearly, even in writing; and if we want to think clearly, we have to communicate clearly, even in writing.

Even on Internet, where nobody knows you’re a dog, the way you present yourself and your language matters. It may matter even more online than in real life, because the way you use language is pretty much all you’ve got.

Consider this, too, while we’re at it: we’re NLPers. Neuro-Linguistic Programmers. As I’ve heard John Lavalle say, Linguistics is our middle name. If we’re going to call ourselves NLPers, we should pay attention to the L.

Today at Dumb Little Man, one of my favorite blogs, they posted an article on how to use the comma. There’s a great place to start. Here’s the list:

1. To glue two sentences together
2. To give additional information
3. Writing a series of three or more words or phrases
4. Non restrictive phrases
5. Demanding a pause
6. Setting off direct quotations
7. After conjunctive adverbs
8. Set off a direct address
9. Parenthetical phrases

For a fuller explanation and some good examples, go read The DumbLittleMan Guide to Comma Use.

Incidentally, here’s another good, albeit short, article from Dumb Little Man: Impress Your Clients, Boss and Colleagues: How To Improve Your Business Writing

As I come across more goodies like this, I intend to post them. If you’ve got a favorite article on the use of, say, semicolons, apostrophes, or quote marks, drop me a note in the comments.

There are those who assert that problems do not exist, or that they should be reframed away as “challenges” or “opportunities” or some junk.

As Samuel Johnson once said, “I refute it thus!”

Thank you, Scott Adams.

Remember the story about how giving someone a reason, even if it’s a nonsense reason, gets them to say “yes”? We got it from Robert Cialdini, if I remember correctly.

Thanks to a recent post on Language Log entitled Generalization and Truth, I’ve learned that the cited study is here: “The Mindlessness of Ostensibly Thoughtful Action: The Role of ‘Placebic’ Information in Interpersonal Interaction”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(6): 635-42, 1978.

I’ve also learned that the study didn’t exactly say what we’ve been told it says:

What I discovered was frequent misunderstanding of the 1978 paper’s results, involving both a different conclusion and a strikingly overgeneralized picture of the observed effects. Kahneman 2003 was merely the most prominent of these. So as part of my on-going exploration of scientific rhetoric…

For the details, go read Generalization and Truth at Language Log.

A January article from the Victoria News, published by the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, shares some research by Paul Sulzberger, PhD into the teaching of languages:

Dr Sulzberger has found that the best way to learn a language is through frequent exposure to its sound patterns – even if you haven’t a clue what it all means.

“However crazy it might sound, just listening to the language, even though you don’t understand it, is critical. A lot of language teachers may not accept that,” he says.

Now, people who are good at learning languages have long said that immersion makes a massive difference, but they’ve never talked about why that’s the case. Dr. Sulzberger asserts that aural exposure to the language actually changes the brain, re-wiring it to understand what is being said:

Dr Sulzberger’s research challenges existing language learning theory. His main hypothesis is that simply listening to a new language sets up the structures in the brain required to learn the words.

“Neural tissue required to learn and understand a new language will develop automatically from simple exposure to the language—which is how babies learn their first language,” Dr Sulzberger says.

It’s an interesting idea, and it makes a lot of sense to me. You can read the rest of the article here.

And in the spirit of this snippet from the article:

“Teachers should recognise the importance of extensive aural exposure to a language. One hour a day of studying French text in a classroom is not enough—but an extra hour listening to it on the iPod would make a huge difference,” Dr Sulzberger says.

…by way of Lifehacker, here is a master list of free online language lessons.

Arnold Zwicky at Language Log pointed us to this great episode of Dinosaur Comics which explains the use and misuse of metaphors. Entertaining and educational!

Security guru Bruce Schneier brings us one of those things that flies in the face of conventional wisdom:

People confess to crimes they don’t commit. They do it a lot. What’s interesting about this research is that confessions—whether false or true—corrupt other eyewitnesses…

Yep. People will believe someone’s confession over their own experience.

How can we put this to work?

Schneier on Security: Confessions Corrupt Eyewitnesses