https://illinois.edu/db/view/25 Everything you wanted to know about language, and more. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/17285 debaron@illinois.edu Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:30:00 CST It's time once again to name the word of the year, and since we're coming up to 2010, it's also time to pick the word of the decade. The word of the year for 2009 is "teabag"; but the word of the first decade of the new millennium has to be "wingnut." The New Oxford American Dictionary just named "unfriend" its Word of the Year, defining it, "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook." Unfriending has become the thing to do to your ex. Just recently, Lou Dobbs unfriended CNN, and Sarah Palin unfriended John McCain and the entire 2008 Republican Presidential Campaign. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/16903 debaron@illinois.edu Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:00:00 CST Whether you're a dedicated couch potato or only an occasional channel surfer, I'm sure you've noticed that swearing on prime-time television is on the rise. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/16190 debaron@illinois.edu Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:30:00 CST Philip Greenspun, an MIT software engineer and hi-tech guru, argues in a recent blog post that "technology reduces the value of old people." It's not that old people don't do technology. On the contrary, many of them are heavy users of computers and cell phones. It's that the young won't bother tapping the knowledge of their elders because they can get so much more, so much faster, from Wikipedia and Google. What's rendering the old irrelevant is the internet. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/15866 debaron@illinois.edu Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:00:00 CST All happy writers may be alike, as Tolstoy might have put it, but unhappy writers write better, according to social psychologist Joe Forgas of the University of New South Wales. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/14943 debaron@illinois.edu Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:45:00 CDT I began writing this online message 40 years to the minute when the internet went live. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/14557 debaron@illinois.edu Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:30:00 CDT English-only is back in the news this week. In Dallas, even a hint of Spanish in your voice can get you fined, and in Taos, New Mexico, a smattering of Spanish on your name tag can get you fired. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/14414 debaron@illinois.edu Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:30:00 CDT Researchers are predicting that Twitter is going global: in just four years, everyone on the planet -- some 10 billion people -- will be tweeting. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/14332 debaron@illinois.edu Sat, 24 Oct 2009 17:30:00 CDT Everybody knows that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. It's one of those undeniable facts of daily life, a fact we seldom question until we meet up with a case that doesn't quite fit the way we're used to viewing things. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/13953 debaron@illinois.edu Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:00:00 CDT Senate Resolution 310 proclaims today, Oct. 20, as the National Day on Writing. Sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Day on Writing seeks to promote personal, professional, and civic writing in all its forms and celebrates writing by establishing a National Writing Gallery to display all the writing created on National Writing Day. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/13055 debaron@illinois.edu Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:15:00 CDT A recent poll finds that "whatever" is the single most annoying word in English, followed by the common phrase "you know." https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/12745 debaron@illinois.edu Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:30:00 CDT The Federal Trade Commission has issued new rules requiring bloggers to disclose any compensation they may receive for product placements, endorsements, and testimonials. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/12046 debaron@illinois.edu Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:00:00 CDT This week is Banned Books Week (Sept. 26 - Oct. 3), celebrating the freedom to read. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/11421 debaron@illinois.edu Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:45:00 CDT My book "A Better Pencil" came out this month from Oxford University Press. It's not my first book, but it's the first one I've published since the internet went viral. Because my book is about the impact of computers and the 'Net on how we read and write, I checked the World Wide Web to see how the book was doing. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/10349 debaron@illinois.edu Sun, 13 Sep 2009 01:35:49 CDT Sept. 18 is Samuel Johnson's 300th birthday. The English essayist, poet, novelist, and witty conversationalist whom we know mostly through the anecdotes recorded by his friend and biographer, James Boswell, and his other friends, became famous in his day for his two-volume Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/10343 debaron@illinois.edu Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:57:26 CDT After a passenger asked her for the time in English, a Montreal bus driver called the police and ordered all twenty passengers to get off her bus. Her supervisors defended the action because, while English and French have been Canada's two official languages for exactly forty years, French and French alone is the official language of the province of Quebec. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/9052 debaron@illinois.edu Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:54:00 CDT As if health care weren't already a big enough headache for the new administration, now right wing fear-mongers are attacking as "socialized education" Pres. Barack Obama's planned back-to-school address next Tuesday at Wakefield High School, in Virginia, which will be broadcast live on CSPAN to students and teachers across the nation. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/8038 debaron@illinois.edu Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:53:49 CDT The California legislature has passed a bill to allow people to use any language that they want when they patronize or work for a business establishment. It's already illegal to discriminate in California on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, marital status, or sexual orientation. If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signs the new bill into law, it will be illegal to discriminate in California on the basis of language as well. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/7512 debaron@illinois.edu Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:09:38 CDT President Obama's health-care initiative may be visionary, but his apparent faith in the Bush administration's "No Child Left Behind" program, with its emphasis on standardized testing, prompts me to reprise this 2004 essay that first appeared in Education Week. Maybe the Department of Education can become visionary too, rethinking NCLB and its massive testing program so that no one really is left behind. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/7056 debaron@illinois.edu Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:44:25 CDT Computers, now the writer's tool of choice, are still blamed by skeptics for a variety of ills, from speeding writing up to the point of recklessness, to complicating or trivializing the writing process, to destroying the English language itself. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/7039 debaron@illinois.edu Wed, 12 Aug 2009 02:08:13 CDT Last year the Librarian of Congress warned that texting was responsible for a drastic decline in American sentences, but that opinion wasn't backed up by any scientific evidence. Now, a team of Australian psychologists has come a step closer to proving that mobile phones are destroying our ability to think. The researchers show that children who use mobile phones respond to higher-level cognitive tasks faster, but less accurately, than those who don't. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/6994 debaron@illinois.edu Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:36:52 CDT This week 15-year-old Deng Senshan died from beatings while being treated for internet addiction at a Chinese internet rehabilitation clinic. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/6849 debaron@illinois.edu Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:55:27 CDT When the government reads our emails or tracks our web searches in the interests of national security, we cry big-brotherism and worry about the erosion of civil liberties. When corporations like Amazon and Google track us, ostensibly to better anticipate what we might want to buy, we tend to praise their ingenuity as hi-tech capitalism at its best. Amazons latest fail should remind us that Big Brother is watching not from the CIAs bricks-and-mortar headquarters in Reston, but from corporate headquarters somewhere, everywhere, in cyberspace, and that we must defend our civil liberties from corporate as well as government abuse. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/6843 debaron@illinois.edu Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:28:15 CDT People who swear when theyre hurt feel less pain than those who dont. At least thats the conclusion of a team of psychologists from Englands Keele University. https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/6835 debaron@illinois.edu Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:20:39 CDT . https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/6829 debaron@illinois.edu Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:06:48 CDT . https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/6762 debaron@illinois.edu Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:31:28 CDT . https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/6748 debaron@illinois.edu Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:00:00 CDT . https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/6730 debaron@illinois.edu Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:43:42 CDT . https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/6667 debaron@illinois.edu Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:06:06 CDT . https://illinois.edu/db/view/25/6643 debaron@illinois.edu Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:51:51 CDT In 1859, a Methodist minister named A. B. Pikard wrote two letters to former senator Abraham Lincoln -- Lincoln had lost his seat to Stephen Douglas in 1858 -- protesting the inhumanity of the fugitive slave laws. Its no surprise to find a northern abolitionist minister opposing the return of runaway slaves to the masters theyd escaped. But a minister who uses the phonetic alphabet to argue that the practice is both immoral and unconstitutional, well that is unusual.