Phrasing something a different way can flip its apparent meaning. Here’s an example. A press release begins by saying this: “Adults over 50 who sleep for five hours or less per night have a greater risk of developing more than one chronic disease…” Now re-phrase that — in a way that is equally true — […]
Stephen Wolfram offers a raft of things that might or might have meanings. Wolfram also offers thoughts on whether those meanings—if they are meanings—were intended to mean what we may think they might mean. This is part of Wolfram meandering down mean streets of thought about whether and how it’s possible to make things that […]
We have been advised that this published study possibly says something: “Contesting Essentialist Theories of Patriarchal Relations: Evolutionary Psychology and the Denial of History,” by Jesse Crane-Seeber and Betsy Crane [pictured here], The Journal of Men’s Studies, October 2010, vol. 18, no. 3, 218-237. The authors, at Widener University, write: “This essay emerges from an ongoing mother-son dialogue about contemporary gender relations […]
Michael Quinion says he has solved the mystery of the red herring—how the phrase “red herring” came to have its current meaning: The matter is now cleared up as the result of a pair of articles in the October 2008 edition of Comments on Etymology, edited by Professor Gerald Cohen at the Missouri University of Science […]
Professor Fabio Rojas asks, (writing in the orgtheory blog): “What is the secret code for letters of recommendation?“
Practically speaking, one must perhaps at some point confront the meaning of the word “must.” Salmon had done so. His study on the matter is: “Conventional Implicature, Presupposition, and the Meaning of Must,” William Salmon [pictured here], Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 43, no. 14, November 2011, pp. 3416-3430. The author is at the University of […]
The scholarly journal called Social Text has again published a paper that may seem to be a jumble of big words but may, conceivably be full of deep, clear, important meaning. The new study is: “S’More Inequality — The Neoliberal Marshmallow and the Corporate Reform of Education,” Bethany Moreton [pictured here], Social Text, 2014, Volume 32, Number 3 […]
The Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Role of Learnability in Grammatical Theory (1996) featured one of the very few scholarly investigations into the origin(s) of the expression “Willy-Nilly” Author Paula Kadose Radetzky (University of California, Berkeley) notes that although “Willy-Nilly” originally meant ‘unwillingly’, […]
In America, potato chips carry more than grease and salt. They carry meaning. That’s the message carried by this new study: “Authenticity in America: Class Distinctions in Potato Chip Advertising,” Joshua Freedman and Dan Jurafsky [pictured here], Gastronomica, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter 2012), pp. 46-54. The authors explain: “Our study uses the language of […]
There’s a new advance in the effort to write prose without any direct involvement of a human brain. Until recently, writing was thought to be a skill that required at least some levels of understanding. The first giant breakthrough was Professor Philip M. Parker‘s automatic book-writing machine, which has produced several hundred thousand books (and […]