This year’s 24/7 Lecturers are hard at work preparing their lectures for the 33rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. These lectures — a complete technical description of a subject in 24 seconds, followed by a clear summary in seven words — demand more skill and thought than the audience may realize. Here is a […]
Statistics an be compiled about anything, independent of the question: is there any point in gathering statistics about this thing? The following study may be good fodder for teachers who wish to discuss that question with students: “The Temporal Making of a Great Literary Corpus by a XX-Century Mystic: Statistics of Daily Words and Writing […]
Words can be used to describe things. A study published in 2019 presents a striking example: “Transformative resources of the terminological internationalization (on the material of German and English),” Vladimir V. Elkin [pictured here], Elena N. Melnikova, and Anna M. Klyoster, in The International Conference Going Global through Social Sciences and Humanities, Springer, Cham, 2019. […]
Loooooooooooooooook, if you like, at this study that explores stretchable words: “Hahahahaha, Duuuuude, Yeeessss!: A Two-Parameter Characterization of Stretchable Words and the Dynamics of Mistypings and Misspellings,” Tyler J. Gray, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds, PLoS ONE, vol. 15, no. 5, 2020, e0232938. This graphic from the study perhaps makes clear the main […]
It might be commonly said that we ‘acquire’ knowledge, ‘acquire’ a smartphone, or ‘acquire’ a verruca – in less common parlance is the word ‘deacquire’. It’s traditionally used though, for reasons that are not altogether clear, when referring to museums and their collections. In the same way as a museum might, for example, ‘acquire’ The […]
Earle Spamer wrote us a scathing letter, about some of the 24/7 Lectures. In case you are not familiar with the 24/7 Lectures, which happen every year as part of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, here’s what they are: Each year at the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, we invite some of the world’s top thinkers […]
Stories that only have six words. Are they truly a ‘Narrative Genre’? David Fishelov, believes that they maybe. He’s a professor of comparative literature. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. See his essay on the subject. ‘The Poetics of Six-Word Stories’ * (It’s published in Narrative, January 2019.) The professor considers stories from websites. Such […]
Dr Richard Stephens, of Keele University, UK, was a co-recipient of the 2010 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain. Since then, his work on swearing has continued, and he’s the lead author of a 2018 paper for the journal Psychology of Sport and Exercise (Volume 35, March 2018, Pages […]
When you read news reports about science or medicine, you can amuse yourself by noticing how often the word “prestigious” crops up. You might notice which news organizations make frequent use of the word. You might notice which science-related or medical-related institutions (or whatever) are called “prestigious.” You might ask yourself which of those news […]
“While critics discuss the link between female speech and sexual looseness, and silence and chastity, many have overlooked the prerequisite for obedience – hearing and its agent, the ear. The link between the ear and vagina is often ignored because of the proneness to perceive ears as passive orifices (Kilgour 131; Woodbridge 256). However, ears […]