Number of Posts: 8
Posts 1 - 8
'Ha' Isn't a Laugh. Seriously?
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 8.7.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | abbreviations, emojis, Facebook, research/study, texting, word/writing
Summary | People express laughs in different ways when the text or otherwise communicate online. Some type a version of "haha", others write "LOL" or a similar abbreviation but none of these messages mean that one is actually laughing. Linguists who have analyzed thousands of texts claim that LOLs signal interlocutor involvement like an "uh-huh" on the phone.
Image Description | Cartoon of various people laughing with various noises.
Image Tags | male(s)
Why Kids Can't Write
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 2.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | grammar, punctuation, school, smartphone, social media, spelling, texting, threat, word/writing
Summary | Many students struggle with writing despite various pedagogical models that have been implemented in past years to tackle that perpetual issue. This is all the more suprising considering that today's students may do moret voluntary writing than any generation before it. They text and post on social media a lot but the writing register is different there. The format's main principle is shortness so grammar, spelling, and punctuation take a back seat.
Image Description | GIF of a hand writing and a group of teachers in a workshop.
Image Tags | female(s), gifs, text
Surfing With a New Keyboard
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 8.6.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis, GIFs, Google, smartphone, texting, translation, word/writing
Summary | Third party keyboards are now available to download to your smartphone. One of them is Gboard, it is very good at translating your texts in real-time. Some keyboards also offer a search function for emojis or GIFs. The swipe-typing feature is also very popular which allows users to swipe across the letters to enter words rather than type each individual letter.
Image Description | N/A
Serial Fiction on Tap
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 12.5.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | smartphone, word/writing
Summary | There is now literature that is customized to be read on a smartphone. It is very similar to 19th century pulp/dime fiction: short episodes ending with cliffhangers. They are also layouted in such a way that they are easy to read on conventional smartphones.
Image Description | N/A
'Ha' Isn't a Laugh. Seriously?
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 9.7.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | spelling, texting, word/writing
Summary | When the author of the article was dating a man and would text him jokes, she was surprised to see that he would always text her back with HAHAHAs (even if the jokes were not that funny). She then realized the HAHAHAs were not representative of his laugh, but it was the result of the autocorrect function. Even though textual representations of laughter go back to Chaucer and Shakespeare, the difference between HAHAHA or HA only exists nowadays. Michelle McSweeney, a researcher at Columbia University, says that laughter helps establish cohesion. There are many ways people can express laughter online: hahahahaha, haha, HAHAHA, haaaaaaa, hehe, lol, etc. In 2015, LOL was the most common way to express laughter online. Electronic laugh has been evolving like any other dialect.
Image Description | N/A
How I Became Addicted to Online Word Games
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 18.3.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | addiction, game, language threat, spelling, word/writing
Summary | There are plenty of stories about the horrors of online game addiction. But being addicted to online word games mimicking Boggle or Scrabble does not only have the same addiction-related issues but also messes with your vocabulary. These games have no penalty for guessing a word that might not even be one, which is why one just begins to memorize all words that the app accepts without really knowing what they mean. This obsessive toying with words may have a negative impact on our linguistics abilities as well as spelling, and so on.
Image Description | Illustration of a man with Scrabble tiles on his tongue reminiscent of party pills.
Image Tags | game, male(s)
None of Us Are Safe From Getting ‘Owned’
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 28.3.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | privacy, social media, Twitter, word/writing
Summary | Much communication on social media and especially Twitter revolves around criticizing. One frequently used term is 'owning' - one can 'own' a hater or troll when exposing some compromising information about them or something that they did not realize. The word hails from hacker culture of the early internet days when 'owning' meant to hack into someone else's virtual space and snoop around.
Image Description | Illustration of a lock made out of an ethernet cable.
Redefining 'Hot': The Dictionary
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 12.2.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | social media, word/writing
Summary | Dictionaries have entered the sphere of social media. They are marking presence with 'word-of-the-day-tweets' and thereby often reflecting on the political climate of the day. Though they claim to be apolitical, many such dictionary posts are criticized for being biased comments on politics, for instance when Trump's tweets are used to exemplify the word 'paralogize' (to draw conclusions from unrelated evidence). The internet and social media have revolutionized dictionaries in enabling them to conduct empirical lexicography since they are now provided with never-ending data to show them new commonly used words in context. Some new dictionary entries even use GIFs to illustrate the meaning of new words like for the word 'facepalm'.
Image Description | Cartoon about 'discarded books'.
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