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NAVY TO DROP ALL-CAPS COMMUNICATIONS

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Caps off to the Navy’s plan to drop all-caps.

OFFICIAL COMMUNICATIONS AND ORDERS HAVE BEEN IN ALL CAPS SINCE 19TH CENTURY.

YOUNG SAILORS ACCUSTOMED TO TEXTING SEE ALL-CAPS ORDERS AS A FORM OF SHOUTING!

NAVY WANTS ITS ORDERS AND OFFICIAL MESSAGES TO BE MORE READABLE AND LESS RUDE.

“WHILE THIS DECISION WAS MADE TO SAVE [...]

Culture | Ethics | Language | Philosophy | Psychology

The Milestones That Matter Most

[W]hen Japanese and American fourth and fifth grade children were asked why they shouldn’t hit, gossip or fight with other kids, 92 percent of the American kids answered “because they’d get caught or get in trouble.” Ninety percent of the Japanese kids asked the same question responded, “because it would be hurtful to someone else.” [...]

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Multimedia | Computers and Writing 2013

Earlier this week, the Computers and Writing folks discussed the decline in the use of the word “computer” in MLA job ads. The decline is more than offset by a rise in related terms, so the discussion appropriately focused on the value of “computers” as an umbrella term. (In our daily lives, we increasingly use [...]

Academia | Cyberculture | Humanities | Language | Media | Modding | Rhetoric | Technology

Melissa Terras Reports Her Success in Making Digital Humanities More Inclusive

A pleasant little success story. “TEI” is the “Text Encoding Initiative,” an international effort to define and standardize the digital representation of texts.

[I]n 2006 I first noticed that the TEI guidelines encouraged the use of ISO5218:2004 to assign sexuality of persons in a document (with attributes being given as 1 for male, 2 for [...]

Academia | Culture | Humanities | Language | PopCult | Writing

Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore

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I will have to watch for these uses of “slash.” I wonder if it has any relation to the practice of using a slash to denote romantic pairings in fanfic (e.g. Harry/Hermione).

Two weeks ago, one student brought up the word slash as an example of new slang, and it quickly became clear to me [...]

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Chillax, Wikipedia, and bridezilla are not puns: Against adjoinages

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So if recessionista and fembot are not really puns, what are they? They’re neolexic portmanteaus, in which root words are brutally slammed together with cavalier lack of wit. “Neolexic portmanteau” is a mouthful, so instead we shall choose a simpler handle. Sherry-manteau, catastrounity, misceg-formation, piss-poortmanteau, and poor-man’s-toes all proffer themselves as alternatives, but they are [...]

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McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Banned Performance Enhancing Substances in Literary Competitions.

PROUSTZAC

Enhances and enriches remembrance of things past. Can lead to increased carbohydrate consumption.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Banned Performance Enhancing Substances in Literary Competitions..

Culture | Ethics | Humanities | Language | Rhetoric

Loaded Words: How Language Shapes The Gun Debate

Here’s a great article I’m asking all my journalism students and all my lit-crit students to read.

Words do more than just describe the world. They literally define it. They shape and frame it.

“Most people don’t understand this,” says linguist George Lakoff of the University of California, Berkeley. “Most people think that words just [...]

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Why Drag It Out?

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The ways that the informal speech of women impacts the language is soooo underexplored.

For the past five years, Sali Tagliamonte, a linguist at the University of Toronto, has been gathering digital-communications data from students. In analyzing nearly 4 million words, she’s found some interesting patterns. “This reduplication of letters, it’s not all crazy,” she [...]

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Resumes: Top 5 Tips for Job Hunters

I just freshened up an older instructional page, Resumes: Top 5 Tips for Job Hunters.

I still need to update the examples, but my advice is pretty much the same as it was in the late 1990s when I posted the first draft.

Value the Chance to Try Again Balance Creativity with Function Details, Details, [...]