The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer says conservative Evangelical Christians view President Obama as “the avatar of godless socialism”. Do American Christian conservatives use ‘socialist’ to mean ‘insufficiently religious’? If so, their usage parallels that of Osama bin Laden.
NPR’s Morning Edition and the Sunlight Foundation suggest that congressional speech-making is becoming less sophisticated. The presentation appears to validate conventional wisdom that American politics has taken an anti-intellectual turn of late, but the story shows flawed methods coupled with confirmation bias.
Recent news events highlight relationships between fact and story telling. Ethan Zuckerman’s recent ruminations on activism and journalism provide a summary and synthesis of one set of ideas, and a piece Michael Wilson contributed to the New York Times’ City Room at about the same time provides another.
Barbara Johnstone (2011) “Making Pittsburghese” and Timothy Messer-Kruse (2012) “The ‘undue weight’ of truth on Wikipedia” present very different views of scholar’s experiences with Wikipedia. Johnstone’s evaluation is mostly positive, while Messer-Kruse’s is quite negative.
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE The Verbal Artistry of Julius Malema From the Anthro News Blog Language and Culture Column. Guest Columnist Steven P. Black Steven P.… Read More »The Verbal Artistry of Julius Malema
H. Samy Alim writing in the NY Times about “What if We Occupied Language?” When I flew out from the San Francisco airport last October,… Read More »Occupying Language
The Linguistic Society of America’s Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation is carrying out a letter-writing campaign to urge President Obama to sign an executive order. According to the LSA-CELP, “U.S. government agencies would be directed to ensure that their policies, procedures, and functions support community-based language revitalization. It would compel governmental agencies to follow through on the promises of the Native American Languages Act and the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act.”
This piece does not reflect the official opinion of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, its officers or its individual members. One of the most important… Read More »Language Links #3
This post does not reflect the official opinions of the SLA, its officers or individual members. I thought this call for papers was interesting as… Read More »Call for Papers: Computational Models of Narrative
This post does not reflect the official opinions of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, the SLA Blog or individual members of the SLA. From: Aaron… Read More »Response to Language Links #2
These comments do not necessarily reflect the official opinions of the Society of Linguistic Anthropology, its officers or individual members. In the June 24, 2011… Read More »Language Links #2
Last week, after years of urging, the Census Bureau released this statement: In response to concerns expressed by data user groups, the Census Bureau decided… Read More »Combatting Linguistic Inaccuracies in the Census
This is the first of columns listing links in the news connected to language. These links do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Society… Read More »Language Links #1
Recently some scholars in language acquisition and education have posted links on Facebook to the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (henceforth CCFC), which is… Read More »Marketing language abilities
January 5, 2011 David S. Johnson, Division Chief Housing and Household Economic Statistics U.S. Census Bureau 4600 Silver Hill Road Washington, DC 20233 Dear Mr.… Read More »Letter to the Census Bureau from the SLA Committee on Language and Social Justice
Stephen Chrisomalis, Wayne State University
Recently, there has been a “Puzzle Moment” in the science section of the New York Times, with an eclectic mix of articles combining scientific pursuits with cognitive and linguistic play of various sorts. One that caught my eye is ‘Math Puzzles’ Oldest Ancestors Took Form on Egyptian Papyrus’ by Pam Belluck, which is an account of the well-known Rhind Mathematical Papyrus. The RMP is an Egyptian mathematical text dating to around 1650 BCE, and is one of the most complete and systematic known accounts of ancient Egyptian mathematics.
New York Times reviews the latest research on baby babbling:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/health/12klass.html?src=me&ref=health
and an article on children’s use of irony. Tape recording of naturally occurring speech, but not laboratory experiments, reveal even quite young children can understand irony.
P. Kerim Friedman, NDHU Paul Chambers, a 27-year old accountant in training from South Yorkshire got fined £1,000 for posting the following text to Twitter… Read More »The Joke’s on You
Steven Black, UCSD
This morning (Sept. 20, 2010) while drinking my coffee I did a perfunctory survey of the news on Africa, only to be jolted out of my pre-coffee stupor by an article on cnn.com with the title, “Group: Use of ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’ Disparaging.” This immediately concerned me. While I prefer to describe ‘southern Africa’ generally or ‘South Africa’ specifically, I myself have unquestioningly used the term ‘sub-Saharan’ in past work in order to indicate the boundary of Arabic-dominant cultural practices. Some academics prefer the (inevitably more bulky) phrase, “Africa south of the Sahara,” but I wonder if this shift in terminology is really enough for the phrase to point to a different set of indexical meanings.
Kathryn Woolard, SLA President In response to my original posting on this website, I received the following email message a few days ago from the… Read More »Guy Deutscher responds