In October 2008, ‘Year2183’ posted a message on the anti-Muslim website ‘Gates of Vienna’, arguing that Muslims should be forcibly deported from Norway. Three years later, on 22 July 2011, the same individual posted and e-mailed a 1500-page document describing his extreme-right ideology and the extensive preparations that he made before killing 77 people in […]
Psycholinguistics
When you sit down at the end of a long day and turn on Netflix, do you turn the subtitles on? If so, you are joined by many other viewers who prefer watching television and movies with the closed captions feature. In 2006, the Office of Communications in the UK found that 7.5 million people […]
Warning: Some of the words in this post may be considered offensive. One beauty of the English language is the seemingly infinite possibilities when it comes to making new words. People seem to get especially creative when they’re coming up with new phrases for insults and curse words—the type of language that tends to be […]
How do we recognize the written word? While this seems trivially easy to us, we need to remember that words that are quite close perceptually can be drastically different in meaning. Fin and fine, crew and crow, and deck and desk may look nearly the same but their meanings differ considerably. In the sentence “I […]
There are some 40,000,000 foreign-born people living in the United States today. Most of those people hail from Asia or Latin America and the Caribbean, and their native language is therefore most likely not English. And indeed, it is not uncommon for people in the U.S.—and also the U.K., Canada, and Australia—to speak English with a […]