In an episode titled “The Library” on the popular TV show Seinfeld, Jerry and Kramer meet a “library investigation officer” named Lt. Joe Bookman. When revealing his name, Kramer wittingly responds, “That’s like an ice cream man named Cone!” While this amusing fictional example is a great use of the type of observational comedy that popularized this long-running sitcom, [...]
Have you read a physical book in the last year? If so, you are increasingly in the minority; engagement with audiobooks continues to rise each year, both by the number of people experimenting with the format and by the number of books “read.” But what does this mean for culture, knowledge acquisition, and even the human attention span? The [...]
When words travel across borders, they often face a choice: should they keep their meaning or preserve their sound? Translation handles meaning, but transliteration tackles the challenge of sound. From city names to global brands, transliteration shapes how we recognize the familiar in unfamiliar alphabets, sometimes smoothly and sometimes with comic twists. This matters because alphabets are not interchangeable [...]
As we’ve learned in this sign language series, sign is far from the same everywhere. In fact, it’s just as diverse as the rest of the world’s languages! However, just as Esperanto was created to be an international spoken language, universal sign language could exist. But how successful has this initiative been, and should it even be a project [...]
Imagine: the Mexico men’s soccer team wins the Gold Cup. As a person from Mexico yourself, you’re proud to be there for this exciting moment. A player approaches you, shouting a sentence in Spanish. What did he say? Aren’t you supposed to know? Everyone is watching. This stressful experience encapsulates the cultural and personal impact of no sabo: those [...]
To understand just how important interjections are and why you subconsciously use them as much as you do, it’s helpful to know what role they serve. You likely place them into conversations (at a rate of one every 12 seconds or so!) without much thought, even though they are some of the most impactful utterances. But what do they [...]
There’s a funny thing about pop culture: the more fleeting it seems, the more lasting its impact often is. And perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in the words that owe their origins to Billboard-topping, chartbusting numbers. We might forget it, but several of the words we use today started on a lyrics sheet in a studio that [...]
The fact that no one really sits down to read anymore (or, at least, that’s the way it might seem) is a symptom of many concurrent cultural and societal influences. However, this lack of reading acumen is more than just a change in preference; it’s having real impacts on entire generations, including those who grew up enjoying the earthy [...]
For Deaf individuals, this question is integral to understanding the unique and complex systems at work in the language part of the brain. Sign language is neurological in the same way that spoken languages are. However, the brain processes sign language differently from spoken languages, which can impact the cognitive faculties of a Deaf individual (often for the better!). [...]
While English has been the dominant language spoken in the US since the country's founding, Americans have been listening to Spanish-language music since music was recorded, and likely much earlier than that. However, within the last decade, listenership for Spanish-language music has increased by nearly 1,000%, and Spanish has now become the second most listened-to language for music worldwide. [...]
