Every November, millions of Americans sit down to a feast where the turkey takes center stage. But if you were to travel to Turkey, the country, and ask for a "turkey," you wouldn’t get far. The bird we now associate with Thanksgiving is native to North America, not Turkey. So why the name? The answer lies in a tangled web [...]
From the moment we learn to control our mouths, lungs, and vocal cords as infants, we yearn to speak. As babies, we babble and attempt to copy words, and with no formal instruction at all, we can typically grasp the basics of speaking in under a year and begin to communicate. Neurolinguists have shown that our brain’s superior temporal [...]
“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare’s Juliet famously asked, and the answer depends on what culture you are talking about and what language you are speaking. Our names are uniquely personal and individual identifiers, yet they often represent the lives, aspirations and beliefs of an incredibly large group of people. In some cultures, names are steeped in tradition and passed [...]
