But some of his most interesting work has to do with power dynamics. He says that by analyzing language you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status.

"It's amazingly simple," Pennebaker says, "Listen to the relative use of the word "I."

What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word "I" less.

To demonstrate this Pennebaker pointed to some of his own email, a batch written long before he began studying status.

The piece of plastic covering the ends of your shoelace, so you don’t have to moisten them with spit to thread them through your shoelace holes

Awesome

"Quirrel is a purely declarative query language designed for performing analytics and statistics on large-scale, multi-structured data sets."

""

A flatland-style story of using verbs and nouns in Java versus other languages.

Talk like a decorator, be treated like a decorator.

Has links to the voice of america pronunciation guide

"Mamihlapinatapai is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word”, and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. It describes “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.”"

"an autological word is a word that describes itself, and a heterological word is a word that does not describe itself. There are lots of examples of autological words below (the main point of this page); some examples of heterological words: 'long', 'French', 'tentacled'. The first puzzle to look at is: Is 'heterological' a heterological word?"

"If The New York Times ever strikes you as an abstruse glut of antediluvian perorations, if the newspaper’s profligacy of neologisms and shibboleths ever set off apoplectic paroxysms in you, if it all seems a bit recondite, here’s a reason to be sanguine: The Times has great data on the words that send readers in search of a dictionary."

"The term perverb is also used in the weaker sense of any proverb that was modified to have an unexpected, dumb, amusing, or nonsensical ending — even if the changed version is no harder to parse than the original: * A rolling stone gathers momentum. * All that glitters is not dull. * Don't put the cart before the aardvark. * See a pin and pick it up, and all day long you'll have a pin."

Lullaby collection from around the world

"GOD TEXTS THE TEN COMMANDMENTS." 1. no1 b4 me. srsly. 2. dnt wrshp pix/idols 3. no omg's 4. no wrk on w/end (sat 4 now; sun l8r) 5. pos ok - ur m&d r cool 6. dnt kill ppl 7. :-X only w/ m8 8. dnt steal 9. dnt lie re: bf 10. dnt ogle ur bf's m8. or ox. or dnkey. myob. M, pls rite on tabs & giv 2 ppl. ttyl, JHWH. ps. wwjd?

"A new study, published online in the journal Nature, shows that the songs of isolated zebra finches evolve over multiple generations to resemble those of birds in natural colonies. These findings show that song learning in birds is not purely the product of nurture, but has a strong genetic basis, and suggest that bird song has a universal grammar, or an intrinsic structure which is present at birth. "

"The difficulty applies the other way round too. English-speakers are keen to say please politely in other languages, even if those languages do not express politeness by constantly saying please. So English tourists say ‘por favor’ to waiters and barmen in a way that sounds too insistent to a Spaniard. It is as if someone were to say: ‘A glass of wine, if you please, my good man.’ If you want the butter passed in Spanish, you say, ‘Pass the butter.’ To add por favor can smack of impatience."

"They're uncommon words that have a unique and specialized meaning in software development. They are a bit off the beaten path. Words you don't hear often, but also words that provide the thrill of discovery, that "aha" moment as you realize a certain programming concept you knew only through experimentation and intuition has a name."

"Details of how police in the Irish Republic finally caught up with the country's most reckless driver have emerged, the Irish Times reports. He had been wanted from counties Cork to Cavan after racking up scores of speeding tickets and parking fines. However, each time the serial offender was stopped he managed to evade justice by giving a different address. But then his cover was blown. It was discovered that the man every member of the Irish police's rank and file had been looking for - a Mr Prawo Jazdy - wasn't exactly the sort of prized villain whose apprehension leads to an officer winning an award. In fact he wasn't even human. "Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence," read a letter from June 2007 from an officer working within the Garda's traffic division."

A place for speakers of other languages to meet "Connect with native speakers and learn directly from other members of the busuu.com community!"

As ordinary physical items enter the same network, it’s not going to be about virtual or physical activities anymore. Both will be different faces of the same coin. It’s not going to be about context or not. Context will be the primary component of everything. The primary device will no longer be a “mobile”, but more like something that interacts with the network in a highly contextual way. Ideas, people and physical objects will be part of the same network in a very literal sense

useful for finding the word hovering outside your reach

the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed grammatical order (ex: "I know what I like, and I like what I know").

"when a person, after having learned some (usually obscure) fact, word, phrase, or other item for the first time, encounters that item again, perhaps several times, shortly after having learned it. This is a specialized version of the effect of serendipity."

Covering several popular foreign language social networks. (Naver, Baidu, Mixi, Mediapart.fr)

find speakers of other languages who want to practice yours

resource for writing poetry

The Three Princes of Serendip, referring to a set of characters who “were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”

The pre-linguistic way in which infants perceive colour may not necessarily be the foundation for colour perception later on, once a child learns language.

So it´s: the place where the widows of captains who drive steam ships on which you can go for a "trip" on the Danube can collect their pension

it's possible that the more words tots hear, and the more information available for any individual word, the better their brains can begin simultaneously ruling out and putting together word-object pairings, thus learning what's what.

based on the style book which is given to all journalists at The Economist.

a mode of graded categorization in Cognitive Science, where some members of a category are more central than others

Sociology and biology are curiously akin

Everyone has a favorite word. What's yours? (sparked my deluge of word postings to del.icio.us today, sorry!)

National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis celebrates the diversity of the world's indigenous cultures, now disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate. He argues passionately that we should be concerned not only for preserving the biosphere, but also t

Use photos to come up with a word.

How is it possible to become conversationally fluent in one of these languages in 2-12 months? It starts with deconstructing them, choosing wisely, and abandoning all but a few of them.

"87.5% of all statistics are made up." (Funny, I would have thought is was more like 68%). FWIW, about 35% of these jokes are actually funny. Oh, and check out my favorite delicious tag, "meta".

What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages?

like mango, a social language acquisition portal

a collection of words that are troublesome to readers and writers. Words are grouped according to the way they are most often confused or misused.

An idiom is a phrase where the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words, which can make idioms hard for ESL students and learners to understand.

When you're up to your neck in alligators, it's easy to forget that the initial objective was to drain the swamp

Em, en, and when to use them

Most words have a half-life of 2,000 years. However, a small number of words have a half-life of greater than 10,000 years. from: http://blog.longnow.org/2007/08/25/most-all-words-replaced-in-2000-years/

online game that gives you a word, you type in the first thing that comes to mind, and it builds a big network of connected words etc see: http://2dboy.com/2007/07/16/this-is-what-i-learned-about-humans-interesting-stats-on-human-brain-cloud/

Excellent resource for grammar rules and lessons

alphabets through the years

With free daily podcasts, lesson review, and guidance from experts.

English and, I assume, other languages, are full of rules that no one teaches - not to native speakers anyway - but that everyone learns.

Learning takes place in an immersive and realistic virtual space with a remarkable voice system that enables students and teachers from anywhere in the world to interact.

he home for language courses developed by the Foreign Service Institute. These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain

characters are made by pressing and holding one of the ALT keys, then typing the indicated numbers. You must use the numeric keypad on the right side of your keyboard (check that Num Lock is on)

Some common solecisms

1988 docudrama about "the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter". It was created by Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos. Features interviews with Doug ... all » Hofstadter and Dan Dennett. Dennett also stars as himself.

a new programming language that lets you create your own interactive stories, games, music, and art.

lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word.

Pop vs Soda

Basic cooking terms that have been part of kitchen vocabulary for centuries are now considered incomprehensible to the majority of Americans.

Strait-laced, just deserts, shoo-in, fount of knowledge, free rein, sleight of hand, fazed by, buck naked, vocal cords

The world's largest flashcard library

Poems showing the absurdities of English spelling.

The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed.

This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.