A new amazing possibility to create and share knowledge. Trainees, Students and Translators are encouraged to upload easily their own blossary on this page. Blossary, a platform of online glossaries, gives you the possibility to create your own personal lexicon.
A recent study by Career Advisory Board and MBO Partners revealed that 90% of freelancers felt that having relevant technical skills and a specialty within their field made them more successful. Here are just a few reasons why freelancers specialize:
1. Clients want experts.
2. Clients trust experts.
3. Your work will probably be of higher quality.
4. Experts are more memorable.
“OK” is certainly one of the most common expressions in the English language – and one of the most versatile. After all, it can be used as an adjective, a noun, and a verb.
But what do the letters in OK stand for? And where did the expression come from in the first place?
Over the years, a variety of explanations have been offered. Some have argued that OK came from the Native American Indian tribe Choctaw’s word “okeh.” Others have suggested it came from a word in the Wolof language of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Concrete nouns: People, places, and things are all concrete nouns. They’re things you can see or touch such as kittens and puppies, trees and flowers, sticks and stones, and cities and countries.
Abstract nouns: They’re things such as concepts, feelings, ideas, states of mind, and attributes. For example, honor, loyalty, courage, truth, and freedom are all abstract nouns.
Collective nouns: They describe a group of things, usually people, such as team, band, group, class, committee, etc.
Compound nouns: Compound nouns are usually nouns that are made up of two other words, and they can be formed three different ways: 1) open compounds (two separate words, such as coffee house), 2) closed compounds (two words that are now written as one, such as football), 3) hyphenated compounds (two words that are joined by a hyphen, such as collar-bone).
A useful tool to compare sentences, paragraphs or whole texts. Just copy/pasted them and you’re done!
What the pronouns you use reveal about your thoughts and emotions, or how to liespot your everyday email.
We’re social beings wired for communicating with one another, and as new modes and platforms of communication become available to us, so do new ways of understanding the complex patterns, motivations and psychosocial phenomena that underpin that communication. That’s exactly what social psychologist and language expert James W. Pennebaker explores in The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us — a fascinating look at what Pennebaker’s groundbreaking research in computational linguistics reveals about our emotions, our sense of self, and our perception of our belonging in society. Analyzing the subtle linguistic patterns in everything from Craigslist ads to college admission essays to political speeches to Lady Gaga lyrics, Pennebaker offers hard evidence for the insight that our most unmemorable words — pronouns, prepositions, prefixes — can be most telling of true sentiment and intention.
Study has far-reaching implications for unconscious role of infant experiences on adult development.
An infant’s mother tongue creates neural patterns that the unconscious brain retains years later even if the child totally stops using the language, (as can happen in cases of international adoption) according to a new joint study by scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital – The Neuro and McGill University’s Department of Psychology. The study offers the first neural evidence that traces of the “lost” language remain in the brain.
Facebook made it a standard option on the drop-down menu of relationship descriptors some ten years ago, allowing daters and would-be daters and whoever else might be interested to take note of such inherent drama in their friends’ profiles and, at the very least, to be warned before engaging or getting engaged. So even though Facebook didn’t create it’s complicated, it gets a lot of the credit for spurring its use across the world wide web and beyond.
Although there is a shortlist of strong contenders, as you’ll see below, it was vape that emerged victorious as Word of the Year.
So, what does vape mean? It originated as an abbreviation of vapour or vaporize. The OxfordDictionaries.com definition was added in August 2014: the verb means ‘to inhale and exhale the vapour produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device’, while both the device and the action can also be known as a vape. The associated noun vaping is also listed.
As e-cigarettes (or e-cigs) have become much more common, so vape has grown significantly in popularity. You are thirty times more likely to come across the word vapethan you were two years ago, and usage has more than doubled in the past year.
Usage of vape peaked in April 2014 – as the graph below indicates – around the time that the UK’s first ‘vape café’ (The Vape Lab in Shoreditch, London) opened its doors, and protests were held in response to New York City banning indoor vaping. In the same month, the issue of vaping was debated by The Washington Post, the BBC, and the British newspaper The Telegraph, amongst others.
Why do we eat toast for breakfast, and then toast to good health at dinner? What does the turkey we eat on Thanksgiving have to do with the country on the eastern Mediterranean? Can you figure out how much your dinner will cost by counting the words on the menu?
In The Language of Food, Stanford University professor and MacArthur Fellow Dan Jurafsky peels away the mysteries from the foods we think we know. Thirteen chapters evoke the joy and discovery of reading a menu dotted with the sharp-eyed annotations of a linguist.
Jurafsky points out the subtle meanings hidden in filler words like “rich” and “crispy,” zeroes in on the metaphors and storytelling tropes we rely on in restaurant reviews, and charts a microuniverse of marketing language on the back of a bag of potato chips.
The fascinating journey through The Language of Food uncovers a global atlas of culinary influences. With Jurafsky’s insight, words like ketchup, macaron, and even salad become living fossils that contain the patterns of early global exploration that predate our modern fusion-filled world.
From ancient recipes preserved in Sumerian song lyrics to colonial shipping routes that first connected East and West, Jurafsky paints a vibrant portrait of how our foods developed. A surprising history of culinary exchange—a sharing of ideas and culture as much as ingredients and flavors—lies just beneath the surface of our daily snacks, soups, and suppers.
Engaging and informed, Jurafsky’s unique study illuminates an extraordinary network of language, history, and food. The menu is yours to enjoy.
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