Tag: LANGUAGE

The Grey Lady has had enough of your newfangled social networking balderdash! Phil Corbett, the new standards editor at the New York Times, declared in a memo yesterday that "tweet" is not fit to print. "Some social-media fans may disagree," Corbett writes, "but outside of ornithological contexts, 'tweet' has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should ...

There's no denying the hype around the iPad, but, apparently, humans aren't the only mammals who are intrigued by Apple's tablet. According to a press release (PDF) from Speak Dolphin, a bottlenose dolphin named Merlin recently learned to communicate using the iPad. Merlin, who resides at a research center in Puerto Aventuras, Mexico, is shown an object, like a ball or plastic duck. Then, trainer ...

The development of the written alphabet is one of humanity's greatest triumphs. Although it's difficult to nail down when the first true alphabet was created, experts can agree that by the 15th century B.C.E. many cultures in the Middle East had shifted from primarily logographic forms of written communication to much more open-ended, phonogram-based texts. But that flexibility came at the cost of ...

In February, Google teased us with an updated version of Google Goggles that could translate words appearing in photographs, but, sadly, that version was limited to German-to-English translations. Still, we were promised that an update would bring other languages, and that day is finally here. Now, Goggles can read images featuring English, French, Italian, German and Spanish words, and translate ...

Believe it or not, but not all Twitter users are there to connect with others, share random factoids about their day or spread links to fun stuff they find on the Web. No, some take to the service simply to feel better about themselves by belittling others for the amusement of onlookers. The Twitter trolls come in several forms. CapsCop, for instance, pounces on users who have the unpleasant ...

Remember when, not too long ago, "guru" was one of those corporate words du jour? We had "Web gurus" and "customer service gurus" and inspiration-gurus-at-large. These self-styled titles were hot like UGGs, and fell out of vogue almost as quickly. [Ed. Note: Yes. Out of vogue. Dead. Kaput.] Well, now people have taken to "ninja" as the cool new nom de whatever, and it's a broad enough trend that ...

The BBC's Jude Sheerin recently penned an interesting article about the problem of spam filters when it comes to a language rife with double entendres. Sheerin tells the tale of one of Canada's oldest magazines that has recently been forced to change its name due to constant spam warnings. The moniker in question: The Beaver, that grand animal dear to Canada's heart. Most of the 30,000 viewers to ...

Share If you take a look across the top of your keyboard, you will notice an invaluable work of design that has been recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator for the Department of Architecture and Design, decided that '@' was due for some institutional gravitas, and pitched it to MoMA's design and architecture acquisitions committee. Why ...

Android owners have been enjoying the perks of the Google' Goggles application for a few months now, leaving us iPhone users jealous. After reading Google's latest announcement, we're now even more jealous of our Android brethren. According to the Google Translate Blog, the company introduced a Google Goggles prototype at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that instantly translates text ...

It should come as no surprise that at Switched we communicate, not only with each other, but the outside world primarily through electronic means. In fact, last week's CES was the first time most of us have ventured outside of our solitary writing dungeons in months. One of the shortcomings of e-mail and instant messaging is that often our natural snark and sarcasm gets lost in translation to ...

We reported back in November that the New Oxford American Dictionary had voted "unfriend" as 2009's word of the year. In Britain, the holy birthplace of the OED, a recent survey of this year's neologisms, led by TV personality and lexicographer Susie Dent, revealed that social networking terms remain some of the most popular new words in the English lexicon. One of the most often used words ...

Ever since the dawn of a glorious thing called the Internet, many among the world's literati have been carping and kvetching about the imminent demise and corruption of the written word at the hands of tweets and other cyber abbreviations. One recent study, however, proudly proclaims prose to be healthier than ever, thank you very much. As Wired reports, researchers at the University of San ...

They're everywhere. The entire landscape of the digital age is just crawling with them. Like Volkswagen-sized subway rats or hipsters clad in plaid, smileys are so universally ubiquitous that you hardly notice them anymore. But how much is too much? At what point do we assert our evolutionary claim to language, slam our fists on our keyboards, and scream "Enough is enough!"? Is it time that we ...

Having just finished a Switched office debate on whether Apple's camel-casing of its products (iPod, iPhone) has completely debased the English language, we stumbled across this piece of cra- amazing paragon of personal technology christened after the camel-case trend: the iWallet. The wallet itself is rather unremarkable, and the design is exquisitely bad. For starters, it's a hard-shell case ...

You may have never really noticed the weird capitalization pattern on iPhones; or perhaps you just thought it was part of Apple's brilliant marketing schtick. In reality, though, this weird mid-word capitalization has been around for a while, and is commonly known as 'camel case' (because of the visual "hump" that a nested capitalized letter gives a word). Caleb Crain, in a great article for ...