Killer app: Seven dirty words you can’t say on your iPhone

By Dennis Baron
Apple’s latest iPhone app will clean up your text messages and force you to brush up your French, or Spanish, or Japanese, all at the same time.

This week the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approved patent 7,814,163, an Apple invention that can censor obscene or offensive words in text messages whie doubling as a foreign-language tutor with the power to require, for example, “that a certain number of Spanish words per day be included in e-mails for a child learning Spanish.”

Black Youth, the Tea Party, & American Politics

Yesterday, Cathy Cohen published an article with the Washington Post titled, Another Tea Party, led by black youth?” In it, she shares,

In my own representative national survey, I found that only 42 percent of black youth 18-25 felt like “a full and equal citizen in this country with all the rights and protections that other people have,” compared to a majority (66%) of young whites. Sadly, young Latinos felt similarly disconnected with only 43 percent believing themselves to be full and equal citizens.

In the video below, Cohen further discusses the involvement of black youth in American politics.

Linked Up: Comic Con, Neon Signs, Phonebook Art

Today’s poem is brought to you by Random.

Haikus are easy

But sometimes they don’t make sense

Refrigerator

The Synoptic Problem

By Jen Vafidis, Editorial Assistant
For a week, a Florida pastor’s threat to burn copies of the Koran to mark the most recent anniversary of September 11 had an almost disastrous momentum. Before he eventually acquiesced, Pastor Terry Jones provoked a hot-blooded global response. Protests in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia, not to mention an insinuating statement from Hezbollah, gave off the persistent impression of danger. One of the pastor’s many vocal critics was President Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria, a country plagued with violent in-fighting between Christians and Muslims. In a Facebook post the President condemned Jones’ plans and implored him to be “mindful of the Golden Rule taught by Jesus Christ: Do unto others as you would want others to do unto you.”

War and Peace Part Three: Deprivation

By Amy Mandelker
I am proofing the galleys for this new edition of the Maude translation of War and Peace when a freak storm with gale force winds takes out three towering pines on my neighbor’s property, topples a venerable oak crushing a friend’s roof, and downs trees and power lines all over Princeton township and beyond, leaving the southern part of the state deprived of electricity for several days.

Why pay through the nose?

By Anatoly Liberman
Why indeed? But despite our financial woes, I am interested in the origin of the idiom, not in exorbitant prices. On the face of it (and the nose cannot be separated from the face), the idiom pay through the nose makes no sense. Current since the second half of the 17^th century and probably transparent to the contemporaries, it later joined such puzzling phrases as kick the bucket and bees’ knees.

Idioms are harder to trace to their “roots” than words. Etymology, though not an exact science, is governed by certain regularities (sound correspondences, patterns of semantic change, and so forth), but a search for the origin of idioms rarely needs the expertise of historical linguists. They will offer good

Questioning Alternative Medicine

By Roberta Bivins
As a historian who writes about the controversial topic of ‘alternative medicine’, I get a lot of questions about whether this or that therapy ‘works’. Sometimes, these questions are a test of my objectivity as a researcher.

Turnover at the White House and a Crisis of Confidence

By Elvin Lim
The Obama White House has announced a series of personnel changes in recent weeks, ahead of the November elections. The aim is to push the reset button, but not to time it as if the button was plunged at the same time that voters signal their repudiation on election day. But the headline is the same as that of the Carter cabinet reshuffle in 1979: there is a crisis of confidence in the Oval Office.

Comic Con – Episode 3 – The Oxford Comment

This weekend, Michelle and Lauren took on New York Comic Con & Anime Festival to bring you superheros, speed dating, light sabers, and more.

It’s alive! New computer learns language like a human, almost.

By Dennis Baron
A computer at Carnegie Mellon University is reading the internet and learning from it in much the same way that humans learn language and acquire knowledge, by soaking it all up and figuring it out in our heads.

People’s brains work better some days than others, and eventually we will all run out of steam, but the creators of NELL, the Never Ending Language Learner, want it to run forever, getting better every day in every way, until it becomes the largest repository imaginable of all that’s e’er been thought or writ.

Linked Up: James Franco, Willy Wonka, NPR

By the time you read this, I will be at Comic Con. Don’t be sad. I’ll take photos. Lots and lots of photos. Lots.

Tariq Ramadan & Christopher Hitchens: Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

With the Obama administration in its nascent years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict proving as intractable as ever, relations with Iran reaching a boiling point and the political landscape changing rapidly both in the United States and the Middle East, wrestling with the issue of Islam is more crucial than ever and will be a defining feature of the 21st century. In this video clip, famous atheist and prolific author Christopher Hitchens and the accomplished and controversial scholar Tariq Ramadan debate one of the most pertinent questions of our modern age.

Memo From Manhattan: Age and the City

By Sharon Zukin
I’ll tell you what’s “very strange”: the population of New York City is going to get a whole lot older very fast. The city’s age spread is now about the same as that of the U.S. population. Around 7% are children too young to go to school, almost 25% are under eighteen years of age and half as many (fewer than 12%) are over sixty-five.

But according to demographers’ projections, after 2010 New York will be a rapidly aging city. Some reasons for this are natural (baby boomers aging), others are social (medicine and changes in cultural practices keeping us alive longer) while still others are a mix of both (fertility rates declining). All in all, though, the city’s older population will increase dramatically in the next twenty years.

John Winston Ono Lennon, Everyman

By Gordon Thompson
On 9 October, many in the world will remember John Winston Ono Lennon, born on this date in 1940. He, of course, would have been amused, although part of him (the part that self-identified as “genius”) would have anticipated the attention. However, he might also have questioned why the Beatles and their music, and this Beatle in particular, would remain so current in our cultural thinking. When Lennon described the Beatles as just a band that made it very, very big, why did we doubt him?

War and Peace Part Two: Earthquakes

By Amy Mandelker
The earthquake in China. The school that collapsed, crushing students and teachers, was established and funded by the charitable organization for which my ex-husband works. He is a conservationist and social activist, and for several days following the first shocks, he is only able to contact one of his co-workers at the scene, who digs alone at the site of the school with his chilled, bare hands for an entire day. By evening he uncovers the dead body of a teacher.

The Rum History of the Word “Rum”

By Anatoly Liberman
The most universal law of etymology is that we cannot explain the origin of a word unless we have a reasonably good idea of what the thing designated by the word means. For quite some time people pointed to India as the land in which rum was first consumed and did not realize that in other European languages rum was a borrowing from English. The misleading French spelling rhum suggested a connection with Greek rheum “stream, flow” (as in rheumatism). According to other old conjectures, rum is derived from aroma or saccharum. India led researchers to Sanskrit roma “water” as the word’s etymon, and this is what many otherwise solid 19^th-century dictionaries said. Webster gave the vague, even meaningless reference “American,” but on the whole, the choice appeared to be between East and West Indies. Skeat, in the first edition of his dictionary (1882), suggested Malayan origins (from beram “alcoholic drink,” with the loss of the first syllable) and used his habitual eloquence to boost this hypothesis.