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Today, the “four letter” words traditionally termed profanity in American English are more properly just salty. As late as 1920, the lowlier word for excrement rarely appeared in print; its use has increased a hundredfold since. The uses of “damn” and “hell” in print are higher than ever in written history. No anthropologist observing our society would recognize words used so freely in public language as profanity.

At the same time, consider the words we now consider truly taboo, that we enshroud with a near-religious air of sinfulness. They are, overwhelmingly, epithets aimed at groups.

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– http://ift.tt/1oDWg63

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The old saying “Sally sold seashells by the seashore” has nothing on a tongue twister created by researchers at MIT. The verbal puzzle, “pad kid poured curd pulled cod,” tripped up test subjects who tried to spit it out so much, that psychologists believe it could be the toughest one there is to date.

“If anyone can say this [phrase] ten times quickly, they get a prize,” said Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, a psychologist from MIT who specializes in speech errors as a way of understanding normal brain functions, and one of the creators of the mouth-boggling phrase.

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– http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/12/05/mit-tongue-twister-trickiest-to-say/

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The English “sorry” is a marker not of grace and decorum, but rather of a belief that one magic word has the power to decontaminate the world even as it both pacifies and reproves those who pollute it. “Sorry” is a mixture of decayed piety and passive-aggressive guile.

The stand-alone “sorry” was unknown to Shakespeare or Dr. Johnson. Only in the mid-19th century did it become common to say “sorry” rather than “I am sorry.” The adjective was divorced from the person feeling the sorrow, and soon ceased to signal even regret.

“Sorry” rose at the same time that the English began using “overfamiliar” as a term of reproach and “detachment” as a synonym for “aloofness.” Stand-alone “sorry” may have dressed like a gentleman, but his heart was made of India rubber.

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– http://app.nytimes.com/#2013/12/14/opinion/a-poor-apology-of-a-word

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In a paper published on Friday in the journal PLOS One, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands announced that they had found strikingly similar versions in languages scattered across five continents, suggesting that “Huh?” is a universal word.

The study, conducted by Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira and Nick Enfield, closely examined variations of the word — defined as “a simple syllable with a low-front central vowel, glottal onset consonant, if any, and questioning intonation” — in 10 languages, including Dutch, Icelandic, Mandarin Chinese, the West African Siwu and the Australian aboriginal Murrinh-Patha.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/09/arts/that-syllable-everyone-recognizes.html?ref=todayspaper