Tag: Language
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Coding is for everyone — as long as you speak English — Gretchen McCulloch — Wired
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This year marks the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, so there’s been a lot of pixels spilled on “the initial promises of the web”—one of which was the idea that you could select “view source” on any page and easily teach yourself what went into making it display like that. This article makes […]
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How good is “good”?
How good is “good”? YouGov asked people to rate how positive and negative certain expressions are. Warning: Contains pretty charts. As it turns out, “good” and “bad” are not exactly mirrors of one another on the scale. Bad has an average score of 2.60, meaning its mirror equivalent on the scale ought to score 7.40. […]
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A spectre is haunting Unicode
A spectre is haunting Unicode Some meaningless Japanese characters (known as ghost characters) have been included in Unicode — and no-one knows why. Although there are some pretty good theories. [S]everal of the added characters had no obvious sources, and nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced. Nobody was sure […]
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A conversational hierarchy
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A conversational hierarchy An attempt to rank ten different types of conversation. I am always amazed by how much people are willing to divulge on public transport. They list what they’re having for dinner tonight, they explain their aches and pains in detail, or they slag off Jennifer from Accounts. Of course what I forget […]
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Woman’s English too good for UK entry
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Woman’s English too good for UK entry A pregnant Indian woman has been refused entry to live in Scotland with her Fife husband because her language qualification for entry to the UK is too advanced. Disgusting! When is this country going to stop being so hostile to people?
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How the letters of the alphabet got their names
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How the letters of the alphabet got their names — The Economist This is revelatory. It all makes much more sense than I realised.
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Why your emojis are getting lost in translation and what you can do about it
You’ve probably been using some emojis wrongly without realising it.