Tasting the Word ‘Tuesday’: The Extraordinary World of Lexical-Gustatory Synesthesia

2 months ago

What does the word 'Tuesday' taste like to you? For most of us, the question is nonsensical, but for individuals…

The Girl Who Couldn’t Speak: Genie and the Tragic Limits of the Critical Period for Language

2 months ago

The tragic case of "Genie," a feral child discovered in 1970 after a decade of silent isolation, offers a harrowing…

A Heckin’ Good Syntax: The Surprisingly Complex Grammar of DoggoLingo

2 months ago

Beyond the cute misspellings of "doggo" and "pupper," the internet phenomenon of DoggoLingo has developed its own surprisingly consistent grammatical…

The Chameleon Tone: Unlocking the Musical Logic of Mandarin’s Tone Sandhi

2 months ago

Mandarin is famously a tonal language, but what many learners quickly discover is that the tones they memorize often change…

Island Sign: The Spontaneous Birth of a Language in Martha’s Vineyard

2 months ago

Long before Nicaraguan Sign Language became famous, another sign language emerged organically on Martha's Vineyard. Due to a high rate…

The Syntax of Scent: Can We Ever Truly Describe Smells with Words?

2 months ago

Why can we describe a shade of blue with a dozen words, but struggle to articulate the scent of rain?…

The ELIZA Effect: Why We Talk to Chatbots Like They’re Human

2 months ago

Have you ever found yourself saying "please" and "thank you" to a chatbot or voice assistant? This is the ELIZA…

The Graveyard of Words: Who Decides When a Word Is Officially Dead?

2 months ago

For every new word that enters the dictionary, thousands of others fall into disuse and disappear into the graveyard of…

Who Owns Slang? The Complexities of Linguistic Gentrification in the Digital Age

2 months ago

From "on fleek" to "slay," words born in specific communities—particularly AAVE—often travel into the mainstream, where they're adopted by brands…

The Shape of Nothing: How the Invention of ‘Zero’ Was a Linguistic and Mathematical Revolution

2 months ago

The concept of zero is more than just a number; it’s a profound linguistic and philosophical idea that had to…

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