All posts tagged: word

Ways Millennials Give Away Their Age Without Ever Saying A Word

Published by skeptic

Every generation has its own unique set of quirks that are an ultimate giveaway as to how old they are. For boomers, it can be referring to the TV remote as “the clicker.” For Gen X, it can be using a mouse with a laptop. For millennials, it can be a variety of habits and behaviors that reveal their age without them even having to say a single word (and ones that fellow millennials will certainly recognize!) Many of the millennial generation’s quirks are adorably endearing — and we can only hope these 29 to 44-year-olds pass them down to their own kids, keeping these unforgettable eccentrities alive for generations to come! Here are 6 ways millennials give away their age without ever saying a word: 1. Getting anxious whenever they receive a voicemail Diego Cervo | Canva Pro Have urgent news you just have to tell your millennial friend about? You better text it to them. When millennials receive a voicemail, they often assume the worst. Surely someone must be dead or dying if …

Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue

Published by José

In an old Zen story, two monks argue over whether a flag is waving or whether it’s the wind that waves. Their teacher strikes them both dumb, saying, “It is your mind that moves.” The centuries-old koan illustrates a point Zen masters — and later philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists — have all emphasized at one time or another: human experience happens in the mind, but we share reality through language and culture, and these in turn set the terms for how we perceive what we experience. Such observations bring us to another koan-like question: if a language lacks a word for something like the color blue, can the thing be said to exist in the speaker’s mind? We can dispense with the idea that there’s a color blue “out there” in the world. Color is a collaboration between light, the eye, the optic nerve, and the visual cortex. And yet, claims Maria Michela Sassi, professor of ancient philosophy at Pisa University, “every culture has its own way of naming and categorizing colours.” The most famous …

“A firewall against erasure”: Jennifer Beals on “The L Word” book fans demanded

Published by Sam

I knew that Jennifer Beals and I were going to have a fantastic conversation when, after connecting on Zoom and chatting for a bit, she asked if I would mind it if she turned off her camera because it helps her concentrate better. Opening up about being what she describes as “very shy,” she went on to describe her inspiration for pursuing a wide release of “The L Word: A Photographic Journal,” a collection of photos she’d personally taken during the filming of the original “L Word” series, which she’d compiled into a book in 2010 to hand out to the cast and crew after they’d wrapped the show. Having bowed out of fan events due to a certain level of uncomfortability being in crowds of strangers, she was convinced by cast members Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig to join them at an event taking place in the U.K. one year, and it was there that she learned that fans weren’t just interested in the photos she’d taken, they all but demanded greater access to them. …

MasterWriter is like having a word wizard whispering brilliant phrases in your ear

Published by skeptic

Writing is hard. One minute, you’re typing away, feeling like the next literary genius, and the next, you’re staring at the blinking cursor, trying to find a word that isn’t “nice” or “good.” Don’t go searching for your old, dusty thesaurus—MasterWriter’s got you. If you’re a novelist, poet, journalist, songwriter, or anyone who has ever agonized over the perfect phrase, this powerful suite of writing tools is about to change the game. For just $99.99 (usually $150), you can get a two-year license to MasterWriter’s Creative Writer version, packed with tools designed to help you write better, faster, and with more creativity. This isn’t just a fancy thesaurus—it’s a fully loaded writing assistant that gives you access to word families, phrases, synonyms, rhymes, metaphors, similes, alliterations, and even pop culture references. Think of it as a co-writer who never gets writer’s block and never says, “Eh, good enough.” Let’s say you’re trying to describe the sun. A standard thesaurus might offer words like blazing, scorching, or torrid. MasterWriter’s Word Families tool digs deeper, giving you …

Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Manuscripts: Before the Word Processor & White-Out

Published by José

Before the word processor, before White-Out, before Post-It Notes, there were straight pins. Or, at least that’s what Jane Austen used to make edits in one of her rare manuscripts. In 2011, Oxford’s Bodleian Library acquired the manuscript of Austen’s abandoned novel, The Watsons. In announcing the acquisition, the Bodleian wrote: The Watsons is Jane Austen’s first extant draft of a novel in process of development and one of the earliest examples of an English novel to survive in its formative state. Only seven manuscripts of fiction by Austen are known to survive. The Watsons manuscript is extensively revised and corrected throughout, with crossings out and interlinear additions. Janeausten.ac.uk (the website where Austen’s manuscripts have been digitized) takes a deeper dive into the curious quality of The Watsons manuscript, noting: The manuscript is written and corrected throughout in brown iron-gall ink. The pages are filled in a neat, even hand with signs of concurrent writing, erasure, and revision, interrupted by occasional passages of heavy interlinear correction.… The manuscript is without chapter divisions, though not without informal division …

The Trump Supporters Who Didn’t Take Him at His Word

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Ask Trump supporters why they like the president, and chances are good you’ll hear something like: He tells it like it is and says what he means. The question, then, is why so many of them refused to take him at his word. Over the first three weeks of the second Trump presidency, a recurrent motif is that Trump does exactly what he said he would, and then people who backed him react with shock and dismay. If you’re surprised, you weren’t paying attention—and judging from recent examples, many people weren’t. When Trump announced his plan (I’m using the word generously) to occupy the Gaza Strip and convert it into an international real-estate development, the chairman of Arab Americans for Trump, which formed to back him during the election, expressed shock and betrayal, and announced that the group would …

A Five-Letter Word for Love by Amy James—Book Review by TBE

Published by skeptic

Amy James’s debut novel “A Five-Letter Word for Love” is a contemporary romance that cleverly weaves together small-town charm, personal growth, and the addictive daily ritual of Wordle. While the premise might seem gimmicky at first glance, James manages to craft an engaging story that goes beyond its hook to explore deeper themes of ambition, contentment, and what it truly means to find your place in the world. Plot & Character Development The Story The novel follows Emily Evans, a 27-year-old receptionist at an auto shop in small-town Waldon, Prince Edward Island. Despite having a science degree, Emily feels stuck in a job she never wanted while dreaming of a creative career in a big city. Her one consistent achievement is maintaining a 300+ day streak on Wordle, the popular word game. When she finds herself stumped on a particularly challenging puzzle, she reluctantly turns to John Smith, the laconic mechanic she’s dismissed as boring and one-dimensional. This interaction sparks an unexpected connection that forces Emily to question her assumptions—both about John and about what …

Scientists map how neurons encode word meanings

Published by skeptic

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people Notice: JavaScript is required for this content. Language has interested brain investigators for centuries. In the 1860s, Pierre Paul Broca’s post-mortem examinations of stroke patients with language deficits identified an area of the left frontal lobe involved in speech production. At around the same time, Karl Wernicke identified another region located in the temporal lobe that was damaged in stroke patients who had lost the ability to understand spoken language. In the latter part of the 20th century, the development of brain scanning techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) enabled researchers to understand the functions of these language centers in greater detail, divide them further into distinct subregions, and see how they recover from stroke damage. Brain scan studies have also shown that a network of regions in the left frontal and temporal lobes map the form of words to their meanings and put them together to form phrases and sentences. Yet, we still know …

Hannah Fry: I hate the word ‘ginger’, but I love how we develop our ‘colourful’ language | The Formula To Life With Hannah Fry

Published by Sam

I’ve always hated the word “ginger”. I know that people use it as a descriptive term, but there’s just something about the way the vowels can be elongated that make it sound like it was destined to be a sneer across a school playground (at least, the playgrounds I frequented in the 1990s). “Redhead” always seemed a much more affectionate term, even if it is wildly inaccurate. Growing up, I assumed that was deliberate misdirection. I thought “red” was a euphemism, like saying someone has “passed wind” when it’d be impolite to use the real word. I only recently discovered this is not the case at all. Redheads and redbeards are called “red” because we glorious genetic mutants have been around much longer than the word “orange”. I’m sure you know this bit of pub trivia already: the colour orange was named after the fruit, and not the other way around. But until about 1500, the English language just didn’t have a way to describe anything with that particular hue. People lumped gingers, squirrels and …

The Most Common Word For Prayer in the New Testament – OpentheWord.org

Published by skeptic

Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints.— Ephesians 6:18 By Rick Renner The most common Greek word translated “prayer” in the New Testament is the word proseuche. This particular word and its various forms is used approximately 127 times in the New Testament. It is the word that Paul uses in Ephesians 6:18, when he says, “Praying always with all prayer.…” The word “prayer” in this verse is a translation of the word proseuche. Today I would like to tell you about this word and what it means for you and me. The word proseuche is a compound of the words pros and euche. The word pros is a preposition that means toward, and it can denote a sense of closeness. For example, one scholar says the word pros is used to portray the intimate relationship that exists between the members of the Godhead. John 1:1 says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.…” The word …

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All posts tagged: word

Ways Millennials Give Away Their Age Without Ever Saying A Word

Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue

“A firewall against erasure”: Jennifer Beals on “The L Word” book fans demanded

MasterWriter is like having a word wizard whispering brilliant phrases in your ear

Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Manuscripts: Before the Word Processor & White-Out

The Trump Supporters Who Didn’t Take Him at His Word

A Five-Letter Word for Love by Amy James—Book Review by TBE

Scientists map how neurons encode word meanings

Hannah Fry: I hate the word ‘ginger’, but I love how we develop our ‘colourful’ language | The Formula To Life With Hannah Fry

The Most Common Word For Prayer in the New Testament – OpentheWord.org