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11 Brand Names With Unforunate Meanings In Other Languages
Once in a while, an international company will come out with a new product, brand name or slogan that gets, well, seriously lost in translation. One famous example is Mitsubishi’s unfortunate 1973...
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"F-Bomb" Is Now Officially A Legitimate Word
NEW YORK (AP) -- It's about freakin' time. The term "F-bomb" surfaced in newspapers more than 20 years ago but will land Tuesday for the first time in the mainstream Merriam-Webster's Collegiate...
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Gibbons Sing Like Human Sopranos When Dosed With Helium
Singing gibbons use the same vocal techniques as soprano singers when calling to one another across the jungle, a study has found. Humans were believed to have evolved our unique speaking ability...
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Teaching Kids A Second Language Isn't A Waste Of Money
Children growing up in low-income households often fall behind their peers in just about every category––from school testing, college exams and even their mortgage rates later in life. What if...
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Learning A Language Makes The Brain Bigger
By peering into students' brains, a recent study, published in the journal NeuroImage, found that learning languages can help bulk up the brain. The researchers, from Lund University, compared the...
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Sesame Street Is One Of The Only TV Shows That Is Actually Good For Kids
Television has a bad side. According to a report from the University of Michigan, the average American child has seen 16,000 murders on TV by age 18. Indeed, programs explicitly designed for kids...
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How My Chimpanzee Friend Learned To 'Talk'
October 30th marked the five-year anniversary of the death of my friend Washoe. Washoe was a wonderful friend. She was confident and self-assured.She was a matriarch, a mother figure not only to her...
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The Secret Meaning Of The Body Movements Of Sign Language Interpreters
As New York City Mayor Bloomberg gave numerous televised addresses about the preparations the city was making for Hurricane Sandy, and then the storm’s aftermath, he was joined at the podium by a sign...
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Just The Idea Of Being Called A Cheater Is Enough To Keep People Honest
When it comes to the decision to be honest or cheat, language plays a huge role. In a recent Stanford study, two different groups of participants were asked to think of a number between one and...
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How Dogs Learn Words
Dogs can learn the names of objects, but they likely focus on different features when learning words than humans do, new research finds.When toddlers learn words for objects, they focus on shape. This...
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10 Language Mistakes Kids Make That Are Actually Pretty Smart
Little kids make such cute mistakes when they talk.We know they’re still learning the language, so we tolerate their errors and chuckle at how funny they sound.Behind that chuckle is the assumption...
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The 10 Easiest Foreign Languages For English Speakers To Learn
More and more Brits are finding their first job abroad.But how difficult is it to pick up the language?Anne Merritt reveals the 10 easiest to learn from scratch.AfrikaansLike English, Afrikaans is in...
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Why A Southern Drawl Sounds 'Uneducated' To Some People
Studies have shown that whether you are from the North or South, a Southern twang pegs the speaker as comparatively dimwitted, but also likely to be a nicer person than folks who speak like a...
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Two Common Mistakes In English Grammar May Have Come From Scandinavia
LAST WEEK we looked at Jan Terje Faarlund's idea that "English is a Scandinavian language." He thinks that West Germanic Old English died out in Britain, and was replaced by a language based on the...
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British English Is Starting To Infect America
Spot on — It's just ludicrous!" snaps Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley."You are just impersonating an Englishman when you say spot on."And don't get him started...
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It Was A Bad Idea For Watson The Supercomputer To Learn The Urban Dictionary
"OMG, that's a bullshit question. Eat one, you doofus."One as-yet-to-be-determined day in the future, computers will talk back to us in this manner.But, thankfully, it would appear that Computers with...
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Your Facebook Posts Are More Memorable Than Your Face
The fleeting status updates you post on Facebook might leave a more lasting impression than you think. New research shows that people are much more likely to remember the text from Facebook posts than...
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Whole Foods Founder Says Too Many Companies Get Capitalism Wrong
Whole Foods' rise has been unique in many ways. It's taken a concept that was once considered very niche—a focus on local and organic food—and turned it into a multi-billion-dollar international...
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This Pen Translates Text As You Underline With It
Three designers have come up with a way to translate text as you underline it with a pen, Camille Bautista of Mashable reports. The Ivy Guide is a device that fits over pens and pencils, and scans...
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Girls Have A Genetic Advantage Over Boys When It Comes To Language
According to a new study in the Journal of Neuroscience, a language-related gene known as FOXP2 — which is essential for speech in humans and for communication in mice — is more active in young girls...
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