In keeping with our week’s theme on Internet slang, today we’re going to explore the wonderful world of strange Twitter terms.
Twitter is an incredibly popular social network and micro blogging site that allows users to post updates with no more than 140 characters. Users tend to have difficulty squeezing thoughts into a limited character count, so the Twitterverse created it’s very own vernacular to appease the masses. Alongside Twitter’s traditional glossary of must-knows like “#” and “@username,” a few odd and humorous terms found their way into the mix. Here’s a Twitterific list of some obscure terms:
Twitterati – users who follow A-Lister’s, which often include celebrities. (Who doesn’t want to follow Chuck Norris?!)
Tweeple – Twitter users
Phweeters – people who have fake accounts representing personalities and celebrities. (Perhaps I’m not following Chuck Norris after all!)
Tweeterboxes – you’re a Tweeterbox if you Tweet too much!
Dweet – a drunk Tweet! (Chuck, I didn’t mean what I Tweeted, Hiccup!)
Tweading – reading Tweets
Twaggle – a gaggle of followers (Just me and Chuck)
Now that you’re up to par on the obscurities of Twitter and my profound affections for Chuck Norris, we can proudly say we’ve got Tweet-Cred! In order to perfect your Twittonary vocabulary in the Twitterverse, brush up on your English by taking a few classes!
Like the evolution of dance, language has evolved for Internet users. The web created it’s own vernacular and unfortunately acknowledgement arrived in the form of the Oxford English Dictionary. A few years ago, OED decided to wave it’s white flag and add a few internet slang words to it’s lexicon: LOL, OMG, and <3 better known as: ♥.
Although Internet slang was initially created to shorten the length of keystrokes or recompense for smaller character input areas, it quickly seeped into our everyday lives. At random moments throughout my day, I will hear or even say a few of these words. Some would say it’s a corruption of the English language, or perhaps a true sign of the impending apocalypse. Others believe it’s all apart of the amazing evolution of language.
Here’s a list of some popular Internet slang:
LOL – Laugh out loud
OMG – Oh my God/Gosh
<3 or ♥ – Heart
FYI – For your information
BFF – Best friend forever
YOLO – You only live once
BRB – Be right back
ROFL – Rolling on the floor laughing
AFK – Away from keyboard
Totes – Totally
The English language is incredibly complex, even for native speakers life myself. Perhaps you should brush up on your English by taking a few courses before learning the advanced world of Internet slang!
Did you know fetuses start developing language skills in the last 10 weeks of pregnancy? Imagine what would happen if they had cell phones in the womb! Researchers in the United States and Sweden have discovered the tiny humans can actually learn by listening to their mother’s communicate.
Have I blown your mind?
The research is partly based on their auditory system already fully working during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy. Infants are able to listen and decipher sounds as well as remember and learn them. Once born, babies at just 30 hours old (I’m still younger) were exposed to Swedish or English vowel sounds. Infants responded by strength of suction on their pacifier that was connected to a computer!
Don’t believe it? Check out this video of a newborn being tested
Whenever the baby sucked on it’s pacifier, the computer delivered generated sounds of vowels through headphones. Results indicated that babies can distinguish different languages when born, and are curious to further explore languages that are unfamiliar. Babies with bilingual mothers can equally adopt two or more languages through natural exposure. Based on this research, every child should start life with the knowledge to converse in different languages. Why not give your bundle of joy a head start by learning a new language yourself? Perhaps you can start by taking some Spanish classes!
eBooks written in foreign languages have been selling like hotcakes. Amazon reported a seventy percent rise in eBook sales during 2012 both within the United States and international markets. Foreign language eBooks offer readers the opportunity to read popular books translated in various languages, and often at a lower price than the print version.
Authors gain a wider audience due to accessibility. Notable examples include JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series translated to La Collection Complète des eBooks Harry Potter or Bram Stoker’s Dracula in French. If you would like to challenge yourself and read a foreign language book, why not take French classes in New York to get started.
Claiming to “change the way people learn languages”, Duolingo has been running for a while, and has been lauded as an “elegant solution” to 2 problems – helping people learn languages, and translating foreign language texts on the web.
For example, if you’re a native English speaker who wants to learn Spanish, it gives you Spanish sentences from around the web that are relevant to your level, along with a crib sheet of words that you may not know. After you’ve finished, it then highlights words that you had trouble with and gives you more real-world examples of their usage. As you translate more sentences, you not only learn new vocabulary, but you’re also helping out with translating Spanish websites into English!
Now the iPhone app is out, and like the website, it is 100% free.
Duolingo certainly is a practical and elegant way to learn a new language, though whether it’s the most effective technique for learning a language is doubtful. However, it “gameifies” the language learning process, by making it more fun and interactive, and allowing you to “level up”, compete with your friends, and generally give the user an addictive way to improve their language skills. The fact that it also has the side effect of helping translate the web is a huge bonus.
You can learn more about Duolingo by watching this video:
This one’s a slightly different kind of language post, but still interesting I feel. Tech company Apple has been heavily involved in plenty of litigation over the past few years, most recently over claims that other phone manufacturers (namely Samsung) have modeled – or straight up copied – their devices’ designs. Whichever side you take in that particular debate, it’s clear that Apple’s penchant for trying to sue everybody is starting to grate. Thankfully, judges are also getting annoyed by it.
Apple lawyers have been arguing that “App Store” is a trademarked phrase, and it has the right to stop others from using similar phrases. That includes Amazon, which was sued by Apple in March 2011, shortly after it opened the Amazon Appstore for Android.
Now, some of those issues are finally coming to a head in public. At a hearing today in an Oakland federal court, it became clear that while Apple may have a lot of fury and passion behind this lawsuit, it has run into trouble in the form of a very skeptical judge. US District Judge Phyllis Hamilton showed great doubt that Apple will be able to prove that consumers were confused or deceived by Amazon’s use of the word “Appstore.” At this point, it’s somewhat remarkable that the company hasn’t dropped this suit, since Hamilton indicated a year ago that she was unimpressed by Apple’s arguments and denied a preliminary injunction.
Arguing over the intellectual property ownership of elements of your phones and tablets is one thing, but trying to trademark a generic term like “App Store” reeks of arrogance in my opinion, and I for one am glad that judge Phyllis Hamilton seems to agree. The arrogance is only reinforced when Apple claim that it’s not so much about the words themselves, but the fact that Apple ‘set the benchmark’ and they feel that customers would be cheated by an inferior product with a similar name.
“They [Amazon employees] admit they targeted Apple customers, because Apple set the benchmark for what consumers expected,” said Eberhart. “When you combine that with our evidence consumers associate the term ‘app store’ with Apple,” it’s enough evidence to warrant a trial.
“Everyone who uses a smartphone knows the difference between the Apple iOS system and the Android system,” responded Hamilton. “Where’s the confusion? There’s some suggestion [by Apple] that if Amazon is using the ‘Appstore’ term someone might think they have as many apps as Apple does. Well, why? And how, in fact, does that contribute to any deception on the part of Amazon?”
October 26, 2012 at 6:56 am
· Filed under technology, vocabulary · Posted by Matthew Fallon
A recent article on CNET discusses this year’s “25 worst passwords of the year” list, with the top 3 unchanged from last year: “password”, “123456″ and “12345678″. However, new entries to the list such as “Jesus”, “password1″ and “welcome” show that on the whole, people still aren’t getting to grips with the fact that these kinds of passwords are easily crackable.
Making a strong password is not difficult, and requires only a tiny bit more effort. A password that is easy to remember doesn’t necessarily have to be easy to guess. Language learners can use words from several languages in order to confuse brute-force hacking efforts, which use a dictionary to try every word or every combination of numbers until they gain access.
From the article:
Security experts suggest picking long passwords (the longer, the better) that include as many different characters as possible while excluding anything that can be personally linked, such as birthdates or names of relatives. Choosing passwords that include words found in common dictionaries is also discouraged.
However, popular nerd and math based webcomic XKCD has its own take on making memorable yet strong passwords. Comic creator Randall Monroe muses, “through 20 years of effort, we’ve successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess”. His solution is the opposite of that of the security experts above, and uses math to form a password that is easy to remember but has enough entropy that it will take centuries for a computer to guess: use 4 common yet unrelated words, and remember a situation the involves all 4 of them. His example, “correcthorsebatterystaple” is a much stronger password than “Tr0ub4dor&3″, even if it seems like it wouldn’t be.
I sometimes use a combination of common English and Chinese words for my passwords – they’re certainly memorable to me, and I’d be very impressed if there was an algorithm out there that could guess it!
Still, maybe if computers could take some of Chinese lessons Miami has to offer, they might have the required vocabulary…
Scholars at Oxford University working on an ancient writing system called “proto-Elamite” may have finally unlocked the secret to deciphering it, thanks to a breakthrough in technology that allows academics to view the inscriptions more clearly than they were previously capable of doing.
In a room high up in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, above the Egyptian mummies and fragments of early civilisations, a big black dome is clicking away and flashing out light.
This device, part sci-fi, part-DIY, is providing the most detailed and high quality images ever taken of these elusive symbols cut into clay tablets. This is Indiana Jones with software.
It’s being used to help decode a writing system called proto-Elamite, used between around 3200BC and 2900BC in a region now in the south west of modern Iran.
This machine, using a combination of computer processing in conjunction with 76 photographic lights, allows every facet of the tablets to be captured, and allows it to be viewed from any angle, with every groove and notch displayed in strikingly high detail.
The writing system has no bilingual texts or overlaps, and the spoken language that it accompanies fell out of use thousands of years ago, meaning that it is fiendishly difficult to decode. Besides that, a major hurdle for scholars seeking to learn the meaning of what appear to be arbitrary dots, dashes, circles and other symbols is the fact that the only extant texts contain many mistakes and inconsistencies, due to a lack of scholarly tradition among the people who originally engraved the symbols onto the tablets. In 10 years of work, Dr. Dahl has managed to decipher around 1,200 different symbols, but due to the difficulty of the decoding process he still lacks plenty of basic vocabulary.
The key to the decoding of the language that has mystified scholars for centuries is not only the technological breakthrough itself, but the ability to easily crowd-source the entire project via the internet – the images will be uploaded online to allow any and all linguistic cryptographers to contribute their knowledge and findings to the project.
Like the building of the famous Enigma machine during the Second World War, cryptology is very rarely one person doing all the work – it usually consists of a large team each contributing their worth towards cracking the code. The ability to make the images easily available to millions of people means that the code of the proto-Elamite writing system could finally be broken.
Here’s a great little tool that takes a novel approach to learning a new language – in fact, it’s rather similar to the approach taken by the author of the Harry Potter book that gradually teaches you Swedish I posted about earlier this month.
Flewent is an extension for Chrome that takes whatever English website you happen to be browsing, and translates certain words into your target language, depending on the level you choose. You set the target language and a percentage, and Flewent does the rest. If you don’t understand a word, you can simply hover over it for its English translation.
This kind of passive learning can greatly help build vocabulary, and is a great auxiliary aid to standard rote learning. Since you’re reading anyway, you might as well use the opportunity to bolster your knowledge in the language you’re learning. The more vocabulary you learn, the higher you can set the threshold for translated words, until you’re eventually browsing in your target language!
Due to the machine translation nature of the extension (using Google Translate), sometimes the translated words aren’t perfect – occasionally they will misunderstand the word’s context, or give you a word that doesn’t have quite the right nuance of meaning – but generally speaking, it’s a great unstructured way to improve your vocabulary. The latest update even allows you to listen to the translated words, helping you both cement the new word in your mind as well as helping you with pronunciation.
As somebody who often browses primarily text-based websites like Reddit, I think this kind of tool is a fantastic idea!
While not specifically about learning languages, I still thought that this language-related tidbit was worth posting. A recent article on tech blog Techcrunch, somewhat dramatically titled “Putting an end to the biggest lie on the internet”, discusses something that we all both find familiar and yet instantly gloss over – terms of service.
When signing up to any web site (or installing most applications on your computer), it’s perfectly normal to be greeted by a wall of text, often in hard to navigate legalese or otherwise official sounding language, delineating the terms and conditions of using that site or application. Most people do not have an hour and a half to dedicate to reading and understanding each word of the T&C, and so just blithely click “I agree” in order to use the service.
However, companies know this just as well as users do, and some will occasionally hide rather less than savory conditions in there – for example, popular image host Twitpic.com takes credit for your content, and reserves the right to sell your images on to news agencies without giving any credit or money to the photographer.
However, there is a new service that aims to help people wade through the terms and conditions and receive a bullet-point list of what exactly clicking “I agree” entails: the aptly-named TOS;DR (a play on the popular internet abbreviation TL;DR – “too long; didn’t read”).
TOS;DR summarizes terms and conditions for you, and then rates sites, services and apps on a scale from A (the best) to E (the worst). Twitpic is, unsurprisingly, rated an E.
So, next time you’re faced with a list of terms and conditions as long as your arm just to use a particular site, check out TOS;DR and see what you’re really signing away when you click that “I agree” button.
Rose Ramraj languagetrainers.com
Rose is a Blogger of all things fascinating. Her educational background is in writing and business studies. She currently lives in New York City with her husband and two mischievous toy poodles.
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eBooks written in foreign languages have been selling like hotcakes. Amazon reported a seventy percent rise in eBook sales during 2012 both within the United States and international markets. Foreign language eBooks offer readers the opportunity to read popular books translated in various languages, and often at a lower price than the print version.
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