Pronouns and Individualism

Researchers hypothesized that pronoun usage reflects increasing individualism in American culture. Their research found that for American books from 1960-2008, use of, "first person plural pronouns (e.g., we, us) decreased 10% first person singular pronouns (I, me) increased 42%, and second person pronouns (you, your) quadrupled."

Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica

A study examined content-framing of encyclopedia entries of top Fortune companies in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica in 2006, 2008, and 2010. While  Britannica was predominantly neutral, "Wikipedia entries were significantly longer, were more positively and negatively framed, and focused more on corporate social responsibilities and legal and ethical issues ... The findings stress that the knowledge-generation processes in society appear to be fundamentally shifting because of the use of social media collaboration."

Turkish English

Science has published a study revealing that modern Indo-European languages - which includes English - originated in Turkey 9,000 years ago. This rejects the prevailing theory of the language family originating 5,000 years ago in SW Russia.

Researchers studied "virus epidemics to create family trees of ancient and modern Indo-European tongues to pinpoint where and when the language family first arose."

Linguists identify language families by looking for similar sounding (and, often, meaning) words in modern languages (e.g. water & wasser - German) - the closer the words, the closer the languages.

Werid But Cool

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't awlyas mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe