"Irony" Man

     If you were asked what word in the English language was the most misunderstood or misused, what would you say? Would it be "literally", when it is used in sentences such as, "It was literally raining cats and dogs"? Or would you suggest "like", one of the words that is striving to take the throne away from "um" for the word most used when we are filling time between thoughts. However, the writers from Dictionary.com have nominated another word for the most misused in English, "ironic".

     According the their article,

"Often the word “ironic” is misused to remark on a coincidence, such as “This is the third time today we've run into each other. How ironic.”

It is also mistakenly used to describe something out of the ordinary or unusual: “Yesterday was a beautiful, warm day in November. It was really ironic.”

And, unfortunately, it is sometimes used to simply emphasize something interesting. For example, “Ironically, it was the best movie I've seen all year!”"

     Another important misuse of "ironic" is when it is used incorrectly in the place of the "sarcasm". The only time when something is really ironic, is when it is the exact opposite of it's literal meaning. A statement such as, "It's been such a good day" would be ironic if you were using it to describe the day you were late to work, wrecked your car, and got soaked in the rain. A sarcastic statement would be something like saying something like, "Wow, your shirt is so nice" to someone who has theirs caught on a nail and ripped, and is obviously embarrassed by it. The main difference between irony and sarcasm, is that with sarcasm, you are deliberately trying to taunt, harass or make fun of someone, while with irony you are not. 

     To learn more about irony and the different types of it there are, you can go to hotword.dictionary.com/ironic/.

1. http://hotword.dictionary.com/ironic/

2. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

That is a mouthful

   

The German language, which has always been known for its tendency to create long compound words, recently marked the passing of the longest word in its lexicon. The 63 letter long monster,  Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, was the German word for a "law for the delegation of monitoring beef labeling". The law for which this word was created was recently repealed, and with it no longer in place, there is no need to keep using the word.

     With Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz passing out of use, that leaves Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, an insurance company that provides legal protection, as the longest German word in use. If you are wondering how in the world you would pronounce Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, you are not alone. Fortunately, the Telegraph out of the U.K. has provided a sample of how it would be said:


   


1. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/-em-rindfleischetikettierungs-berwachung-saufgaben-bertragungsgesetz-em-germany-says-goodbye-to-its-longest-word/276492/
2. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/10095976/Germany-drops-its-longest-word-Rindfleischeti....html

"You do it your way, and I'll do it mine"

   

"Signs, signs, everywhere there's signs" goes the song, and recently a new sign popped up at the Louvre Museum in France. The sign, written only in Chinese, "forbids people from urinating or defecating wherever they want.”

     Why was this sign put in place? There doesn't seem to have been a particular incident related to this sign, but one reason may be that some Chinese don't have the same views on their bodily functions as many in the west do. For example, many Chinese parents don't put their babies in diapers, something that, if you were to do in Europe or the US, would get you stares at the least, or visits from the police at worst. Instead, they prefer to put their children in split pants, a type of pants that have an open crotch, and let them relieve themselves in any open area they can find. Also, to many Chinese, it is perfectly normal to spit just about anywhere. Because of this, some tried to curb public spitting before the Olympics started in 2008, so as not to damage China's image to those visiting from abroad.

     These differences in cultural issues, and the problems they have caused, have not gone unnoticed by Chinese officials. Recently China passed a new tourism law. The law will give travel agencies the authority to penalize tourists who violate social ethics. Wang Yang, a deputy prime minister from China, said that while many countries had welcomed tourists from his country, the quality of some of them left something to be desired. Yang said: "They speak loudly in public, carve characters on tourist attractions, cross the road when the traffic lights are still red, spit anywhere and some other uncivilized behavior. It damages the image of the Chinese people and has a very bad impact."

    While the Chinese are working on the image problem their tourists have caused as they travel, they weren't the first nation to have a negative association with their tourists. For a large portion of the recent past, Americans have been seen as the ignorant tourists. There must be something about gaining superpower status that signals the worst behaving members of that society to go out into the world.





1. http://qz.com/88334/china-is-starting-to-get-embarrassed-about-its-tourists-obnoxious-behavior-abroad/
2. http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1f5ry9/china_is_starting_to_get_embarrassed_about_its/
3. http://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-embarrassed-by-its-tourists-2013-5
4. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-starting-embarrassed-tourists-obnoxious-194019907.html
5. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-51379838/how-pg-brought-the-diaper-revolution-to-china/
6. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/world/asia/17manners.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&em&;ei=5087%0A=;en=95c25c162ed63e15;ex=1177041600
7. https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd2j9P9gh0ML3Y6GUJVh59KT8y5GAFgaOEYWwv0_V4hkJ_JrtrvEDyfr5nGpdVfd5NZ8vvtelKmqvEDtZknWHTKUgePjerJge1jGQsbE-yodoJs32onylyXixthuifQVsmeiteEbzmAZK-/s1600/road-signs-and-traffic-light.png

It's a question of instinct

     I saw this on reddit the other day and couldn't help but share. One of my major problems when it comes to English is that I can't remember all of the rules most of the time. Which is embarrassing because I am a native speaker and, other than a few snippets of Spanish, it is the only language I know.

    However, not all my grammatical hope is lost. Sometimes I can tell just by looking sometimes that I have made an error somewhere. It doesn't work all the time, and thank God I have spell check, or it would be infinitely worse. I couldn't tell you why something may be wrong, but a lot of the time, it will just look off. When I saw the picture below, I took a little bit of solace in the fact that I may not be the only one whose brain works like that.

1. http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/1dl2nt/this_is_english_basically/

"Yo yo-yo"

     One of the problems with the English language is that it does not have a gender neutral pronoun. Over the years, many have tried to come up with something to use instead of the standard him or her. Back in the 1880s, lawyer Charles Converse proposed "thon", a mix of the words "that" and "one". Other words put forward to fill the gap have been "nee", "heesh", "huh". While none of these ever caught on, a new contender for the gender neutral crown has come from some children in Baltimore. These children have begun using the word "yo" in the place of "he" or "she" to fill the gender neutral gap.

      Margaret Troyer, a former teacher, published a paper showing that "yo" was replacing "he" and "she" in every day usage for many of her students. Troyer first noticed the change while she was teaching children in a Baltimore-area middle school. From the NPR article on the story:

"Some examples would be 'yo wearing a jacket,' " Troyer says, referring to her research. "Another example from the paper is, 'Yo threw a thumbtack at me,' which is a typical middle school example."
So Troyer began to study her students. She gave them blank cartoons and asked them to fill in the captions — many of the cartoon characters were androgynous.
Troyer found the kids used "yo" instead of "he" or "she" when they didn't know the gender of the character. But they also used "yo" as a substitute even when they did know the gender.
"They said things like, 'Yo put his foot on the desk.' So it was clear from this that they knew it was a male person, but they were just using 'yo' to refer to the person," says Troyer. "And then in other sentences they would use 'yo' to refer to a female as well."

     While the adoption of a new gender neutral pronoun is unusual, Christine Mallinson, a sociolinguist at the University of Maryland, isn't quite sure if it will stick around. "It'll be interesting to see whether they keep that usage as they become adults. Do they keep that in the workplace? If that's the case, it might persist," says Mallinson. "But sometimes slang or linguistic innovations in middle or high school get dropped out as people become adult users of English."

     What do you think? Do you think "yo" is here to stay? Did you have any slang or made up words that you or your friends came up with in school that you don't use anymore? Let us know in the comments!





1. http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/04/25/178788893/yo-said-what
2. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8f/Us_yoyo_national_2a.jpg