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Another "Kids Today" conversation

Tom the Dancing Bug for 8/23/2013 starts this way:   Read the whole thing.

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Psycho kids today

Kevin Dutton, "Psychopathy's Double Edge", Chronicle of Higher Education 10/22/2012: [I]n a survey that has so far tested 14,000 volunteers, Sara Konrath and her team at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research has found that college students' self-reported empathy levels (as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a standardized questionnaire containing such items […]

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Kids today

Following up on our most recent "kids today" post, I decided to spend a few minutes over lunch searching Google Books for interesting examples of the genre. Thus: Many children today are greatly to be pitied because too much is done for them and dictated to them and they are deprived of the learning processes. […]

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Kids today yesterday

The most recent xkcd: The mouseover title: "If you identified with the kids from The Breakfast Club when it came out, you're now much closer to the age of Principal Vernon." The Breakfast Club, in case you happen to have missed it, was a 1985 movie about high-school detention.* And the guy who played Principal […]

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How do "today's students" write, really?

There was a cute "Things Kids Write" piece in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago (James Courter, "Teaching Taco Bell's Canon", 7/9/2012), with the subhead "Today's students don't read. As a result, they have sometimes hilarious notions of how the written language represents what they hear." Is it true that college students today […]

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What happened to all the, like, prescriptivists?

A tweet by Julia Ioffe from 10/4/2022 (image below because twitter embedding seems to be broken…):

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I feel like "I feel like"

[This is a guest post by Pamela Kyle Crossley] Just read the blog post on this. I feel like "I feel like" is one of those passive-aggressive tics that came in in the 1980/1990s, related to that thing where people turned statements into questions by raising their pitch at the end of a sentence (which […]

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The Synergy of the Growth Hack Paradigm

Non Sequitur for 10/7/2019:

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Mad

I'm in San Francisco for InterSpeech 2016, where I'm involved in four papers over three days, so blogging will probably be a bit light. But I have a few minutes before the morning starts, so let me continue the discussion of Gabriel Roth's feelings ("Paper cut to the heart", 9/8/2016) by quoting from Bill S's comment: Some of […]

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"Feel that" has been disappearing

The recent flurry of posts on feel as a propositional attitude verb has, I now feel, buried the lede. Kids today may have started using "feel like S" with increasingly frequency in recent years. But their elders have apparently been abandoning "feel that S" ever since the middle of the 20th century.

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Feelings, beliefs, and thoughts

Molly Worthen, "Stop Saying 'I Feel Like'", NYT 4/30/2016: In American politics, few forces are more powerful than a voter’s vague intuition. “I support Donald Trump because I feel like he is a doer,” a senior at the University of South Carolina told Cosmopolitan. “Personally, I feel like Bernie Sanders is too idealistic,” a Yale student […]

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Could this really be the end?

..of the nonsense about narcissism and pronoun counts? Probably not, but it should be. I'm talking about Angela L. Carey,  Melanie S. Brucks, Albrecht CP Küfner, Nicholas S. Holtzman, Mitja D. Back, M. Brent Donnellan, James W. Pennebaker, and Matthias R. Mehl, "Narcissism and the use of personal pronouns revisited", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, […]

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More fun with Facebook pronouns

Class discussion of the Facebook pronoun data brought out some interesting points. We started by looking at the relationship between first-person singular pronouns ("I", "me", "my", "mine") and first-person plural pronouns ("we", "us", "our", "ours") as a function of the age of the poster. Here's the ratio of FPS/FPP frequencies:

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