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Needs more sexting

Today's xkcd:

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Restless creak

Jeep's Superbowl commercial: [No longer available at YouTube]

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The culturomic psychology of urbanization

Patricia Greenfield, "The Changing Psychology of Culture From 1800 Through 2000", Psychological Science 2013 (pdf): The Google Books Ngram Viewer allows researchers to quantify culture across centuries by searching millions of books. This tool was used to test theory-based predictions about implications of an urbanizing population for the psychology of culture. Adaptation to rural environments […]

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Donald Kagan's farewell

Matthew Kaminski, "Democracy may have had its day", WSJ 4/26/2013: Donald Kagan is engaging in one last argument. For his "farewell lecture" here at Yale on Thursday afternoon, the 80-year-old scholar of ancient Greece—whose four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War inspired comparisons to Edward Gibbon's Roman history—uncorked a biting critique of American higher education. Universities, […]

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"… a generation of deluded narcissists"?

Keith Ablow, "We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists", Fox News 1/8/2013: A new analysis of the American Freshman Survey, which has accumulated data for the past 47 years from 9 million young adults, reveals that college students are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their […]

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Innovation, rules, and regulation

John McIntyre, "I said pound sand, sticklers", 12/27/2012: Yesterday I sent out this tweet: "Just waved through a singular 'they.' Pound sand, sticklers." The singular they was in a sentence on The Sun's editorial page: "Although experts say only a tiny proportion of seriously mentally ill people ever resort to acts of violence, the odds […]

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Regardless whether Prudes will sneer

On both sides of the War of the Iptivists, many people seem to believe that opinions about linguistic usage reflect attitudes towards innovation.  The story goes like this: A new word, a new form, or a new construction is invented; at first, most people reject the innovation and deprecate the innovators; but the innovation spreads all the […]

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The readers are worse than the writers

… at least judging by the readers' comments on Stephanie Banchero, "Students Fall Flat in Vocabulary Test", Wall Street Journal 12/6/2012.  Banchero's article seriously misunderstands and misrepresents an already-misleading account of American schoolchildrens' knowledge of vocabulary — see "Journalist Falls Flat in Comprehension Test", 12/8/2012, for details. But the 127 readers' comments suggest that the paper […]

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More Dutton

Uptake by Andrew Sullivan, "Psychopaths All Around Us", 11/13/2012. This stuff sells. If you're thinking about buying it, you should read "Psycho kids today" and "Is self-involvement really increasing in American youth?".

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Is self-involvement really increasing in American youth?

Following up on "Psycho kids today", here's a passage from Kali Trzesniewski and M. Brent Donellan, "Rethinking 'Generation Me': A Study of Cohort Effects From 1976-2006", Perspectives on Psychological Science 5(1) 2010: Social commentators have argued that changes over the last decades have coalesced to create a relatively unique generation of young people. However, using large […]

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Historical culturomics of pronoun frequencies

Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell and Brittany Gentile, "Male and Female Pronoun Use in U.S. Books Reflects Women’s Status, 1900–2008", Sex Roles published online 8/7/2012. The abstract: The status of women in the United States varied considerably during the 20th century, with increases 1900–1945, decreases 1946–1967, and considerable increases after 1968. We examined whether […]

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Textual narcissism, replication 2

Yesterday, I tried replicating one of the experiments in Jean M. Twenge et al., "Increases in Individualistic Words and Phrases in American Books, 1960–2008", PLoS One 7/10/2012, and got results that seem to be significantly at variance with their conclusions ("Textual narcissism", 7/13/2012). This morning, I thought I'd try getting a replication with word counts from […]

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A half century of usage denialism

Yesterday, I discussed Joan Acocella's strange misreading of two essays introducing the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary ("Rules and 'rules'", 5/11/2012). John Rickford wrote that "the patterns of variation and change … are regular rather than random, governed by unconscious, language-internal rules and restrictions" — but Ms. Acocella took this defense of "vernaculars […]

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