Needs more sexting
Today's xkcd:
Jeep's Superbowl commercial: [No longer available at YouTube]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
… 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 […]
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?".
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]