When you put yourself into a new social context, one of the things you learn is a new vocabulary. This is natural and normal. However, you must give care to develop vocabulary habits that will benefit and not hinder you in the future. I started college in 1994. After a few weeks on campus, I realized there were quite a few words and phrases that were in common usage that I was going to start using simply by being around them. While most of them were benign, there were several that I was a bit unsure whether I wanted to adopt or not. I'm not talking about obscenities. I'm talking about things like: Crap - Often used as an expletive, adjective or adverb. Sucks - Used to describe … [Read more...] about Reputable Language
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Language and Learning
For my freshman English class in college, I wrote a paper looking at the correlation between language and thought. My premise was that certain thought capabilities would be impossible without having a language in order to express those thoughts. There has been some recent research looking at how language can help with learning. The experiment was designed to see if people could learn information more quickly if there was a word associated with it. They were shown a series of "aliens". These were clay sculptures some had roughly shaped heads and others had smoother heads. The subjects of the experiments were told to tell if each alien was friendly or not. The smooth head aliens … [Read more...] about Language and Learning