Month: September 2025

In 1973, with the American civil rights movement increasingly impacting on academia, the term Ebonics was coined, a portmanteau word combining “ebony” with “phonics”, to refer to how Black Americans speak English, with influences from West African languages, and dialectal forms that emerged within Black communities. 

The term escaped academia in the 1990s and entered mainstream discussions about how Black students should be taught in school, and how their distinctive dialects should be treated. Did they need to be ‘corrected’ to standard American English, or should their modes of speaking be recognised as formal variants in their own right, and accepted or even taught in school?

The term ‘ebonics’ remains controversial among African American linguists, some of whom see it as trivialising an essential debate.

Photo Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-civil-rights-to-black-lives-matter1/

Poets are often pretty casual with the rules of language for the sake of their art, but possibly none has pushed the boundaries more than Lewis Carroll, the 19th century author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, whose poems are filled with invented words that consistently pose a challenge to translators seeking to render them in another language. 

Consider the first verse of his famous poem, Jabberwocky: 

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Despite the obvious challenges involved, somehow Jabberwocky has been translated into sixty-five languages, with translators using equivalent nonsense terms of their own invention.

Photo Source: https://classic-literature.co.uk/lewis-carroll-jabberwocky-poem/#google_vignette

Throughout the cold war, the USA and the USSR engaged in space exploration as a proxy for hostilities. In 1993, amid improving relations, American Vice-President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin announced plans for a new space station, which eventually became the International Space Station, which would enable cooperative research and observation, and potentially transportation, maintenance, and a staging base for possible future missions to the Moon, Mars, and asteroids. 

Astronauts on the International Space Station – who come from various different backgrounds, not just the USA and Russia – are all expected to know both English and Russian, but as many are not proficient in both, over the years the ISS crews have developed their very own pidgin language that combines words, sounds, phrases, and expressions from both Russian and English, which they refer to as ‘Rushglish’.

Photo Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-cold-war-politics-shaped-international-space-station-180975743/

Throughout the medieval period in Europe, large numbers of people traversed the many pilgrimage routes to sacred sites. These multiple journeys had a vast impact on language, as they exposed travellers and their hosts to many vernacular tongues that they would never otherwise have encountered. 

Very educated pilgrims could communicate with one another in Latin, then the language of scholarship and the Church, but the need for everyday communication led to the development of glossaries and guides that pilgrims could use on their religious journeys, thus contributing to the standardisation of many languages.

Photo Source: https://historymedieval.com/medieval-pilgrimage-routes-beyond-the-horizon/

In 1999, acclaimed Irish poet Seamus Heaney published a new translation of the Old English epic, Beowulf. While his translation won awards and was greeted with great acclaim by many, others criticised him for the liberal use of terminology from the English as spoken in Northern Ireland – the linguistic tradition in which Heaney grew up, which has profoundly marked his writing.

Heaney himself commented that he had used Northern Irish dialectal terms he knew from listening to his aunts and other relatives, and that he had seen similarities between the original Old English and some of the words he was familiar with as a child.

Heaney’s most vociferous critics took to referring to his translation as “Heaneywulf” to signal their disapproval of his treatment of the text.

Photo Source: https://susannahfullerton.com.au/13-april-1939-seamus-heaney-is-born/

The Internet has changed the world in too many ways to count. 

Almost as soon as the Internet became part of daily life, owners of interactive websites were grappling with a tricky ethical and logistical dilemma. Should they control or limit what people can say online? And if they should, how?

Today, many search engines, social media platforms, and reference sources online use special filters that identify and block words or phrases that are widely considered offensive or obscene. These filters are clever, but they’re not perfect. Many totally innocuous local and community websites and groups found themselves blocked when filters falsely identified strings of letters or words in their titles as inappropriate. 

The name of this phenomenon is the ‘Scunthorpe Problem’. Scunthorpe is a town in Leicestershire, England. In 1996, people from that area were banned from creating AOL accounts because the town’s name incorporated a four-letter word widely considered rude. 

Although filters have become more sophisticated over the years, similar problems have continued to occur. And, because the filters have a bias towards the English language, minority languages, and surnames from non-English-speaking cultures, have been disproportionately affected. 

As recently as March 2025, after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the removal of content designated ‘inclusive’, the US Department of Defense removed references to the ‘Enola Gay’ aircraft!

Photo Source: https://www.sporcle.com/blog/2017/04/the-scunthorpe-problem/

One of the lesser-known fields of psychology is ‘maledictology’ which, as the name suggests, examines how people express themselves emotionally by swearing. Swearing is studied in its neurological, psychological and social contexts.

Clearly, the decision to swear comes from the brain. It is hypothesised that swearing involves both higher-level cognitive functions, such as decision-making and language, and the subcortical system, which determines how the person will respond to stimuli in their environment.

In psychological terms, we learn how to swear as part of our normal psychological development in society. From childhood, we learn what the common swearwords of our culture are, and which circumstances prompt their use. Knowing what is, and isn’t, considered rude in different contexts is an essential element of a child’s psychosocial development.

Socially-based research examines the cultural markers that people, and societies, use to determine when a particular word is or isn’t appropriate.

Currently, maledictology remains very much a minority field of study, a contested ground between psychology and linguistics that struggles to find funding, suggesting that the taboo element of swearing permeates academia as much as any other field of endeavour. For those who are particularly interested, the academic journal Maledicta was published between 1977 and 2005.

Photo Source: https://www.tuw.edu/psychology/career-in-psychology-traits/

Luxembourg is a small European country tucked between France, Belgium, and Germany. Alongside French and German, its official language is Luxembourgish, a West Germanic language similar to several High German dialects, spoken by about three-quarters of the population. Of course, as so few speak it – fewer than 300,000 – Luxembourgers generally also speak French or German, and often both.

The tricky question of the difference between a dialect and a language raises its head here once again. Until the mid-twentieth century, Luxembourgish was considered a dialect of German, but following a rigorous process of standardisation it was promoted as an independent language in its own right.

Photo Source:  https://www.luxtimes.lu/yourluxembourg/luxembourgguide/luxembourg-s-capital-celebrates-30-years-of-unesco-status/29149917.html

The spell checker tool that is an integral feature of word processing programs like Microsoft Word has been a joy for bad spellers everywhere, but it has its flaws.

The ‘Cupertino effect’ is a term that was coined to refer to the spell checker’s annoying habit of occasionally replacing correctly spelled words that are not in its dictionary with a different, often wildly wrong, word. It is named after the fact that some older spell checkers used to replace the English word ‘cooperation’ with ‘Cupertino’ (a California city), because its dictionary had only the hyphenated variant, ‘co-operation.’

Most of the time errors like this are just a minor irritation, but when important documents aren’t carefully proof-read after running a spell check, embarrassing – and potentially even dangerous – errors can slip by. This can happen even more easily when people are writing in a language other than their mother tongue and may be relying more heavily on a spell checker.

Even with all the technology at our disposal, sometimes you just can’t beat the human touch!

Photo Source: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/07/autocorrect-fails-how-and-why-to-turn-off-word-prediction-on-your-phone.html