Author: 101translations

‘Bad’ words are a mainstay of both humour and social commentary, and most of us know a lot of them, from words that are so taboo we’re not supposed to use them at all, to words that we only take out for special occasions, often when tempers are running high.

‘Bad’ words often started out as neutral or even good words. Over time, having become associated with negative connotations, they’ve gone through a process known as ‘pejoration’, gradually coming to be so linked with negative things that they become irredeemable.

Pejoration is found in all languages. In English, there is a marked tendency for words associated with women, that once had a positive or neutral connotation, to undergo a process of pejoration, becoming insults or taboo words. In English, many more ‘bad’ words relate to women than to men, with many – ‘fishwife’ and ‘prima donna’ for example – having originally simply referred to a woman’s role at work or in society.

The name ‘Karen’ – until recently a perfectly ordinary name with no particular connotations at all – has undergone a remarkably fast process of pejoration and is now associated with a popular negative stereotype of a particular type of women. Once one of the most popular names for girls, it has seen a rapid decline in popularity, as parents don’t want to saddle their daughter with a name with such negative connotations.

Perhaps there is some slight comfort to be found in the fact that when a word really goes bad, it sometimes becomes gender-neutral too. The term ‘diva’, which originally referred to a female opera singer, came to be used to refer to women who were unreasonably demanding, but in recent years is increasingly often applied to men, while a quick trawl through social media gives witness to the slow rise in males being referred to as ‘male Karens’ or even simply ‘Karens’ alongside their sisters.

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Red is by far the most used colour on flags, appearing on 76% of all national flags.

There’s a good reason for that.

Red is a colour that has been used to communicate many important messages since the very first humans started making images on cave walls with materials like ochre.

And just think of all the different messages we communicate with the colour red. It means ‘danger,’ presumably because red is also the colour of freshly shed blood. It means ‘love,’ perhaps because we tend to flush when we experience feelings of excitement and affection. It means ‘anger,’ because we also flush when we are angry.

So it makes sense for red to feature on national flags, which are often used to garner feelings of solidarity and willingness to act at times of war (or football), sentiments of love and affection for the motherland, and the determination to stand up for our country when it is under attack.

101translations is based in Ireland (which does NOT have red in its flag) but loves to work with people who wave all sorts of flags!

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-bunch-of-red-flags-flying-in-the-air-CzCrB4pQsUc

You will be familiar with the concept of writing a letter, putting it into a bottle, carefully sealing it, and casting it out to sea in the hope that it will one day find a messenger.

Perhaps you have also hummed The Police’s 1979 hit Message in a Bottle.

There are lots of ways to communicate, and as communication professionals, we are here for all of them, but throwing letters in bottles into the sea doesn’t seem like the most… effective way of reaching out.

Yet this niche form of communication has a long history. Allegedly, in about 310 BCE, the Greek philosopher Theophrastus used bottled messages to determine if the Mediterranean Sea was formed by the inflowing Atlantic Ocean (the first, but far from the last, time bottles were used in this way to study the movement of the seas and oceans). Since then, people have released messages in bottles for all sorts of reasons: research, in the hope of finding an exotic pen pal, and just because.

Some of the saddest stories of messages in bottles involve people in shipwrecks and other disasters, expressing the hope that their last words will reach a loved one. Like Alice Bettridge, a young woman working on the Kamloops freighter. In December 1928, a trapper found a bottled note at the mouth of the Agawa River, Ontario. When he opened it, it read: “I am the last one left alive, freezing and starving to death on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. I just want Mom and Dad to know my fate.”

Because of concerns about littering and polluting, messages in bottles have gone out of vogue, but the very idea of a heartfelt message being sent out to sea in search of a recipient continues to resonate, and still pops up in literary and theatrical contexts.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-bottle-floating-in-a-body-of-water-SkVpd5YhUug

Seidensticker was born into a farming family in 1921 and graduated with a degree in English from the University of Colorado in 1942, the same year the US Navy started expanding its school of Japanese language, which moved from Berkeley in California to the University of Colorado, largely because Americans of Japanese descent were then being taken into custody as enemy aliens in the west. Seeking only to avoid the draft, Seidensticker enrolled.

Thus began Seidensticker’s love affair with the Japanese language, which would lead to his becoming one of the most famous translators from Japanese into English, to his working as an academic at the University of Tokyo and, later, Stanford, and to the introduction of generations of English-speakers to the best of Japanese literature. His labours not only made Japanese works of literature available, but also showed English-language publishers that Japanese literature could sell well. To this day – he died in 2007 – he is regarded as one of the finest translators from Japanese into English.

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Our fashion choices are a form of communication. When we decide how to dress, we are making statements about who we are, and who we want to be seen as. Depending on our choices, we might be saying ‘I’m a goth,’ or ‘I’m a football fan,’ or ‘I want to get ahead in business.’

Above all, fashion mostly says, ‘I care what others think about me, and I want to fit in with people I consider similar to me.’

Using fashion in this way – to make statements about ourselves and form bonds with others – is not surprising. We are social mammals and – alone among mammals – we wear clothes, which give us a wide array of fashion options.

But maybe it is a little more surprising to learn that some other social mammals are interested in fashion too.

For example, back in 1987, people observed orcas off the coast of British Columbia wearing dead salmon as hats. They’d been known to playfully wear kelp at times, but this was the first time they’d been seen wearing dead salmon. At first it was just one or two, and then many of them started doing it.

When the behaviour died out after a year or two, researchers concluded that it had been a fashion trend that had simply gone out of style, as human trends do all the time.

Until 2024, when suddenly dead salmon hats were apparently in style again, perhaps among older orcas (they can live up to the age of 90) reliving their glory days!

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-couple-of-orcas-swimming-in-a-body-of-water-qM9tSt_5orU

Diverse types of writing developed in various cultural and geo-historical contexts around the world, but what was the very earliest attempt to write? One of our earlier blog posts explored the idea that painting could itself be seen as a form of writing, especially when it serves, among other things, as an aide-memoire.

Consider the example of the famous cave paintings found in Spain and France, which often include vivid hunting scenes, and depictions of animals that lived in the area when the climate was vastly different than it is today. These are often accompanied by handprints – sometimes loads of them – made by using the simple technique of holding the hand up against a wall and then blowing ochre pigment around it.

We know extraordinarily little about the artists who created the works of art in those caves, although they’ve given us so much in terms of artistic expression and the opportunity to see at least a glimpse of the distant past. But those handprints suggest that they had a sense of pride and ownership in their work and that, like any artist, they wanted to sign it.

Arguably, if not quite writing, these vivid handprints from the past are at least the earliest form of signature.

We speak just about every language imaginable here at 101translations. Get in touch to learn how we can help you with your translations needs at 👉https://101translations.com/

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Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-painting-on-a-wall-with-a-fire-hydrant-in-the-foreground-i6Fo5_WpaKQ

Since smartphones became ubiquitous, many of us have been experiencing addiction, feelings of anxiety when our phone is not at hand, and issues with attention span, alongside the tangible benefits of having the internet in our pocket.

But what are the impacts – if any – of smartphones on language acquisition?

The research is still in flux, but it does show that when parents use their smartphones around their children, it has a negative impact on how they interact with them, which in turn can cause problems for children’s development.

From birth, babies are drawn to gazing into adults’ faces. This is a behaviour that is related to later language outcomes, so when caregivers are distracted by smartphones, and spend less time looking into their infants’ faces, this creates a challenging environment for language acquisition. Older, verbal children are also less likely to ask their parents questions when they see them interacting with their phones, and this in turn impacts on their ability to pick up language skills.

New problems give rise to novel words. The issues associated with how technology impacts negatively on how parents and caregivers interact with children is often referred to as ‘technoference.’  Researchers are still exploring exactly how it impacts on language acquisition, but it does seem clear that it’s not a good idea to mix smartphone use and the care of small children, tempting as it can be to seek some distraction from a handy screen.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-small-child-laying-on-a-bed-playing-with-a-tablet-zIkwwCA-mqI

Almost 50 years after his death, the cultural and linguistic impact of Elvis Presley continues to be felt.

Elvis is considered to have been a true revolutionary. From the mid-1950s, before the concept of cultural appropriation had been coined and debated, he integrated diverse musical genres, including country music, rockabilly, gospel, and the blues. 

Alongside his music, Elvis’s image and his public persona penetrated the consciousness of the world, driving youth culture as an entire generation of young people emulated his hairstyle, dress sense, and signature moves. Teenagers integrated the words and phrases he used into their own language (referring to someone as a ‘hound dog’ and so on). Often, these words and phrases originated in the African American musical culture that Elvis often tapped into. In his own words, he said: ‘[They] been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin’ now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in their shanties and in their juke joints and nobody paid it no mind ’til I goosed it up.’ 

While in more recent years, Elvis has been retrospectively criticised by some for the ways in which he used African American music, at the time white racists were horrified by the fact that he was helping to make African American music and language commercial and mainstream. His massive popularity made the music business see that all these genres could make lots of money and laid the ground for generations of singers to come.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-man-dressed-in-elvis-clothing-holding-a-microphone-NGY_fydnUIo