Category: Interesting facts

We humans are born communicators, and we use language, and numerous other methods, to get our message across to others and, often, to express our feelings of solidarity for the people around us.

Sometimes we are so good at communicating that things go awry.

Since the late 19th century, psychologists have studied what is now known as social contagion, which refers to when certain beliefs and behaviours spread spontaneously through a social network.

One of the most well-known twentieth century scholars of the phenomenon is Herbert Blumer, who coined the term ‘social contagion’ in his fascinating paper about a dancing mania in the European Middle Ages, when people compulsively danced. Also known as St Vitus’s Dance, the mania affected adults and children alike, until some of them collapsed, and even died. From the first major outbreak in Aachen, in what today is Germany, the mania spread across much of Europe.

Most scholars agree that social contagion occurs when people spontaneously, rather than consciously, imitate the language and behaviour of others, in a sort of mutated version of the same instinct that sees us adopting popular fashions because we want to communicate our identity and our desire to fit in.

Until recently, most studies of social contagion explored its negative aspects: contagions that caused people to self-harm or otherwise engage in damaging behaviour. But some forms of social contagion can have a positive effect. For example, people who are lucky enough to have neighbours who are mostly happy are more likely to be mostly happy themselves, even after factoring in matters such as relative wealth.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/silhouettes-of-people-dancing-at-sunset-by-the-water-WB_PZr8wXxA

Did you know the Arabic language has around 14 different words for “love”? Each of these expresses a distinct phase of the wonderful feeling of falling in love.

It begins with Al-Hawa, the first spark of attraction, and Al-Sabwa, the playful infatuation when two people are getting to know each other. 

When love begins to surface, it moves to Al-Shaghaf, followed by Al-Wajd, when thoughts of the loved one begin to consume the mind.

With time, love can ache and intensify: Al-Kalaf speaks of the longing desire that borders on pain, Al-Oshok of devotion and adoration, and Al-Najwa of when love is so consuming it triggers feelings of sadness.

Then comes Al-Shawq, a deep yearning to be close, and Al-Wasab, the torment of loving too deeply. In Al-Istikana, love becomes an unhealthy, blind submission. 

At its most beautiful, love softens into Al-Wodd, a gentle tenderness where the couple are not only lovers but also best friends, and Al-Kholla describes two soul-mates. Al-Gharam describes love that binds and clings, and finally comes Al-Hoyam, the madness of being completely, overwhelmingly in love.

Fourteen words, fourteen phases of feeling – because love, in every language, is never just one thing.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/focused-photo-of-a-red-rose-C6CVXJMXwqs

We’ve already talked about how different species can communicate with one another, to varying extents. Many social mammals have broadly similar body language, and some that spend a lot of time together, like pet dogs with humans, can learn a little about what the other is communicating.

One of the more unusual examples of interspecies communication involves orcas, a highly intelligent, extremely social species of whale – in fact we discussed orcas’ fashion sense in a previous blog post!

In 2018, researchers revealed findings showing that orcas were capable of imitating human speech. They started by training a captive orca, Wikie, to imitate the sounds other orcas made, and then – although her vocal apparatus is completely different to a human’s – taught her how to say a number of human words, including ‘hello’, ‘one, two’ and ‘bye bye’. They determined that Wikie – and other orcas – learn sounds by vocal imitation, which helps to explain why different pods of orcas in the wild use different arrays of vocalisations, that even have distinct dialects.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/orca-whale-swims-towards-a-person-in-blue-water-Q94StF6MW-k

Jerome of Stridon, who would become known as Saint Jerome, was an early Christian priest, theologian, and translator, chiefly remembered for his translation of the Bible into Latin, and for his commentaries on the text. Unlike other early translators of the Bible, he translated the Old Testament directly from Hebrew, which he had learned from a Jew who had converted to Christianity, and from a Christian community of Jewish origins in Antioch.

Jerome’s use of a Hebrew text was considered controversial at the time, and he was criticised by some of the other great scholars of the day, including Augustine. But the Vulgate translation he created became the standard Bible of the Roman Catholic Church and was affirmed at the Council of Trent in the 16th century, so he is rightly acclaimed as one of the most influential figures in Church – and, by extension, world – history.

Jerome’s legacy is referenced in the many icons and other works of art that depict him in the act of writing.

At 101translations, we would like to see many more translators immortalised in gilded frames.

Well, we can dream…

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/open-book-TNlHf4m4gpI

We’ve talked about fashion before, but a new trend has caught our eye and it’s so interesting we just can’t resist.

Fashion, of course, is a powerful way of communicating feelings of belonging to a group.

Fashions are, unsurprisingly, often kicked off by an influential member of society, whom other people seek to emulate to communicate that they are part of an important club.

This also sometimes happens with other social mammals; you might remember the orcas of Pacific North America and their dead salmon hats, the topic of an earlier post.

Chimpanzees have long fascinated behavioural psychologists just as much as zoologists, because they have so much in common with us humans, including most of our genes, our social behaviour, and our tendency to engage in internecine warfare.

In 2010, an influential, charismatic chimpanzee, known as Julia to the keepers at a wildlife refuge in Zambia, started sticking pieces of grass in her ears, perhaps in imitation of the humans she saw, who sometimes used grass to clean their ears. There was no obvious reason for this new behaviour, but other chimps in the group started doing the same thing; a clear example of someone popular setting a trend and others following.

More recently, in 2023, a male chimpanzee known as Juma upped the ante by not only wearing grass in his ear but adorning his rear end with it too. Within weeks, other chimps were doing the same thing: copying a behaviour that served no obvious function for the purpose of following a fashion.

But fashion does serve a function. It helps us to communicate our feelings of belonging and loyalty to our group or community. And these behaviours on the part of the fashion- conscious chimps offer insights into the evolutionary roots of human culture and language.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/two-black-monkeys-xttQG4YyJ6I

‘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.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/woman-in-white-shirt-holding-black-iphone-4-VGmgsDsck58

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.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/person-wearing-black-top-and-bottoms-standing-beside-black-building-XB2NfRhrPfs