What is the point in #hashtags?

By Jess Reid

 

I am admittedly a social network lover. Twitter is my particular favourite as I feel comfortable often 'tweeting' what I'm doing with my day and how I'm feeling in the hope that one of my 'followers' who are my friends will take an interest – like most teenagers do. However the use of the hashtag and how it's come about has baffled me to say the least; even more now it's become so popular that now it's used on other websites such as Instagram, Tumblr and most recently as even progressed onto Facebook. I just want to know why people can't just write a tweet without using a hashtag? Do they want to get their hashtag 'trending'? Does it automatically make their tweet better? What is the point in hashtags?

 

The hashtag did start as a part of Internet language. It was first commonly used on Internet chat websites (ICR) to indicate which chat was for a particular topic. But Twitter soon took over the hashtag. People would involve a hashtagged word or phrase within their post, for example 'can't wait for #MIC later!' or they can be placed before or after a tweet, e.g. 'The only reasons Mondays are good #MIC' -MIC being an abbreviation of the TV show Made in Chelsea. These tweets will obviously only appeal to people who watch the programme and understand the abbreviation, therefore people who are interested in the topic #MIC can click on the hashtagged abbreviation (because it turns into a link once the hashtag is used as a prefix) and other tweets from people using the same hashtag will appear, the top few being the most popular tweets (this is judged by the amount of 'Retweets' and 'favourites' a tweet has.) So in a way, the hashtag is quite useful for people to find either opinions, facts or possibly further links other people have posted to find out more information on a topic they're interested in. Also once a hashtag has been used so much it can end up 'trending' on Twitter, therefore the latest news on current events can easily be found out once people sign in onto their timeline.

 

Since 2010 television programmes on particular channels have latched onto this idea of the trending hashtags on Twitter and now use them on the programme to get people talking about it online. This has managed to get programmes like Made in Chelsea and Britain's Got Talent more viewers by people using these hashtags, which promote the television show.

 

This promotion idea has had a positive effect for most companies, however others have tried it and it has backfired badly. McDonald's created a hashtag #McDStories in January 2012, for people to tweet positive things about the most popular international restaurant, but only two hours later McDonald's cancelled this marketing plan as the feedback posted was extremely negative towards the major fast food company. Although I still think promotion by hashtags is a great way to gain. Any publicity is

 

But, that is where the usefulness of using a hashtags ends for me. It's when Twitter users starting using the hashtag to gain popularity and a 'Twitter famous' status for themselves. Young people now from the young age of 10 to 20 years old find comfort in themselves when they have a huge number of followers, and get lost in a world of fiction online. By gaining these followers or getting huge number of retweets they hashtage.g. #f4f #RT #Follow. And not just one hashtag alone, people feel the need to use several of these hashtags that use up the whole 140 characters that can be used in a tweet. Unfortunatelyit seems to work for them; therefore my Twitter newsfeed is constantly overwhelmed with hashtags. That's not what I want, therefore those people will be getting an unfollow from me. This popularity problem growing upon the current generation has caused the begging hashtags to spread. Now in the phone app Instagram people post a photo and amongst the caption will involve maybe ten to hundreds of hashtags. #Boy #girl #love #nomakeup #follow #lfl #instadaily #ootd #selfie – there seems to be no end to it.

 

Why do people, mainly teenagers feel happier and more secure if they have 145 likes on their photos or 1000 retweets on their tweet? Why can't they just post information about themselves, or a caption that is actually relevant to their photo of their cat rather than #followback? Other than this fault of the hashtag, to me I do think it is useful to an extent for finding information or promoting a business. It's been created by the internet and now belongs on social networking sites along with retweets, followers, trends, favourites, likes – the list goes on.

 

It's crazy how rapidly Internet language is expanding. I'm part of this new generation and even I can't keep up.

 

#RT if you agree!

 

What is the important time for children to acquire language?

What is the important time for children to acquire language? By Kayleigh Campbell

Lack of speech due to lack of socialisation is a big problem now a days…It surprises me to read about children that are never socialised and how hard they find it when they require/learn language. For example one child that I have read about is a girl called Genie. She was locked away by her father and was never spoken to or allowed to speak. When she was eventually found she was thirteen and a half years of age and she didn't know how to speak or understand what people were saying to her as she had never been spoken to so and had not required language. This makes me think that there is a critical time when children must require language to be able to learn and develop what it all means and how they can use it. All children acquire language in the same way regardless of what language they speak. Eric Lenneberg (1960s) says that there is a critical time from birth to puberty when language must be acquired for children to be able to develop their language further and to be able to communicate with others; he adds that if this does not happen then normal language cannot be acquired. We know that the rules of language aren't taught however we know that children are corrected to understand how to speak English. This then means that children will acquire language by being corrected and then they will understand how language works. When children are speaking they say things that adults would never say such as 'I holded the rabbit' instead of 'I held the rabbit.' Children imitate their parents when they hear them speak to learn language and understand what they are telling them and want them to say back, for example 'hello' which the child would then say 'hello' back. However in view of all this we know many rules of language that we don't learn such as the phonological rules of language. Children are not taught how to talk in the past tense…they just acquire it and accept that way of language. Adding to this children are not taught the morphological rule of adding emphasis to words such and 'bang' and 'pop'. However children sometimes don't learn things that are explicitly pointed out to them, for example a child might say 'I catched the ball' and they would then by corrected by an adult which would say that they should say 'I caught the ball' and this way they would have been corrected and would know how to say it next time. If children are never fully socialised at a really early age it can cause them a really big problem for them in later life as they will never be able to fully communicate with others in later life. This tells me that there really is a critical time between birth until puberty where children should be socialised so that they can fully acquire language and understand how to communicate with others.

Taboo Shaboo

by Scott Montague-Murdoch

 

Are we still uncomfortable with the usage of taboo language?

 

“How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!” - Samuel Adams.

Swearing... Well, f*ck, where to begin? A swear word: “An offensive word, used especially as an expression of anger” (Oxforddictionaries.com) Now although this rather basic definition gives us an idea of the concept of swearing it's not actually entirely true. To describe a swear word as “An offensive word” would simply mean to me, that you accepted the idea that whatever derogatory meaning this (however many lettered) word possesses, is offensive to you. Please understand, I am fully aware that this is the complete natural response to have; we are taught from a young age that name calling is wrong, and even punishable. However, I would propose that by accepting these words have meanings, used only for swearing, we are giving them their effect, in turn accepting these assembly of noises actually offend us- though this hard-to-accept concept, requires a broader, slightly more lenient mind, in regards to swearing.

 

So, swearing: Who swears? Well, Mellisa Mohr, a medieval literature expert, stated in her book: Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing, that the average person actually swears quite a lot. Supposedly, according to Mohr's research 0.7% of a persons words, in the course of a day, are swearwords. This percentage may seem insignificant to our own language, but Mohr notes we use first person plural pronouns, at almost the same rate. An interesting statistic if we consider how many people actually oppose the usage of swearing completely.

 

Otto Jespersen claimed, “Women have an instinctive shrinking from coarse and gross expressions.”A study which supported this was, Isabel Gomm's. Gomm found in her research that men swore more than women. She conducted study groups: 2 single sex and 1 mix. She found that men swore than 4 times the amount than women in the single sex groups and more than women in the mixed sex group as well, however by a significantly less amount the single sex group.

 

With all these studies into taboo language and swear words, I feel I'm missing one fundamental question: What is the worst swear word? I searched the net for hours trying to find a study or a poll that would give me, even a rough idea as to how we perceive the severity of swearwords as a collective. I eventually came across a site known as the www.theregister.co.uk, in which the “Rudest words in Britain” were polled between 1998-2000. No1. Was predictably “C*nt” (C U Next Tuesday), followed, to my surprise, by the Hollywood-action-blockbuster of all swearwords: “Mother F*cker”, and than inevitably: “Fuck”. Organisations such as BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) and Ofcom, have to revise the severity of these words to establish appropriate censorships, this process however, I'd suggest this is potentially one the main reasons that people attach such strong meanings to these words, if we are taught that they are so bad they require restrictions or even censorships.

 

Conclusively, in this rather brief ensemble of secondary research and opinionated dictations of how I perceive swearing, one would propose that although we live in a culture where these words are detested by most, they are certainly (linguistically) a reoccurring item, to which we are not socially comfortable with.

Progression of swearing

Google defines 'swear word' as "an offensive word used especially as an expression of anger"

Swearing has become more common in recent years, but what you probably don't know, is that only 14% of swearing is done in an angry tone. The most commonly used tone when swearing is distressed. Swearing is thought to be used by teenagers more than anyone else and the fact that the second highest relationship you talk to when swearing is classmates, (the first being friends) proves this.
We know words go through drift, this is when there meaning changes over a period of time.

But this leads me to ask the question, because we used more swear words, we obviously don't find it very offensive, we don't use an angry tone, is it possible that these words are going through drift, and are they still even taboo?

oxforddictionaries.com defines taboo as "a social or religious custom prohibiting or restricting a particular practise or forbidding association with a particular person, place or thing".

Swearing is now an allowed social custom, with only 3% of swearing received with rejection. And everyone knows that parts of our legal system are very religious focused, but as a society, less and less are becoming religious, and our laws are changing, such as the gay marriage.

As you would expect, different groups have different statistics, for instance, men swear more than women, and both use different words, girls taboo words are "oh my god" and "bitch". But men's top swear words seem to be worse, as they include "f**k" and s**t".

There are no significant differences between racial groups, and all have the same sort of statistics.

We can see most words go through a period of change where they are becoming more common and considered not as bad, but there is still one word, which is still considered by lots that is still bad. I've watched shows where f**k wasn't bleeped out, but this word was.

The word, as most of you guessed (proving my point) is c**t.
Although it is still considered the worst,I have heard it used by many people.
I also know that in Australia, the word is even more commonly used that it is here, friends openly greet each other using the word in public.

This leads me to ask, where will this go next and why has it happened.

And to me the answer is simple, our friends do it, so we do to, and our friends do it because the media allows it, movies use swear words obsessively, and music artists, especially in rap, which makes sense because rap has archived new hights
With our generation.

And to answer where it will go next, I would not be surprised if in a year or two, we are witnessing a swear word or two before the watershed, the words will be used by teachers in school (secondary) or maybe a job interview (which I have already witnessed).

Scott Tennant

Sent from my iPad

How is language used in advertisement?

                        How is language used in advertisement?

 Advertising is all around us on a daily basis, on television, on the radio and in magazines. 

Language choices can make or break an advert and play a crucial role in selling products. With the rise of the technological era the language and methods that are used in advertisement has changed dramatically. In the past adverts used a lot of writing with minimal use of images, now that has changed completely businesses now use heavy basis on images and less so on language. This means that the language that they do use has to convey a large amount of information, yet at the same time remain minimal and secondary to images.

 Adjectives in advertisement have changed over the years to make the reader and potential customer believe in the superiority of products. This use of language is especially important with the increase in "parity products" these are brands that all make relatively the same product. This means that advertisement becomes more important so companies can make their product seem in some way superior to other products.  

Adjectives take a key role is advertisement and allow companies to build up a positive image of products. These help have an impact on the customer in the hope they can see properties in this product that out weigh that of its competitors. Adjectives such as "Fresh", "Special"," Safe" are just a few examples of the types of adjectives companies can use to create a positive image in the mind of the customer. These really do have a significant effect, you as the customer get the seed planted within your mind that this product really is all these things. This means that you have a sense of trust built up, and then if by magic you go on to buy their product.

Companies use information based listing in adverts all the time. No one person can just have a singular product now a days that just performs one function. Ask yourself, does your phone just work as a phone or you television just a device to watch things off? No. The change in the amount a product can do in recent years as meant that listing the uses of a product becomes of its biggest selling points. 

In many types of adverts there is a long list of single word functions that are conveyed to the reader. This can be seen in the increase in technology in mobile phones for example, Apple do this technique of listing on a regular basis. This format in which they lay of functions creates an effect on the reader they are getting no only a phone, but a wide range of functions and opportunities.

These are only a few ways that language is used effectively in advertising. Their careful use of language to promote and sell is their key weapon. With the correct layout and positive reinforcement that comes with adverts companies are able to sell almost anything. A constant barrage of adverts in the media and in day to day life has meant adverts have had to excel in language use to sell products, which at the end of the day is the primary function.

 

Pascal Potter. 

What are the main differences in the language used by different newspaper articles?

 

Approximately 12 million of the 23 major national newspapers are sold throughout the UK every day. The population of Britain currently stands in the region of 60 million, therefore one in every five people are purchasing a newspaper daily. It is therefore no wonder that newspapers use various types of language to target different target audiences and try and out sell rival newspapers through different linguistic choices to make their articles have a different spin/angle in comparison to competing newspapers. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/dec/14/newspapers-abcs)

Differences in the use of language can categorise newspapers into whether they are a 'Tabloid' or 'Broadsheet' newspaper. Tabloids use more normative statements, taking an event and using opinions as well as subjective language to construct their article. Tabloids, in addition, use emotive language to stir up feeling to, in some circumstances, persuade the reader into a certain view point. http://www.zeepedia.com/read.php?  the _language _of_the_newspapers_ii_broadsheet_newspaper_journalistic_writing&b=79&c=33  For example, "Huge fires are burning out of control in Croydon, South London, with police struggling to maintain control." http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3740546/Cops-battle-new-riots-across-London.html#ixzz2XAqTUJXr The Sun demonstrates the viewpoint of Zeepedia, through choosing to use evaluative adjectives such as 'huge' and 'struggling' to express their viewpoint on  how weak the police dealt with the London riots. Likewise http://vle.stvincent.ac.uk/mod/book/tool/print/index.php?id=4512 states that tabloids often use subjective language, but also states Broadsheets tend to use objective language. Both subjective and objective language are a forms of declarative statements, however the facts and statistics used in objective language are used more in Broadsheet newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and as previously mentioned subjective language is used in Tabloids such as the Sun.

The reason for the difference in choice of language between objective and subjective may be due the variance in the target audiences of the newspapers. http://www.winchesterjournalism.co.uk/joomla_1.5_winol/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=237:the-daily-telegraph&catid=63:newspapers&Itemid=314 states that the language used in articles of newspapers may change due to numerous reasons such as; the political party that the different newspapers support and the various target audiences that are targeted when publishing an article.

However in recent years it seems the difference between the traditional divide of Tabloids and Broadsheets is becoming a lot more subtle. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3714293.stm With more subjective, informal and emotive language replacing objective facts and statistics as the declaratives in more and more Broadsheets, the once clear divide in target audience, political view point and difference in language is starting to merge the two different newspaper stereotypes closer together.  

With the recent launch of the 'I' newspaper back in October 2010, many have suggested this mix of tabloid and Broadsheet will be the newspaper of the future. A combination of both subjective opinions on objective facts and statistics has proven a hit with the British public. In fact, In October 2012 it had an average daily sale of 304,691, a great deal more than The Independent (the broadsheet in which it originated from).

Ieuan Evans

Monolingual V Bilingual

By  Mazvita Makwanya

Like me, some of you reading this is probably bilingual or multilingual (speak two or more languages). And also like me you'll know how hard it is to be multilingual. As if learning one language is not hard enough, some infants have to learn two languages or even more from birth because of inter-rational marriages and the now more common relocation of parents amongst other reasons.

As you all must know, bilingualism is not exactly as rare or uncommon as it used to be a few years ago, but what you might not know is how hard it is to acquire or the stages in acquiring it.

Studies suggested that bilingual children acquire and develop language slower than monolingual children. However recent studies argue that the process of simultaneous bilingual acquisition suggests that the two language developments are similar though some linguists still consider bilingualism as a special case of language development.

The most common ways of children learning to speak 2 languages fluently is through simultaneous development or sequential development. Simultaneous development is when the child learns the two languages somewhat equally. In the early stages of this the child may use words from both languages in a single sentence(language mixing) and use word stems of one language and prefixes and suffixes of another language (language blending) (Victoria Fierro Cobas ,MD and Eugenia Chan, MD). The first stage Sequential development is when they use the normal sequence and then obtain the second language after.

Variation among st bilingual children is big just as is the case for monolingual children.
Infant and child bilingual go through some of the same stages of language development as monolingual children and like monolingual babies. The first stage for both types of child is babbling. Children start to babble in what sounds like nonsense when they are about 6 to 7 months of age.  Although some elements of babbling from a multilingual baby may sound like one language and others like another, babbling is not clearly linked to a particular language (Pearson et al., 2010).

Like those that are monolingual, bilingual children will first learn to respond to their own name.  

By the time they are 13 months of age, bilingual children on average understand as many as 250 different words in total, that is, in both their languages combined (De Houwer et al., submitted a).

Bilingual children say their first words between the ages of 8 and 15 months). Bilingual children may start out saying words only in a single language, or in both depending on whether they are simultaneously or sequentially learning the languages. 

At age 20 months the average total number of words spoken by bilingual children for both their languages combined can be as high as 254 (De Houwer et al., submitted b). Hoff et al. (2012) found a somewhat lower number of just over 200 words at age 22 months.  This supports the earlier claim that the language development varies. 

Which Gender Swears More? and Why?

It is quite a common assumption nowadays that men are ruder, and tend to use more profanities or taboo language than woman do on a general basis. But is this very generalized opinion fact or fiction? And if it is true why is this the case?

It is a fascinating topic as it is probably accepted by most people that men tend to swear more than women. The first piece of evidence I found on this subject was by Michael Gauthier and his report called Profanity and Gender published by the university of Lyon presents a table set up into categories and it shows some surprising results, the researcher asked women and men how often they would use swear words and phrases, and in contrast to popular belief it found out that 15.7% of the women they asked said the used swears "very often" while a marginally lower 14.8% of the men asked said they used swears "very often". This evidence shows us that even though men are perceived as the most likely gender to us swear words, these particular results show that men and women show no noticeable different in the amount they swear.

This evidence does show us that women and men are very similar in how much they think they swear, and this is very surprising to me. I think people tend to think that men swear more than women because women, on a general basis, seem to be a lot more polite than men, this is a point that has been put across by Robin Lackoff, as she states that one of the many characteristics of women's speech is to use super polite forms. I think this is something women do in public because women rely more on positive face, where they have the need to feel liked so by not swearing in public all the time makes sure they are doing as much as they can to get positive face. Whereas I believe that men are mostly more based on negative face, where they don't want to be imposed upon, but there is still a slight need to be liked but not so much that they are going to stop themselves from swearing when they are out and about.

The research done by Gauthier also goes onto state that 27.7% of men tend to swear "more than usual" when they are with their other male friends, whereas only 7.1% of women swear "more than usual" when they are with other female friends. This suggests that men use swearing a lot in a group environment. This evidence doesn't surprise me at all as this shows that men probably egg each other on and often get rowdy and raucous when they are with each other. Whereas some women seem to find swearing aggressive, and a somewhat unattractive traitr. But all in all I was surprised to see that women and men have seen themselves as having the same frequency of swearing.

 

Robert Graham

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Why did the chicken cross the road?

By Belinda Kemp

Two fish were in a tank. One said 'you man the guns, I'll drive!' haha everyone loves a joke, no matter how silly it may be. But why is it funny? What is it about the joke that makes us as human beings recognise it as being humorous? Have you ever heard a joke and thought, 'what in the world was that all about?'. How about the chicken crossing the road joke? That's not funny, its common sense?!? And why is it that most jokes that we hear nowadays contain racial, sexist or homophobic content that we still find humorous? Well, that's just me going on a bit of a rant but to get to my point, why is it funny?

There are many theories as to why we need humour. The first being the superiority theory which claims that all humour involves a feeling of superiority. Feeling better than someone else, so if you're out with your friend and their crush is walking past just as they trip and fall on their face, this would be humorous because you wouldn't be the one looking like a twat in the floor! Basically laughing at other peoples misfortunes...

Then there's the famous relief theory which claims that it is a tension release model, for example the relief of a fear, like when being tickled the laughs are because you hate being tickled! It's not funny... it's horrible and people hate being tickled it's just funny after because your relieved it's over!

Finally we come across the incongruity theory. This theory claims that it's the idea of feeling smart. That you have uncovered the truth, you understand the joke, you've realised the resolution, so it's humorous because you feel like a smart arse, you're pretty pleased with yourself! (To find out more about the theories go to Theories of humor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

But why are things funny? Well... things are funny when their expected, like the traditional banana skin on the floor and man walking towards it carrying a large box, unaware if what's in front of him. We all know what's going to happen. But what if it was unexpected humour, you see the man walking towards it but he stops, were waiting for him to slip but he turns around and walks away, he then bumps into a trolley and drops the box on his foot! That would be hilarious because no one expected it. Or what if it's familiar humour, you're trying to overtake someone on a pathway, but as you overtake you trip on the kurb and look like an utter idiot. We all recognise how embarrassing that is, we've all done it, that's what makes it so funny!

But to get down to the juicy stuff, the linguistics used in jokes:

-          Playing with graphology

'What do you get if you cross a tall green monster with a fountain pen?... the ink-credible hulk.

-          Sound play

'What's the difference between a doormat and a bottle of beer?... ones taken up and shaken and the others shaken up and take'

These are just a few but to find out more go to Power Through Humour

 

Meaning and Context in a Child's Acquisition

By Ellie Williams



Once children begin to learn the meanings of words, especially gradable adjectives, they have to be able to use them in the right context. It can be hard for them to grasp the context that an adjective like "tall" can describe two different things that can be completely different heights. Children will learn the difference of this reasonable easy as they will see different things that are tall like people and mountains and they will learn the difference relatively easy.



However when the children have to acquire extra linguistic knowledge on the subject this could become a little trickier. For example it could be said that; a group of seven year olds built a tall tower and Gustave Eiffel built a tall tower. Now both of these towers would be tall but only in their own context, to understand the difference you would have to have extra knowledge on the participants involved. Like the fact that Gustave Eiffel built the Eiffel tower, one of the most famous towers in the world and that a seven year old may build a tower out of building blocks about a metre high but still be a tall tower to be built by a seven year old.



As always with practice, children will understand how the gradable adjectives can be used for two different objects that are completely different. However it may be harder for them to cope with the concept that two objects can be the same but have different adjectives. A good example of this is in a pdf. file written by Kristen Syrett, Rutgers University, Christopher Kennedy, University of Chicago and Jeffrey Lidz, University of Maryland in 2009, called Meaning and Context in Children's Understanding of Gradable Adjectives. They use the example of: 


a. Anna is tall.

b. Anna is tall for a gymnast.

c. Anna is tall for a woman.

It all comes down to value judgements; unless you clarify in what context Anna is tall, someone may think that she is 6"3' when really she is only 4"5' and only considered tall for a gymnast. As gymnasts are mostly short, she may be short compared to other people but compared to gymnasts she would be tall. This also applies with height between men and women, unless the context is known, the meaning can be misunderstood. For example a woman and a man may be the same height but the woman may be considered tall and the man may be considered short. This is dependent on value judgements and unless the context is known people may not be able to depict the correct information from the statement.

Children would see this as another challenging concept to understand, they know the meaning of the word, but trying to learn how the adjective can be used in different contexts would be another step in acquisition of language. As children grow older they will begin to know how to use words and know what they mean but whilst growing up gradable adjectives can be a very hard concept for children to acquire.

http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/docs/skl-meaning+context.pdf