Digital Commons Network^™

It’S Not What You Do, It’S Who You Are: Adjectives As Identity-Conferrers, C.B. Rodgers

Anthós

To see how positive identity assessments are created, I investigated two statements, both released by organizations that can broadly be described as part of Portland’s liberal or left community. Each statement responds to assertions that the actions of the organization, or one of its members, provides a platform for anti-Semitic, white supremacist, and/or fascist political organizers to make inroads in Portland. One set of data is a statement from Citybikes, a workerowned cooperative, that was published on Portland IndyMedia, a web-based independent media center; the other is a statement from a Portland community art space, The Variant, that was published …

Linguistics / Etymology - University Of South Florida, Lisa Zilinski, Sonia Lorenz

Data Curation Profiles Directory

The research project is centered on determining the evolving meaning of the term “polytechnic”. As a standard class assignment, freshman students will be required to execute video interviews of upper classmen to find out what they think “polytechnic” means. This assignment will be repeated with each group of incoming freshmen so that all students will have the opportunity to interview and be interviewed. By interviewing the students each year, the researchers will be able to understand the changing definition of the term “polytechnic” as the students progress through school. By comparing responses from differing freshmen classes, the researchers will be …

Linguistic Devices, Emotionality, And Memorability Of Computer Mediated Communication, Angela M. Mion

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

I examined whether college students use shortcuts, pragmatics, and errors in text messages differently depending on their gender and the emotionality of the message. Results indicate that the prevalence of particular shortcuts differed across happy, sad, and angry messages, but gender did not influence use of linguistic devices. In a second study, I examined the emotionality and memorability of text messages versus voicemails. Results indicate that texts may be remembered better than voicemails, and happy, sad, and angry messages may be remembered differently by men and women.

Correlations Between Language, Identity, And Discrimination Among Spanish Speakers In Providence, Katherine Rennie

Global Studies Student Scholarship

This study examines how discrimination based on language hinges on the importance of language to one’s personal identity. In order to understand the connections between discrimination and language, the literature on discrimination and its various components is investigated. Scholars’ findings concerning the connection between language and identity are then examined. A discussion will follow of the neuropsychology of language and of the scientific argument that human language came about in response to an evolutionary need for symbolic communication. These themes create a framework for the following study. In order to understand the experience of discrimination as a result of language …

Front Cover And Publication Information, Volume 45, Number 2

Word Ways

Front cover and publication information for this issue.

Banananames, . Anil, A. Ross Eckler

Word Ways

Words like LOGOLOGICAL, which alternate vowels and sonsonanats could use a succinct name. David Morice's The Dictionary of Word Play cites them only with reference to numbers, as "alternating vowel-consonant number name", a wordful description rather than a handy name. May we suggest "banananames", in the spirit of Agamemnon, Albuquerque and Miami words which are named after prime examples.

Party Smarty, Martin Gardner

Word Ways

A Poem.

Gerunding, Ron Singer

Word Ways

A Poem

Typoclycemic Anaphoric Verse, Dave Drayton

Word Ways

Anaphoric verse - a term taken from the word 'Anaphora' - is poetry that involves the "repetition of a word at the beginning of successive utterances," Motte 2007 pp. 209. Inspired by the power that such technique lends to a text, each repetition potentially a reiteration, I sought to employ it with a further constraint that I believed would serve to even better illustrate the anophora's potential for stern, powerful imagery through accretion.

Hebrew Or Japanese?, Solomon W. Golomb

Word Ways

1. INTRODUCTION

It is quite common that, for any two languages, there will be words that look or sound alike, but with different meanings. French words that look like English words but with different meanings in the two languages are called faux amis ("false friends"). In some cases they are from unrelated roots (e.g. French pain means "bread" and rue means "street". In other cases, words that began the same evolved different meanings. From its Latin roots, concurrence basically means "running along side of", which in English came to mean "agreement", but in French it means "competition."

Some New Results On King- And Queen- Graphable Words, Mike Keith

Word Ways

A word (or phrase, sentence, etc.) is said to be king-graphable (KG) if each of its distinct letters can be placed on a square of an infinite chessboard such that the entire word or pharase can be spelled out by starting on the first letter and making only the moves of a chess king to get from letter to letter.

This Rugged World, Sir Jeremy Morse

Word Ways

A poem.

Crossword, Derrick Niederman

Word Ways

A crossword puzzle.

Colloquy

Word Ways

A collection of responses to previously published articles.

More Martin Magic, Jeremiah Farrell

Word Ways

Martin is Martin Gardner of course and the magic is his "The 3-by-3 Matix" which first appeared in Scientific American (August, 1966) and is reprinted in his Martin Gardner Presents, 1993, Kaufman and Greenburg, p.149. Word Ways subscriber Max Maven has written a fine introduction to this book and has himself developed a new version of the effect.

Anagram Quiz 6, . Anil

Word Ways

No abstract available.

An Alice Puzzle, Oscar Thumpbindle

Word Ways

I have been sitting in on an honor's class about Lewis Carroll being taught this spring semester at my old college haunt Butler University in Indianapolis. Among the many new puzzles and games being introduced in the class I offer the following based on the ten different letters in "Alice in Wonderland". These ten are ALICE and DROWN, perhaps referring the the 2nd Wonderland chapter "A Pool of Tears" where Alice thought she might drown in her own tears.

Kickshaws, David Morice

Word Ways

A collection of linguistic kickshaws.

Book Review - Steven Kahan, Karen Farrell

Word Ways

A book review of You Can Take My Word For It: Another Sixty Adventures in Logology For the Connoisseur by Steven Kahan (Esskay Publishing Company, Hollis Hills, New York 2012).

Exchanging Antonyms, Susan Thorpe

Word Ways

Antonyms have long been favourites of the readers of Word Ways, either as themselves (ODD-EVEN) or in disguise. In the latter case, they may be hidden in other word pairs such as in FATE - THINE, SHIN - SHOUT and BANDED -BORED where they occur at the beginnings, ends and in the middles of the word pairs respectively, the other letters remaining the same.

Funny Words 4, . Anil

Word Ways

No abstract available.

Statue Of Limitations, Don Hauptman

Word Ways

More funny bloopers and witty retorts.

Tripartitle Numerical Tautonyms, T.A. Hall

Word Ways

A numerical tautonym is traditionally defined as a word which can be divided into a sequence of at least two (adjacent) parts, where each part has both the same number of letters as well as the same alphabetic value sum (see David Morice, The Dictionary of Wordplay). For example, the four letters in the word THIS can be transposed into the corresponding numbers 20-8-9-19 (where A = 1, B = 2...Z = 26), which can be divided in the two parts 20-8 and 9-19. If the numbers in the first part are added together, then we obtain 28, which …

Punk Whiz 18, . Anil

Word Ways

More pun quiz misdefinitions.

Instructions To Authors

Word Ways

Instructions to authors wishing to contribute to Word Ways.

Alice In Wonderland

Word Ways

A puzzle.

Spanning The Globe With Scrabble Tiles, Mike Keith

Word Ways

Here is a puzzle that's simple to state but not so easy to solve. Take a set of English Scabble tiles with its standard complement of 98 letters and two blanks (that can be used to stand for any letter). Use all 100 tiles to make a list of names of countries in the world, all different. For the acceptable list of country names use the current list of 192 member states of the United Nations.

L'Imperativo Vero E Suppletivo Nei Dialetti Italiani, Emily Romanello

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

This thesis provides evidence for the need of a re-analysis of the imperative mood based on data taken from thirty-six minor Romance varieties (so-called `dialects') spoken on the Italian peninsula. A clear distinction exists between the imperative of the second person singular and the first person plural based on the following characteristics: verbal morphology, the negation of the verb, the position of stress in the presence of enclitics, the lexical realization of enclitics, and the position of clitics with respect to the verb. In each of these varieties, the second person singular is distinct from the first person plural in …

Reassessing The Wider Genetic Affiliations Of The Timor-Alor-Pantar Languages, Laura C. Robinson, Gary Holton

Alaska Native Language Center Faculty

The wider genealogical affiliations of the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages have been the subject of much speculation. These languages are surrounded by unrelated Austronesian languages, and attempts to locate related languages have focused on Papuan languages 800 km or more distant. In this paper we examine three hypotheses for genealogical relatedness, drawing on both pronominal and especially lexical evidence. We rely in particular on recent reconstructions of proto-Alor-Pantar vocabulary. Of the hypotheses evaluated here, we find the most striking similarities between TAP and the West Bomberai family. However, we conclude that the evidence currently available is insufficient to confirm a genealogical relationship …

Internal Classification Of The Alor-Pantar Language Family Using Computational Methods Applied To The Lexicon, Laura C. Robinson, Gary Holton

Alaska Native Language Center Faculty

The non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar in eastern Indonesia have been shown to be genetically related using the comparative method, but the identified phonological innovations are typologically common and do not delineate neat subgroups. We apply computational methods to recently-collected lexical data and are able to identify subgroups based on the lexicon. Crucially, the lexical data are coded for cognacy based on identified phonological innovations. This methodology can succeed even where phonological innovations themselves fail to identify subgroups, showing that computational methods using lexical data can be a powerful tool supplementing the comparative method.