Showing posts with label words. Show all posts
Showing posts with label words. Show all posts
Monday, May 20, 2024
Friday, November 13, 2020
Tips To Learning A New Language Quickly
The 75 most common words make up 40% of occurrences
EXPRESSIONS OF POLITENESS (about 50 expressions)
The 200 most common words make up 50% of occurrences
The 524 most common words make up 60% of occurrences
The 1257 most common words make up 70% of occurrences
The 2925 most common words make up 80% of occurrences
The 7444 most common words make up 90% of occurrences
The 13374 most common words make up 95% of occurrences
The 25508 most common words make up 99% of occurrences
--‘Yes’ and 'no’: yes, no, absolutely, no way, exactly.
--Question words: when? where? how? how much? how many? why? what? who? which? whose?
--Apologizing: excuse me, sorry to interrupt, well now, I’m afraid so, I’m afraid not.
--Meeting and parting: good morning, good afternoon, good evening, hello, goodbye, cheers, see you later, pleased to meet you, nice to have met.
--Interjections: please, thank you, don’t mention it, sorry, it’ll be done, I agree, congratulations, thank heavens, nonsense.
--Question words: when? where? how? how much? how many? why? what? who? which? whose?
--Apologizing: excuse me, sorry to interrupt, well now, I’m afraid so, I’m afraid not.
--Meeting and parting: good morning, good afternoon, good evening, hello, goodbye, cheers, see you later, pleased to meet you, nice to have met.
--Interjections: please, thank you, don’t mention it, sorry, it’ll be done, I agree, congratulations, thank heavens, nonsense.
NOUNS (about 120 words)
--Time: morning, afternoon, evening, night; Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; spring, summer, autumn, winter; time, occasion, minute, half-hour, hour, day, week, month, year.
--People: family, relative, mother, father, son, daughter, sister, brother, husband, wife; colleague, friend, boyfriend, girlfriend; people, person, human being, man, woman, lady, gentleman, boy, girl, child.
--Objects: address, bag, book, car, clothes, key, letter (=to post), light (=lamp), money, name, newspaper, pen, pencil, picture, suitcase, thing, ticket.
--Places: place, world, country, town, street, road, school, shop, house, apartment, room, ground; Britain, name of the foreign country, British town-names, foreign town-names.
--Abstract: accident, beginning, change, color, damage, fun, half, help, joke, journey, language, English, name of the foreign language, letter (of alphabet), life, love, mistake, news, page, pain, part, question, reason, sort, surprise, way (=method), weather, work.
--Other: hand, foot, head, eye, mouth, voice; the left, the right; the top, the bottom, the side; air, water, sun, bread, food, paper, noise.
--Time: morning, afternoon, evening, night; Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; spring, summer, autumn, winter; time, occasion, minute, half-hour, hour, day, week, month, year.
--People: family, relative, mother, father, son, daughter, sister, brother, husband, wife; colleague, friend, boyfriend, girlfriend; people, person, human being, man, woman, lady, gentleman, boy, girl, child.
--Objects: address, bag, book, car, clothes, key, letter (=to post), light (=lamp), money, name, newspaper, pen, pencil, picture, suitcase, thing, ticket.
--Places: place, world, country, town, street, road, school, shop, house, apartment, room, ground; Britain, name of the foreign country, British town-names, foreign town-names.
--Abstract: accident, beginning, change, color, damage, fun, half, help, joke, journey, language, English, name of the foreign language, letter (of alphabet), life, love, mistake, news, page, pain, part, question, reason, sort, surprise, way (=method), weather, work.
--Other: hand, foot, head, eye, mouth, voice; the left, the right; the top, the bottom, the side; air, water, sun, bread, food, paper, noise.
PREPOSITIONS (about 40 words)
--General: of, to, at, for, from, in, on.
--Logical: about, according-to, except, like, against, with, without, by, despite, instead of.
--Space: into, out of, outside, towards, away from, behind, in front of, beside, next to, between, above, on top of, below, under, underneath, near to, a long way from, through.
--Time: after, ago, before, during, since, until.
--General: of, to, at, for, from, in, on.
--Logical: about, according-to, except, like, against, with, without, by, despite, instead of.
--Space: into, out of, outside, towards, away from, behind, in front of, beside, next to, between, above, on top of, below, under, underneath, near to, a long way from, through.
--Time: after, ago, before, during, since, until.
DETERMINERS (about 80 words)
--Articles and numbers: a, the; nos. 0–20; nos. 30–100; nos. 200–1000; last, next, 1st–12th.
--Demonstrative: this, that.
--Possessive: my, your, his, her, its, our, their.
--Quantifiers: all, some, no, any, many, much, more, less, a few, several, whole, a little, a lot of.
--Comparators: both, neither, each, every, other, another, same, different, such.
--Articles and numbers: a, the; nos. 0–20; nos. 30–100; nos. 200–1000; last, next, 1st–12th.
--Demonstrative: this, that.
--Possessive: my, your, his, her, its, our, their.
--Quantifiers: all, some, no, any, many, much, more, less, a few, several, whole, a little, a lot of.
--Comparators: both, neither, each, every, other, another, same, different, such.
ADJECTIVES (about 80 words)
--Color: black, blue, green, red, white, yellow.
--Evaluative: bad, good, terrible; important, urgent, necessary; possible, impossible; right, wrong, true.
--General: big, little, small, heavy; high, low; hot, cold, warm; easy, difficult; cheap, expensive; clean, dirty; beautiful, funny (=comical), funny (=odd), usual, common (=shared), nice, pretty, wonderful; boring, interesting, dangerous, safe; short, tall, long; new, old; calm, clear, dry; fast, slow; finished, free, full, light (=not dark), open, quiet, ready, strong.
--Personal: afraid, alone, angry, certain, cheerful, dead, famous, glad, happy, ill, kind, married, pleased, sorry, stupid, surprised, tired, well, worried, young.
--Color: black, blue, green, red, white, yellow.
--Evaluative: bad, good, terrible; important, urgent, necessary; possible, impossible; right, wrong, true.
--General: big, little, small, heavy; high, low; hot, cold, warm; easy, difficult; cheap, expensive; clean, dirty; beautiful, funny (=comical), funny (=odd), usual, common (=shared), nice, pretty, wonderful; boring, interesting, dangerous, safe; short, tall, long; new, old; calm, clear, dry; fast, slow; finished, free, full, light (=not dark), open, quiet, ready, strong.
--Personal: afraid, alone, angry, certain, cheerful, dead, famous, glad, happy, ill, kind, married, pleased, sorry, stupid, surprised, tired, well, worried, young.
VERBS (about 100 words)
arrive, ask, be, be able to, become, begin, believe, borrow, bring, buy, can, change, check, collect, come, continue, cry, do, drop, eat, fall, feel, find, finish, forget, give, going to, have, have to, hear, help, hold, hope, hurt (oneself), hurt (someone else), keep, know, laugh, learn, leave, lend, let (=allow), lie down, like, listen, live (=be alive), live (=reside), look (at), look for, lose, love, make, may (=permission), may (=possibility), mean, meet, must, need, obtain, open, ought to, pay, play, put, read, remember, say, see, sell, send, should, show, shut, sing, sleep, speak, stand, stay, stop, suggest, take, talk, teach, think, travel, try, understand, use, used to, wait for, walk, want, watch, will, work (=operate), work (=toil), worry, would, write.
arrive, ask, be, be able to, become, begin, believe, borrow, bring, buy, can, change, check, collect, come, continue, cry, do, drop, eat, fall, feel, find, finish, forget, give, going to, have, have to, hear, help, hold, hope, hurt (oneself), hurt (someone else), keep, know, laugh, learn, leave, lend, let (=allow), lie down, like, listen, live (=be alive), live (=reside), look (at), look for, lose, love, make, may (=permission), may (=possibility), mean, meet, must, need, obtain, open, ought to, pay, play, put, read, remember, say, see, sell, send, should, show, shut, sing, sleep, speak, stand, stay, stop, suggest, take, talk, teach, think, travel, try, understand, use, used to, wait for, walk, want, watch, will, work (=operate), work (=toil), worry, would, write.
PRONOUNS (about 40 words)
--Personal: I, you, he, she, it, we, they, one; myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves.
--Possessive: mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs.
--Demonstrative: this, that.
--Universal: everyone, everybody, everything, each, both, all, one, another.
--Indefinite: someone, somebody, something, some, a few, a little, more, less; anyone, anybody, anything, any, either, much, many.
--Negative: no-one, nobody, nothing, none, neither.
--Personal: I, you, he, she, it, we, they, one; myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves.
--Possessive: mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs.
--Demonstrative: this, that.
--Universal: everyone, everybody, everything, each, both, all, one, another.
--Indefinite: someone, somebody, something, some, a few, a little, more, less; anyone, anybody, anything, any, either, much, many.
--Negative: no-one, nobody, nothing, none, neither.
ADVERBS (about 60 words)
--Place: here, there, above, over, below, in front, behind, nearby, a long way away, inside, outside, to the right, to the left, somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, nowhere, home, upstairs, downstairs.
--Time: now, soon, immediately, quickly, finally, again, once, for a long time, today, generally, sometimes, always, often, before, after, early, late, never, not yet, still, already, then (=at that time), then (=next), yesterday, tomorrow, tonight.
--Quantifiers: a little, about (=approximately), almost, at least, completely, very, enough, exactly, just, not, too much, more, less.
--Manner: also, especially, gradually, of course, only, otherwise, perhaps, probably, quite, so, then (=therefore), too (=also), unfortunately, very much, well.
--Place: here, there, above, over, below, in front, behind, nearby, a long way away, inside, outside, to the right, to the left, somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, nowhere, home, upstairs, downstairs.
--Time: now, soon, immediately, quickly, finally, again, once, for a long time, today, generally, sometimes, always, often, before, after, early, late, never, not yet, still, already, then (=at that time), then (=next), yesterday, tomorrow, tonight.
--Quantifiers: a little, about (=approximately), almost, at least, completely, very, enough, exactly, just, not, too much, more, less.
--Manner: also, especially, gradually, of course, only, otherwise, perhaps, probably, quite, so, then (=therefore), too (=also), unfortunately, very much, well.
CONJUNCTIONS (about 30 words)
--Coordinating: and, but, or; as, than, like.
--Time & Place: when, while, before, after, since (=time), until; where.
--Manner & Logic: how, why, because, since (=because), although, if; what, who, whom, whose, which, that.
--Coordinating: and, but, or; as, than, like.
--Time & Place: when, while, before, after, since (=time), until; where.
--Manner & Logic: how, why, because, since (=because), although, if; what, who, whom, whose, which, that.
Monday, October 14, 2019
BEAUTY: Art--Jenny Holzer
This past Thursday, Friday, and Saturday October 10-12, 2019, famed multi-media artist Jenny Holzer in collaboration with Creativetime mounted a scrolling, projected-word installation at Rockefeller Center In New York City addressing rampant gun violence in the United States. Vigil gathered together first hand accounts from victims of gun violence, whether personally shot or having lost loved ones to guns, along with poems and statements about this most grotesque, seemingly endless epidemic plaguing life in this country.
https://projects.jennyholzer.com/
http://creativetime.org/vigil-jenny-holzer/
Photo: Lauren Camarata
Photo: Lauren Camarata
Photo: Lauren Camarata
Photo: Lauren Camarata
Photo: Lauren Camarata
https://projects.jennyholzer.com/
http://creativetime.org/vigil-jenny-holzer/
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
A Bubbler? What's a Bubbler?
Author Josh Katz did a fascinating survey of regional terms and words that we use across the United States. The same object can have wildly different terms depending on the area of the country. He published his results in his book SPEAKING AMERICAN: HOW Y'ALL, YOUSE, AND YOU GUYS TALK: A VISUAL GUIDE.
https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-American-Youse-Visual-Guide/dp/0544703391
https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-American-Youse-Visual-Guide/dp/0544703391
Sunday, October 7, 2018
The International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet
After many versions in existence since WW I, the English speaking world adopted the final version of The International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet in 1959. It could come in useful...memorize it.
Monday, February 6, 2017
"The 'Untranslatable' Emotions You Never Knew You Had" by David Robson
The 'Untranslatable' Emotions You Never Knew You Had
From gigil to wabi-sabi and tarab, there are many foreign emotion words with no English equivalent. Learning to identify and cultivate these experiences could give you a richer and more successful life.
By David Robson
26 January 2017
Have you ever felt a little mbuki-mvuki – the irresistible urge to “shuck off your clothes as you dance”? Perhaps a little kilig – the jittery fluttering feeling as you talk to someone you fancy? How about uitwaaien – which encapsulates the revitalising effects of taking a walk in the wind?
These words – taken from Bantu, Tagalog, and Dutch – have no direct English equivalent, but they represent very precise emotional experiences that are neglected in our language. And if Tim Lomas at the University of East London has his way, they might soon become much more familiar.
Lomas’s Positive Lexicography Project aims to capture the many flavours of good feelings (some of which are distinctly bittersweet) found across the world, in the hope that we might start to incorporate them all into our daily lives. We have already borrowed many emotion words from other languages, after all – think “frisson”, from French, or “schadenfreude”, from German – but there are many more that have not yet wormed their way into our vocabulary. Lomas has found hundreds of these "untranslatable" experiences so far – and he’s only just begun.
Learning these words, he hopes, will offer us all a richer and more nuanced understanding of ourselves. “They offer a very different way of seeing the world.”
Lomas says he was first inspired after hearing a talk on the Finnish concept of sisu, which is a sort of “extraordinary determination in the face of adversity”. According to Finnish speakers, the English ideas of “grit”, “perseverance” or “resilience” do not come close to describing the inner strength encapsulated in their native term. It was "untranslatable" in the sense that there was no direct or easy equivalent encoded within the English vocabulary that could capture that deep resonance.
Intrigued, he began to hunt for further examples, scouring the academic literature and asking every foreign acquaintance for their own suggestions. The first results of this project were published in the Journal of Positive Psychology last year.
Many of the terms referred to highly specific positive feelings, which often depend on very particular circumstances:
*Desbundar (Portuguese) – to shed one’s inhibitions in having fun
*Tarab (Arabic) – a musically induced state of ecstasy or enchantment
*Shinrin-yoku (Japanese) – the relaxation gained from bathing in the forest, figuratively or literally
*Gigil (Tagalog) – the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished
*Yuan bei (Chinese) – a sense of complete and perfect accomplishment
*Iktsuarpok (Inuit) – the anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, whereby one keeps going outside to check if they have arrived
But others represented more complex and bittersweet experiences, which could be crucial to our growth and overall flourishing.
*Natsukashii (Japanese) – a nostalgic longing for the past, with happiness for the fond memory, yet sadness that it is no longer
*Wabi-sabi (Japanese) – a “dark, desolate sublimity” centred on transience and imperfection in beauty
*Saudade (Portuguese) – a melancholic longing or nostalgia for a person, place or thing that is far away either spatially or in time – a vague, dreaming wistfulness for phenomena that may not even exist
*Sehnsucht (German) – “life-longings”, an intense desire for alternative states and realisations of life, even if they are unattainable
In addition to these emotions, Lomas’s lexicography also charted the personal characteristics and behaviours that might determine our long-term well-being and the ways we interact with other people.
*Dadirri (Australian aboriginal) term – a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening
*Pihentagyú (Hungarian) – literally meaning “with a relaxed brain”, it describes quick-witted people who can come up with sophisticated jokes or solutions
*Desenrascanço (Portuguese) – to artfully disentangle oneself from a troublesome situation
*Sukha (Sanskrit) – genuine lasting happiness independent of circumstances
*Orenda (Huron) – the power of the human will to change the world in the face of powerful forces such as fate
You can view many more examples on his website, where there is also the opportunity to submit your own. Lomas readily admits that many of the descriptions he has offered so far are only an approximation of the term's true meaning. "The whole project is a work in progress, and I’m continually aiming to refine the definitions of the words in the list," he says. "I definitely welcome people’s feedback and suggestions in that regard."
In the future, Lomas hopes that other psychologists may begin to explore the causes and consequences of these experiences – to extend our understanding of emotion beyond the English concepts that have dominated research so far.
But studying these terms will not just be of scientific interest; Lomas suspects that familiarising ourselves with the words might actually change the way we feel ourselves, by drawing our attention to fleeting sensations we had long ignored.
“In our stream of consciousness – that wash of different sensations feelings and emotions – there’s so much to process that a lot passes us by,” Lomas says. “The feelings we have learned to recognise and label are the ones we notice – but there’s a lot more that we may not be aware of. And so I think if we are given these new words, they can help us articulate whole areas of experience we’ve only dimly noticed.”
As evidence, Lomas points to the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University, who has shown that our abilities to identify and label our emotions can have far-reaching effects.
Her research was inspired by the observation that certain people use different emotion words interchangeably, while others are highly precise in their descriptions. “Some people use words like anxious, afraid, angry, disgusted to refer to a general affective state of feeling bad,” she explains. “For them, they are synonyms, whereas for other people they are distinctive feelings with distinctive actions associated with them.”
This is called “emotion granularity” and she usually measures this by asking the participants to rate their feelings on each day over the period of a few weeks, before she calculates the variation and nuances within their reports: whether the same old terms always coincide, for instance.
Importantly, she has found that this then determines how well we cope with life. If you are better able to pin down whether you are feeling despair or anxiety, for instance, you might be better able to decide how to remedy those feelings: whether to talk to a friend, or watch a funny film. Or being able to identify your hope in the face of disappointment might help you to look for new solutions to your problem.
In this way, emotion vocabulary is a bit like a directory, allowing you to call up a greater number of strategies to cope with life. Sure enough, people who score highly on emotion granularity are better able to recover more quickly from stress and are less likely to drink alcohol as a way of recovering from bad news. It can even improve your academic success. Marc Brackett at Yale University has found that teaching 10 and 11-year-old children a richer emotional vocabulary improved their end-of-year grades, and promoted better behaviour in the classroom. “The more granular our experience of emotion is, the more capable we are to make sense of our inner lives,” he says.
Both Brackett and Barrett agree that Lomas’s “positive lexicography” could be a good prompt to start identifying the subtler contours of our emotional landscape. “I think it is useful – you can think of the words and the concepts they are associated with as tools for living,” says Barrett. They might even inspire us to try new experiences, or appreciate old ones in a new light.
It’s a direction of research that Lomas would like to explore in the future. In the meantime, Lomas is still continuing to build his lexicography – which has grown to nearly a thousand terms. Of all the words he has found so far, Lomas says that he most often finds himself pondering Japanese concepts such as wabi-sabi (that “dark, desolate sublimity” involving transience and imperfection). “It speaks to this idea of finding beauty in phenomena that are aged and imperfect,” he says. “If we saw the world through those eyes, it could be a different way of engaging in life.”
Original BBC Future article here:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170126-the-untranslatable-emotions-you-never-knew-you-had
From gigil to wabi-sabi and tarab, there are many foreign emotion words with no English equivalent. Learning to identify and cultivate these experiences could give you a richer and more successful life.
By David Robson
26 January 2017
Have you ever felt a little mbuki-mvuki – the irresistible urge to “shuck off your clothes as you dance”? Perhaps a little kilig – the jittery fluttering feeling as you talk to someone you fancy? How about uitwaaien – which encapsulates the revitalising effects of taking a walk in the wind?
These words – taken from Bantu, Tagalog, and Dutch – have no direct English equivalent, but they represent very precise emotional experiences that are neglected in our language. And if Tim Lomas at the University of East London has his way, they might soon become much more familiar.
Lomas’s Positive Lexicography Project aims to capture the many flavours of good feelings (some of which are distinctly bittersweet) found across the world, in the hope that we might start to incorporate them all into our daily lives. We have already borrowed many emotion words from other languages, after all – think “frisson”, from French, or “schadenfreude”, from German – but there are many more that have not yet wormed their way into our vocabulary. Lomas has found hundreds of these "untranslatable" experiences so far – and he’s only just begun.
Learning these words, he hopes, will offer us all a richer and more nuanced understanding of ourselves. “They offer a very different way of seeing the world.”
Lomas says he was first inspired after hearing a talk on the Finnish concept of sisu, which is a sort of “extraordinary determination in the face of adversity”. According to Finnish speakers, the English ideas of “grit”, “perseverance” or “resilience” do not come close to describing the inner strength encapsulated in their native term. It was "untranslatable" in the sense that there was no direct or easy equivalent encoded within the English vocabulary that could capture that deep resonance.
Intrigued, he began to hunt for further examples, scouring the academic literature and asking every foreign acquaintance for their own suggestions. The first results of this project were published in the Journal of Positive Psychology last year.
Many of the terms referred to highly specific positive feelings, which often depend on very particular circumstances:
*Desbundar (Portuguese) – to shed one’s inhibitions in having fun
*Tarab (Arabic) – a musically induced state of ecstasy or enchantment
*Shinrin-yoku (Japanese) – the relaxation gained from bathing in the forest, figuratively or literally
*Gigil (Tagalog) – the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished
*Yuan bei (Chinese) – a sense of complete and perfect accomplishment
*Iktsuarpok (Inuit) – the anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, whereby one keeps going outside to check if they have arrived
But others represented more complex and bittersweet experiences, which could be crucial to our growth and overall flourishing.
*Natsukashii (Japanese) – a nostalgic longing for the past, with happiness for the fond memory, yet sadness that it is no longer
*Wabi-sabi (Japanese) – a “dark, desolate sublimity” centred on transience and imperfection in beauty
*Saudade (Portuguese) – a melancholic longing or nostalgia for a person, place or thing that is far away either spatially or in time – a vague, dreaming wistfulness for phenomena that may not even exist
*Sehnsucht (German) – “life-longings”, an intense desire for alternative states and realisations of life, even if they are unattainable
In addition to these emotions, Lomas’s lexicography also charted the personal characteristics and behaviours that might determine our long-term well-being and the ways we interact with other people.
*Dadirri (Australian aboriginal) term – a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening
*Pihentagyú (Hungarian) – literally meaning “with a relaxed brain”, it describes quick-witted people who can come up with sophisticated jokes or solutions
*Desenrascanço (Portuguese) – to artfully disentangle oneself from a troublesome situation
*Sukha (Sanskrit) – genuine lasting happiness independent of circumstances
*Orenda (Huron) – the power of the human will to change the world in the face of powerful forces such as fate
You can view many more examples on his website, where there is also the opportunity to submit your own. Lomas readily admits that many of the descriptions he has offered so far are only an approximation of the term's true meaning. "The whole project is a work in progress, and I’m continually aiming to refine the definitions of the words in the list," he says. "I definitely welcome people’s feedback and suggestions in that regard."
In the future, Lomas hopes that other psychologists may begin to explore the causes and consequences of these experiences – to extend our understanding of emotion beyond the English concepts that have dominated research so far.
But studying these terms will not just be of scientific interest; Lomas suspects that familiarising ourselves with the words might actually change the way we feel ourselves, by drawing our attention to fleeting sensations we had long ignored.
“In our stream of consciousness – that wash of different sensations feelings and emotions – there’s so much to process that a lot passes us by,” Lomas says. “The feelings we have learned to recognise and label are the ones we notice – but there’s a lot more that we may not be aware of. And so I think if we are given these new words, they can help us articulate whole areas of experience we’ve only dimly noticed.”
As evidence, Lomas points to the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University, who has shown that our abilities to identify and label our emotions can have far-reaching effects.
Her research was inspired by the observation that certain people use different emotion words interchangeably, while others are highly precise in their descriptions. “Some people use words like anxious, afraid, angry, disgusted to refer to a general affective state of feeling bad,” she explains. “For them, they are synonyms, whereas for other people they are distinctive feelings with distinctive actions associated with them.”
This is called “emotion granularity” and she usually measures this by asking the participants to rate their feelings on each day over the period of a few weeks, before she calculates the variation and nuances within their reports: whether the same old terms always coincide, for instance.
Importantly, she has found that this then determines how well we cope with life. If you are better able to pin down whether you are feeling despair or anxiety, for instance, you might be better able to decide how to remedy those feelings: whether to talk to a friend, or watch a funny film. Or being able to identify your hope in the face of disappointment might help you to look for new solutions to your problem.
In this way, emotion vocabulary is a bit like a directory, allowing you to call up a greater number of strategies to cope with life. Sure enough, people who score highly on emotion granularity are better able to recover more quickly from stress and are less likely to drink alcohol as a way of recovering from bad news. It can even improve your academic success. Marc Brackett at Yale University has found that teaching 10 and 11-year-old children a richer emotional vocabulary improved their end-of-year grades, and promoted better behaviour in the classroom. “The more granular our experience of emotion is, the more capable we are to make sense of our inner lives,” he says.
Both Brackett and Barrett agree that Lomas’s “positive lexicography” could be a good prompt to start identifying the subtler contours of our emotional landscape. “I think it is useful – you can think of the words and the concepts they are associated with as tools for living,” says Barrett. They might even inspire us to try new experiences, or appreciate old ones in a new light.
It’s a direction of research that Lomas would like to explore in the future. In the meantime, Lomas is still continuing to build his lexicography – which has grown to nearly a thousand terms. Of all the words he has found so far, Lomas says that he most often finds himself pondering Japanese concepts such as wabi-sabi (that “dark, desolate sublimity” involving transience and imperfection). “It speaks to this idea of finding beauty in phenomena that are aged and imperfect,” he says. “If we saw the world through those eyes, it could be a different way of engaging in life.”
Original BBC Future article here:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170126-the-untranslatable-emotions-you-never-knew-you-had
Monday, April 13, 2015
"The Saddest Poem I Have Ever Written" by Debbie Millman
In honor of National Poetry Month: "The Saddest Poem I Have Ever Written" by Debbie Millman. From her "Illustrated Essays" series.
I am quite overcome by this piece.
http://debbiemillman.com/
I am quite overcome by this piece.
http://debbiemillman.com/
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
A Color Thesaurus
At a loss as to how to describe a color?
Parent hue is in the top left corner of each chart, created by Ingrid Sundberg.
Since I am an interior designer, I have seen many couples face the "color conundrum" in which women seem to see more tints, tones, and shades than men, illustrated below. I am not sure if it is an actual physiological difference in the eye itself (I know color blindness exists almost exclusively in men) or just a stubbornly-adopted, false gender affectation in men. Think I am exaggerating? Just try to get an average heterosexual man to wear a pink shirt...he will act like it is kryptonite that will sap him of all his energy and end his life.
Parent hue is in the top left corner of each chart, created by Ingrid Sundberg.
Since I am an interior designer, I have seen many couples face the "color conundrum" in which women seem to see more tints, tones, and shades than men, illustrated below. I am not sure if it is an actual physiological difference in the eye itself (I know color blindness exists almost exclusively in men) or just a stubbornly-adopted, false gender affectation in men. Think I am exaggerating? Just try to get an average heterosexual man to wear a pink shirt...he will act like it is kryptonite that will sap him of all his energy and end his life.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
12 Enjoyable Names for Relatively Common Things
1. box tent : the plastic table-like item found in pizza boxes
2. jamais vu : that feeling of seeing something for the first time, even though there’s nothing new about it
3. paresthesia : that tingling sensation when your foot falls asleep
4. grawlix : the string of typographical symbols comic strips use to indicate profanity (“$%@!”)
5. caruncula : the small, triangular pink bump on the inside corner of each eye
6. badinage : another word for playful banter
7. rhumba : a group of rattlesnakes
8. dringle : to waste time by being lazy
9. agraffe : the wire cage that keeps the cork in a bottle of champagne
10. wings : those back flaps on a bra
11. rasher : a single slice of bacon
12. purlicue : the web between your thumb and forefinger
via Mental Floss
2. jamais vu : that feeling of seeing something for the first time, even though there’s nothing new about it
3. paresthesia : that tingling sensation when your foot falls asleep
4. grawlix : the string of typographical symbols comic strips use to indicate profanity (“$%@!”)
5. caruncula : the small, triangular pink bump on the inside corner of each eye
6. badinage : another word for playful banter
7. rhumba : a group of rattlesnakes
8. dringle : to waste time by being lazy
9. agraffe : the wire cage that keeps the cork in a bottle of champagne
10. wings : those back flaps on a bra
11. rasher : a single slice of bacon
12. purlicue : the web between your thumb and forefinger
via Mental Floss
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
BEAUTY: Installation--Mikko Kuorinki
Between March 2010 and February 2011, artist Mikko Kuorinki created a piece called Wall Piece With 200 Letters by forming a new text on the wall of Helsinki's Kiasma Museum every week. The texts were culled from sources as varied as films, poetry, novels, the Tao Te Ching and from writers as diverse as Mircea Eliade, Ronald Koertge, Gertrude Stein, and Meister Eckhart.
http://www.kuorinki.com/
http://www.kuorinki.com/
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