The A-Z Of Occupation
Every social movement I have been involved with, or covered as a journalist, develops its own language of liberation, its own alphabet, and its own buzzwords, rhetoric and discourse.
Here are some of the key words I heard/retained in covering the Occupy Wall Street movement. I am sure there are many words, phrases, and slogans I overlooked, never heard or forgot. Send your favorites to: dissector@mediachannel.org.
These are words that power a struggle and speak to the internal processes that attracted so many to take part, as well as the issues that drive it and the obstacles that face it. They are some of the phrases, terms, sayings and expressions that the occupiers use in their conversations to define themselves and discuss their mission.
A. Adbusters, Anarchy, Arrest, Activist, Action, Anger, Angry, Atrium, Assembly (Freedom of,) Arab Spring, Autonomy, Anonymous. All Night, All Week, Austerity, Autumn Awakening.
B. Bloomberg, Billionaire, Banker, Bank Transfer, Bankster,…
Jiizus: The Jamaican Patois Bible
Robert Pigott reports on the controversial new Bible translation into Jamaican patois for BBC News Magazine:
The Bible is, for the first time, being translated into Jamaican patois. It’s a move welcomed by those Jamaicans want their mother tongue enshrined as the national language – but opposed by others, who think learning and speaking English should be the priority.
In the Spanish Town Tabernacle near the capital, Kingston, the congregation is hearing the word of God in the language of the street.
At the front of the concrete-block church, a young man and woman read alternate lines from the Bible.
This is the Gospel of St Luke in Jamaican patois – or more precisely, “Jiizas – di buk we Luuk rait bout im”.
The sound of the creole, developed from English by West African slaves in Jamaica’s sugar plantations 400 years ago, has an electrifying effect on those listening.
Several women rise to testify, in patois,…
A Browser Extension That Flips Gender
Danielle Sucher’s Jailbreak the Patriarchy is a Chrome extension that substitutes the word “women” for “men” and “he” for “she” and so on within all text. The results are thought provoking — toggle between a patriarchal and matriarchal online world with the click of a button:
Jailbreak the Patriarchy genderswaps the world for you. When it’s installed, everything you read in Chrome (except for gmail, so far) loads with pronouns and a reasonably thorough set of other gendered words swapped. For example: “he loved his mother very much” would read as “she loved her father very much”, “the patriarchy also hurts men” would read as “the matriarchy also hurts women”, that sort of thing.
This makes reading stuff on the internet a pretty fascinating and eye-opening experience, I must say. What would the world be like if we reversed the way we speak about women and men? Well, now you can find out!
The Quest To Invent A Sarcasm Detector
Sarcasm levels are ever-increasing in our modern world — perhaps a century from now, communications will contain more sarcastic expressions than sincere ones. So what is the value of being tongue-in-cheek? It involves more intelligence and creativity than straight-talk, and machines cannot (yet) understand or imitate it with complete accuracy. Thus irony may be our last and best weapon in the inevitable war against the robots. Smithsonian Magazine reveals:
For the past 20 years, researchers from linguists to psychologists to neurologists have been studying our ability to perceive snarky remarks and gaining new insights into how the mind works. Studies have shown that exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving, for instance.
Sarcasm detection is an essential skill if one is going to function in a modern society dripping with irony. “Our culture in particular is permeated with sarcasm,” says Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at San Francisco.
Sarcasm so…
Identifying Psychopathic Killers By Their Own Word Choices
Via ScienceDaily:
As words can be the soul’s window, scientists are learning to peer through it: Computerized text analysis shows that psychopathic killers make identifiable word choices — beyond conscious control — when talking about their crimes.This research could lead to new tools for diagnosis and treatment, and have implications law enforcement and social media.
The words of psychopathic murderers match their personalities, which reflect selfishness, detachment from their crimes and emotional flatness, says Jeff Hancock, Cornell professor of computing and information science, and colleagues at the University of British Columbia in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology.
Hancock and his colleagues analyzed stories told by 14 psychopathic male murderers held in Canadian prisons and compared them with 38 convicted murderers who were not diagnosed as psychopathic. Each subject was asked to describe his crime in detail. Their stories were taped, transcribed and subjected to computer analysis.
Psychopaths used more conjunctions like “because,” “since”…
Teens Largely Unbothered by Vulgar Slurs Online, New Study Finds
Greg Howard writes in Slate:
If someone called us these names to our faces, or even if we overheard them, how would we react? Ask them to stop? Throw a punch? Walk away? All of the above, and in that order? Now what would we do if those words popped up on our Facebook wall, Twitter feed or cell phone? Would we … laugh?
According to a recent national Associated Press-MTV poll of young people between 14 and 24, most teens and young 20-somethings think it’s alright to use slurs among friends or when joking around in cyberspace. Seventy-one percent say that people are more likely to use slurs online, and 51 percent encounter discriminatory words and images on social networking sites. Only half of those surveyed said they would probably ask someone using such language online to stop.
Most say they feel more comfortable with slurs online because people are just trying to…
Free Speech! How Should It Work?
Cooperation is the foundation of any and all societies. A high level of cooperation leads to a higher standard of living and a greater degree of prosperity. A low level of cooperation leads to a breaking down of society as seen so many times in man’s history. When we agree to cooperate in an effort to make and maintain a society we agree to respect each others rights whether we acknowledge this openly or not.
Our rights are the guidelines of our freedoms. If one man’s freedom becomes another man’s slavery that is not freedom but an abuse of freedom. It is a blatant act of disrespect and a severe lack of cooperation, thus counterproductive to society. People that willfully disrespect the rights of others in a society are an enemy to society no matter how their religion or personal beliefs may justify such actions.
Speech is a very important freedom that…
Do You Speak Christianese?
John Blake reveals the doublespeak code words and phrases that Christians use to convey hidden meanings to one another, for CNN:
Can you speak Christian?
Have you told anyone “I’m born again?” Have you “walked the aisle” to “pray the prayer?”
Did you ever “name and claim” something and, after getting it, announce, “I’m highly blessed and favored?”
Many Americans are bilingual. They speak a secular language of sports talk, celebrity gossip and current events. But mention religion and some become armchair preachers who pepper their conversations with popular Christian words and trendy theological phrases…
A Machine To Let You Taste Words
A nonsensical waste of time? Goofy conceptual art? Or a magical cross-sensory experiment? A device that converts any word that you type into a cocktail, via Morskoiboy:
My piece has buttons working as pumps and has pipes instead of wires. It also has a display like any other electronic panel board, but as opposed to using liquid crystals as in electronic displays, my machine’s display functions via multicoloured syrups. My machine converts words into cocktails. And, yes, it does work. Now I can literally taste the flavor of my words.
Pressing the buttons on the keyboard injects the corresponding ingredients into the display, which tints different segments of the display and thus produces letters. You can try to imagine that each letter can have a taste (L-Lime, A-Apple), a color (R-Red, G-Green), or a name (K-Kahlua, J-Jagermeister).
Color Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
We think of a physical object’s being a certain “color” as a solid, immutable property (grass is green, lemons are yellow, et cetera). However, the way our brains see and process color is largely determined by the language we learned as an infant.
Case in point: the Himba tribe of remote northern Namibia, to whom water looks “white” like milk and the sky looks “black” like coal, and who struggle to distinguish between blue and green, yet can easily pick out micro-shades which Americans cannot see. Via BBC Horizon, a reminder that the world looks different to everyone:
Dolphin Whisperer Could Help Us Speak To E.T.
Photo: Auntie Rain (CC)
Could talking to animals guide us to talking to extraterrestrials? Discovery News reports:
For 27 years, marine biologist Denise Herzing and colleagues have been regular visitors in the Atlantic Ocean home of a 200-member pod of spotted dolphins living north of the Bahama Islands.
Understanding the relationships between the members of the pod is key to unraveling what their dozens of whistles, clicks and other signals mean.
“The large goal of this project is to tell the story of what it’s like to be a dolphin,” Herzing, a researcher with Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and the founder and head of the Wild Dolphin Project, told Discovery News.
[Continues at Discovery News]
“One True TOPI Tribe” Compilation
The One True TOPI Tribe, thee OTTT, or simply TOPI (said like Hopi, see TOPI mission statement one), as you already know is a coum-Unity, a decentralized proccess network, founded by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.(Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Dust La Rock for Frank151 from Frank151 on Vimeo.)
You will at once notice at least two unfamiliar terms, TOPI and COUM. Let us start with COUM or coum and see if we can then speak a little more about this One True TOPI Tribe. It’s hard not to notice, how coum is spelled (but how does it sound?), COUM (the capitalization is just to draw your attention to) or coum can be pronounced ‘cum’ or ‘com’. Yet we do not stop at that level. The term also resonates with the word ‘come’ as well as ‘cum’ (like in your face).
This portmanteau word, this phoneme/morpheme, coum invokes other terms that it may combine with, such as communication and all other (dot) com- related terms, even…
‘Herd-Like’ Financial Reporting Could Predict Stock Market Bubbles
Via ScienceDaily:
When the language used by financial analysts and reporters becomes increasingly similar the stock market may be overheated, say scientists.
After examining 18,000 online articles published by the Financial Times, The New York Times, and the BBC, computer scientists have discovered that the verbs and nouns used by financial commentators converge in a ‘herd-like’ fashion in the lead up to a stock market bubble. Immediately afterwards, the language disperses.
The findings presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Barcelona, Spain, on July 19, 2011, show that the trends in the use of words by financial journalists correlate closely with changes in the leading stock indices.
“Our analysis shows that trends in the use of words by financial journalists correlate closely with changes in the leading stock indices — the DJI, the NIKKEI-225, and FTSE-100,” says Professor Mark Keane, Chair of Computer Science in University College Dublin, who was involved in…
Evolver the Podcast: Rediscovering Plant Magic
In this extended clip from the Evolver Intensive Awakening the Cosmic Serpent, Jeremy Narby talks with Kathleen Harrison about her extensive research with the Mazatec shamanic tradition of Mexico, what they taught her about plants and the “energetic carrying capacity of nature,” psilocybin mushrooms, Tobacco and ways for those addicted in the West to heal this relationship with a misused sacred plant.
Next up we have Erin Shaw talking with Naada Guerra. Naada holds workshops on the power of language and how to change our realities by changing the way we use it. In this interview Erin and Naada get into some of the ways we can move towards Empowering Language and more towards the next evolutionary shift.
If you would like to hear more from Jeremy Narby, you can check out his book The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. If you would like to gain more knowledge from Kat…
Luntz and Counter-Luntz: The Word You’re Looking for Is “Dissent”
In recent weeks I’ve had number of interesting discussions with friends, Facebook and otherwise, about the bizarre shift towards totalitarianism in American politics. Of course, no political movement is possible without a corresponding cultural alignment, and the most lamentable trend in this regard seems to me to be the ascendancy of misanthropic polemical whores like Frank Luntz, who function more or less as the shock troops against the American tradition of anti-ideology, perverting our traditional inclinations into a cult of Mammon.[1]
Wisconsinites, whom I believe to be reasonably typical victims of Luntz et alia, demonstrate some pretty mixed reactions to the word “protest”, judging by some friends’ anecdotes surrounding pre-recall canvassing going on in this state. One friend’s story particularly resonated with me: a man who angrily turned a canvasser away from his door saying that he was tired of all that protesting going on in Madison, and thought the “Wisconsin 14″ had shown bad…
The Media’s Language Of Persuasion
Parapolitical notes the contrasting linguistic framing used by the Associated Press in two stories five decades apart:
How does the Associated Press choose which unanimous votes to dismiss as the slavish resolutions of a rubber-stamp parliament and which to praise as examples of bipartisan cooperation?
Woman Leaves Dentist Office With Foreign Accent
Photo: Heinz Hirndorf (CC)
When we leave the dentist after oral surgery it’s common to talk a little funny while the novocaine wears off, but Karen Butler left with a foreign accent. While this isn’t the first incident of its kind, it’s still a mystery as to why individuals develop accents or lose is From Jane Greenhalgh via NPR:
When Karen Butler went in for dental surgery, she left with more than numb gums: She also picked up a pronounced foreign accent. It wasn’t a fluke, or a joke — she’d developed a rare condition called foreign accent syndrome that’s usually caused by an injury to the part of the brain that controls speech.
Butler was born in Bloomington, Ill., and moved to Oregon when she was a baby. She’s never traveled to Europe or lived in a foreign country — she’s an American, she says, “born and bred.”
But she doesn’t sound like…
Crikey! Aussies To Be Fined For Swearing
What the f*#^? The Sydney Morning Herald reports:
Australians may have a love of plain speaking but new laws are set to curtail some of their more colourful language with police issuing on-the-spot fines for obnoxious swearing.
The country’s second most populous state Victoria is due to approve new legislation this week under which police will be able to slap fines of up to Aus$240 (US$257) on people using offensive words or phrases.
Victorian Attorney-General Robert Clark said the penalties, similar to those issued for speeding or parking illegally, would free up police time.
“This will give the police the tools they need to be able to act against this sort of obnoxious behaviour on the spot, rather than having to drag offenders off to court and take up time and money in proceedings,” he said.
But even the state’s top lawyer admitted to swearing sometimes. “Occasionally I mutter things under my breath as probably everybody…
