While I’ve never really thought of my emoticon typings having an actual sound, RCA grads are developing a crowd-sourced directory for just that: the Sound Word Observer shows what !!!! and Yyyeeaaaaah amongst others sound like.
It’s pretty basic at this stage, but it’ll be interesting to see if this progresses to the levels of data of say, the We Feel Fine or the British Library Evolving English sites.
via Design Observer
This unpublished paper suggests that our concept of the world can be affected by our language. For example, people with languages which have defined concepts of the future have smaller nest eggs, eat more, and exercise less as the division between present and future allows them to put it off.
It is also worth noting that concepts of languages and the actual languages can differ: for example precise Germans may not be picking it up from their seemingly well formulated language as you might suspect, but because they can’t handle any more ambiguity after what is in fact a highly idiosyncratic one.
I started drinking a lot of spirits to get an appreciation for what the different types were all about. You know, I drank spirits but I wasn’t that focused on the nuances.
I still remember the first time I drank, it was a Scotch whiskey or something like that, in which I was actually paying attention to what was going on. I thought, This is amazing, because there’s so much sophistication in a Scotch whiskey like this, I was blow away. I had never had whiskeys that were that dynamic and that bright.
- Brad Estabrooke, ‘the first gin distiller in Brooklyn since prohibition’
While this infographic may break down on more intense scrutiny (are any of these things actually related to each other), it looks nearly as good as it’d taste.
The Candy Bar Infographic in its full glory
Infographic spotted by Fast Co. Design
Wine and Conversation
While the title of the book makes it sound like a breezy coffee-table book, Wine and Conversation by Adrienne Lehrer is in fact an honest-to-goodness linguistic study of the language of wine critique. Below are my notes from the book. Continue reading
Stumbled across this video on how human behaviour relates to smell.