Many people now have LinkedIn profiles – and there are many ways to describe yourself and your skills.
It seems that “creative” is the most popular way though. LinkedIn has released its list of top 10 buzzwords on the site, with “creative” topping the list.
1. Creative
2. Organizational
3. Effective
4. Motivated
5. Extensive Experience
6. Track Record
7. Innovative
8. Responsible
9. Analytical
10. Problem Solving
(Source: Mashable)
Interestingly, this list differs slightly outside of the US, with Brazilians preferring “experimental” and the Swiss “analytical”.
It seems to get earlier every year…
The Oxford English Dictionary has named its word of the year – omnishambles. Its meaning is “a situation which is shambolic from every possible angle” and derives from a British TV show called The Thick of It.
Other shortlisted words include:
Eurogeddon
Games maker
Mobot
Second screening
Fiona McPherson, one of the lexicographers on the judging panel, said: “It was a word everyone liked, which seemed to sum up so many of the events over the last 366 days in a beautiful way.
“It’s funny, it’s quirky, and it has broken free of its fictional political beginnings, firstly by spilling over into real politics, and then into other contexts.
“If influence is any indication of staying power, it has already staked its claim by being linguistically productive in its own right, producing a number of related coinages.
“While many of them are probably humorous one-offs, their very existence shows that the omnishambles itself has entered at least the familiar parlance, if not quite the common parlance.” (Source: BBC News)
I wonder how long it will be until a US politician uses the word?
Why not try English lessons in Toronto?
Do you know your LOL from your TMI or OMG?
Are these acronyms creeping in to your everyday English – outside of texting? This interesting infographic shows some staggering stats about texting, including that 8 TRILLION texts were sent in 2011. It also asks the questions “is texting ruining the English language?” and “is texting helping the English language?” It seems there is no definitive answer, with studies yielding different results.
Want to learn how to speak English? Why not try English lessons in Miami or Houston.
An interesting article in Slate busts the myth that the American accent is becoming homogenized.
They take as an example the changes happening in accents around the Great Lakes – known to linguists as the Northern Cities Shift (NCS). This is seen as perhaps being the biggest change for centuries in English pronunciation.
And when it comes to accents, nothing divides English dialects more efficiently than vowel pronunciation. Consider the three-letter words that begin with b and end in t: bat, bet, bit, bot, and but. All five of those words contain short vowel sounds. Their long-vowel equivalents—bate, beet, bite, boat, boot, and bout—arrived at their modern pronunciations as a result of the Great Vowel Shift that began around 1400 and established the basic contours of today’s English. But those short vowels have remained pretty much constant since the eighth century—in other words, for more than a thousand years. Until now.
Some linguists believe that the NCS began with a simple change to the short a sound. When using words with that sound, speakers in the region began moving their tongues forward and up. This “tensing,” as linguists call it, produces a nasal-like sound that is the hallmark of the NCS dialect. Many speakers tense their short a so much that monosyllabic words like cat nearly take on a second syllable. The a sound begins to resemble the wordyeah or the final two syllables of the word idea. “If that were the end of it,” Labov explains, “it wouldn’t be a problem, but a language is a set of connected items.” And so, he says, all the vowel sounds start to move around in “something like a game of musical chairs.” (Source: Slate)
It’s a fascinating article, I recommend reading the full text.
We might not be using all the punctuation marks available to us already, but The New Yorker wants us to invent some more.
They asked readers to help out, by submitting suggestions. Some examples:
Some drew upon celebrity affectations. From @rockskimmer came the Tilde Swinton, which would precede any sentence that’s to be read with frigid confidence. And @FastLaugh got one, and then some, with his suggestion: “The. Staccato. Is. A. Period. Appearing. After. Every. Word. Alternately. Known. As. The. Captain. James. T. Kirk. Mark.”
And the winner:
But for the winner we went beyond rage and self-absorption to @toddlerlit’s bad-writing apology mark. The bad-writing apology mark is simple: as its inventor explains, it merely requires you to surround a sentence with a pair of tildes when “you’re knowingly using awkward wording but don’t have time to self-edit.”
The bad-writing apology mark, which we’ll call the bwam, was one of several excellent suggestions by the same reader: others included the TUI, or Texting Under the Influence mark, and the self-censorship mark, which lets a writer indicate that there’s more to say but no comfortable way to say it. But the bad-writing apology mark took the crown because it’s in such demand in today’s breathless and poorly composed world. In fact, we’ll use it right here to explain this week’s winner: ~Real comedy mixed with real thinking is rare and and glad to pick it!~ (Source: The New Yorker)
Has this inspired you? What punctuation mark would you find most useful?
Text-speak is often denounced by older people, particularly OMG (oh my god).
But it turns out that some words weren’t thought up by today’s young people – OMG has been in existence for almost 100 years.
The Mary Sue reports that OMG was found in a letter from a British admiral to Winston Churchill – dated 1917. The sentence reads:
“I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis — O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) — Shower it on the Admiralty!!” [sic]
For the full story take a look at the article here (with photos).
Struggling to keep up with all the new jargon whilst studying for your MBA? Or perhaps you’re in a new job and want to impress your boss?
The ExecuSpeak dictionary could be for you! Their slogan is “because business is another language” and promises that the dictionary is “easy to use, easy to read, easy to understand”.
A sample entry:
Strategic incompetence: Not getting the job done right – on purpose.
Usage: Because of his strategic incompetence, he was never asked to make the coffee again.
You can buy the dictionary in paperback, although an app is also apparently under development. In addition you can see their ‘word of the day’ over at their Tumblr.
Have you ever wanted to see that special word you and your friends use featured in the dictionary?
Now’s your chance! The Collins Dictionary are inviting submissions from the public for the first time. You can submit your word online, and it will go through an evaluation process. If your word is accepted it will then appear on collinsdictionary.com, with your name next to the definition!
In addition to the excitement of having your word accepted, Collins are offering a prize every day between now and the end of August. You’ll be automatically entered when you submit a word.
A few words that have been submitted so far include mantyhose, cyberstalking and photobombing. Can you do better?
It’s a little less than a week until the start of the Olympic Games, and Londoners are braced for transport chaos.
If you’d like to help ease their stress levels, one thing will make a huge difference. That thing is standing on the right on escalators. This simple rule, which you will see on all escalators on the Tube, allows people in a hurry to walk down the left hand side of the escalator whilst others stand… on the right.
If you’d like to ease London stress levels even more, help out others by telling them to stand on the right – even in their own language. Londonist’s handy guide is here to help. Here are a few translations.
Cantonese: Mm goi kay yau bin
Catalan: Estigues a la banda dreta, si us plau
Klingon: Qam Daq nIH!
Latin: ad latus dextrum sta
Morse: … – .- -. -.. — -. – …. . .-. .. –. …. -
Think Twitter is just people posting about what they had for lunch? You may be right – and wrong.
A new Twitter account takes tweets and turns them into poetry. So the mundane becomes something oddly beautiful. @Pentametron is an automated account that uses algorithms to turn tweets into an iambic pentameter poem (see picture).
Created by Ranjit Bhatnagar, a US programmer, the algorithms works by scanning Twitter postings for rhyming couplets and then checking them against the Carnegie Mellon dictionary for stress patterns. If the tweet matches, it goes into a ‘bin’ to be worked into a poem. Approximately one in 50,000 tweets matches this criteria.
Will one of your tweets make the cut?
(Source: Media Bistro)
