i can’t fucking believe blizzard did this
In Quartz, Daniel Midgley, of the radio program Talk the Talk, has a linguistic guide to writing effective protest signs. Excerpt:
Language can be used to persuade, amuse, insult, and mobilize action. Few formats can accomplish these goals as ably or succinctly as the protest sign.
When you make a protest sign, you’re working with considerable linguistic constraints: Space is limited by what you (and your friends) can carry, and if you’re marching, your reader will have to absorb your message quickly, making sign-writing a tough task.
Fortunately, this is where linguistics can help. Whether you’re protesting US president Donald Trump, Brexit, or college-tuition hikes, certain syntactic and rhetorical principles make the best protest signs powerful and effective. Using the example of anti-Trump protests, the following list outlines some linguistic tips to making forceful and potent pickets. […]
Rhyming
Rhymes are memorable and can help turn a sign into a chant. This is why epic sagas since the era of Beowulf have rhymed—the structure gave the bard a way to remember what came next. The meter of these phrases (what linguists refer to this as their “prosodic pattern”) also make rhyming slogans easy to remember.
CAN’T BUILD WALL / HANDS TOO SMALL
MR. HATE / LEAVE MY STATE
What I read: “A linguist explains how to write protest signs that everyone will remember”
What I expected: A pop science review of current linguistic research on protest signs and its applications
What I got: TOP 10 WAYS YOU CAN SAY “FUCK DRUMPF XD” IN A COOL AND EPIC MANNER
Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)
People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.
Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.
Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.
Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.
Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.
The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.
References
Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.
Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5) 737–747.
Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish:
Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.
Universal grammar confirmed.
You don’t need credentials to be a gamer.
It is not in and of itself a job. To most people, it is a hobby.
Let people enjoy that hobby without having to question whether they have done enough or played enough to qualify for that title.
Nobody’s forbidding people, at gunpoint, to play whatever videogames they want. We just calling them out for being casual plebs, which they are.
Don’t like it? Feel free to ignore our opinions, or git gud instead.
IT’S ON. People told me to do both, and so I did. Good luck!
(also, those original sketches for fanart winners are requests, so they can be whatever you’d like me to draw!)
First time seeing this? Read Drugs & Wires here