The usage, derivation, and psychological, ethical, and legal aspects of slang terminology in medicine are discussed. The colloquial vocabulary is further described and a comprehensive glossary of common UK terms provided in the appendix. This forms the first list of slang terms currently in use throughout the British medical establishment.

Slang is one of the important components of spoken discourse. It is integrated in our everyday language to such an extent that we cannot ignore its significance while analyzing the discourse specifically of the younger generation. This paper investigates the nature of Urdu and English slang used among different age groups; children, teenagers and adolescents in particular, living in Karachi. It also discusses the attitudes of elders, which includes parents and teachers, towards the use of slang words (...) nowadays. Simultaneous cross sectional design is adopted to compare the age groups which helped in examining their discourse and exploring different categories in it, which emerged while observing the language of the age groups selected. The result shows that adolescents also incorporate slang in everyday life, as much as teenagers do but there are different categories that distinguish the vocabulary of the two age groups. Moreover informal discussions also helped elicit the responses of parents and teachers towards the excessive use of slang by the youngsters in our society. (shrink)

Essays over de wijze waarop filosofische problemen figureren bij schrijvers als Goethe, Broch, Kafka en Gombrowicz.

As an emerging language variant, practitioners have extensively used Internet slang in advertising and other communication activities. However, its unique characteristics that differ from standard language have yet to be explored. Drawing upon interdisciplinary theories on schema and communication styles, this research makes the first attempt to conceptualize and measure these characteristics by introducing a new multi-dimensional construct, “Internet slang style,” in the marketing context. It develops and validates a new scale to measure Internet slang style along (...) the dimensions of amiability, overtness, candor, and harshness through a series of in-depth interviews, two surveys, and one experiment with consumers. In addition, this research investigates the impact of Internet slang styles on brand personality and brand attitude. The results indicate that different Internet slang style dimensions positively correspond to different brand personality dimensions but exert no influence on brand attitude. Practically, the scale provides an easy-to-use instrument to evaluate Internet slang styles from a consumer perspective to help companies appropriately employ Internet slang in marketing communication activities. (shrink)

The use of slang, abusive, and offensive language has become common practice on social media. Even though social media companies have censorship polices for slang, abusive, vulgar, and offensive language, due to limited resources and research in the automatic detection of abusive language mechanisms other than English, this condemnable act is still practiced. This study proposes USAD, a lexicon-based intelligent framework to detect abusive and slang words in Perso-Arabic-scripted Urdu Tweets. Furthermore, due to the nonavailability of the (...) standard dataset, we also design and annotate a dataset of abusive, offensive, and slang word Perso-Arabic-scripted Urdu as our second significant contribution for future research. The results show that our proposed USAD model can identify 72.6% correctly as abusive or nonabusive Tweet. Additionally, we have also identified some key factors that can help the researchers improve their abusive language detection models. (shrink)

Geannoteerde briefwisseling van de twee geleerden over het vraagstuk van de evolutie.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 216 Seiten: 479-495.

Traditionally studied as a window onto Arab-Muslim social reality, the medieval Arabic underworld slang found in Kitāb al­-Bukhalāʾ by al-Jāḥiẓ and indeed al­-Bukhalāʾ as a whole serve a number of functions and meanings at once, not just historical documentation. Such multiplicity has implications for translation, which should strive to convey the work’s sociolinguistic and textual heterogeneity. With this ideal in mind, this article compares two English versions of the Arabic slang: R. B. Serjeant’s The Book of Misers and (...) Jim Colville’s Avarice and the Avaricious. Serjeant uses transliteration, explicitation, and footnotes to create a “thick translation” that exposes the rich sociolinguistic and textual range. In somewhat of a contrast, Colville employs English colloquialisms and Scots canting slang to produce what might arguably be called “dynamic equivalence,” which stages a natural English reading experience. The comparison raises further questions about the relationship between a translation’s effects and the translator’s intent, as well as between translation and a second process to which it is sometimes compared, namely, reading. (shrink)

The present paper has as its theme the sociological aspect of the use of slang in a socio educational environment. Its main purpose is to describe and analyze the social distance in a learning environment, according to Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and habitus. In order to develop the classwork, some workshops about a slang dictionary have been held. The qualitative data provided by the pedagogical practice are presented, based on the reports of the meetings so that we (...) have been able to analyze the concepts presented by the young people. From this, it has been verified the symbolic character of words and expressions as a vector of social distancing by the incorporated cultural capital. (shrink)

Appraisal research based on participants' self-report of emotional experiences is predicated on the assumption that the academic community and the lay public share comparable meanings of the emotion terms used. However, this can be a risky assumption to make, as in the case of the emotion disgust which appears in common usage to reflect irritation, or anger, as often as repulsion. To examine the theoretical versus the lay meaning of disgust, 140 undergraduates were asked to recall a time when they (...) felt either angry, disgust, disgusted, revulsion, or grossed out. Analysis of event recall responses and emotional experience measures suggests that the common understanding of the word disgust reflects a combination of the conceptual meanings of disgust and anger whereas the slang term grossed out more closely captures the theoretical construct of disgust. Implications of these findings for emotion research based on self-report are discussed. (shrink)

In South African slang ‘Half-Tiger’ refers to five rand, half of a ‘Tiger’ (ten rand) and amounts to approximately 60 US cents. It is at the ‘Half-Tiger’ level of commerce where contemporary and deeply afro-urban digital cultural practice is found. A mass street level culture that in East Africa is driven by the mobile phone as socio-political development tool. And in South Africa by a booming media industry that has been hacked and gone viral. These cultures augment music, fashion, (...) politics and social shifts with a digital aesthetic unique to each city. The article addresses mobile and digital culture in the two cities and compares the effect of mobile technology and its residue in the cultural practices of these very diverse urban environments. I will be addressing the work of key artists and musicians, looking closely at how they respond aesthetically and in a uniquely afro-urban way to a shifting engagement with digital mobile media and networked social practices. (shrink)

Most theories of slurs fall into one of two families: those which understand slurring terms to involve special descriptive/informational content (however conveyed), and those which understand them to encode special emotive/expressive content. Our view is that both offer essential insights, but that part of what sets slurs apart is use-theoretic content. In particular, we urge that slurring words belong at the intersection of a number of categories in a sociolinguistic register taxonomy, one that usually includes [+slang] and [+vulgar] and (...) always includes [-polite] and [+derogatory]. Thus, e.g., what distinguishes ‘Chinese’ from ‘chink’ is neither a peculiar sort of descriptive nor emotional content, but rather the fact that ‘chink’ is lexically marked as belonging to different registers than ‘Chinese’. It is, moreover, partly such facts which makes slurring ethically unacceptable. (shrink)

For Ordinary Language philosophy, at issue is the use of the expressions of language, not expressions in and of themselves. So, at issue is not, for example, ordinary versus (say) technical words; nor is it a distinction based on the language used in various areas of discourse, for example academic, technical, scientific, or lay, slang or street discourses – ordinary uses of language occur in all discourses. It is sometimes the case that an expression has distinct uses within distinct (...) discourses, for example, the expression ‘empty space’. This may have both a lay and a scientific use, and both uses may count as ordinary; as long as it is quite clear which discourse is in play, and thus which of the distinct uses of the expression is in play. Though connected, the difference in use of the expression in different discourses signals a difference in the sense with which it is used, on the Ordinary Language view. One use, say the use in physics, in which it refers to a vacuum, is distinct from its lay use, in which it refers rather more flexibly to, say, a room with no objects in it, or an expanse of land with no buildings or trees. However, on this view, one sense of the expression, though more precise than the other, would not do as a replacement of the other term; for the lay use of the term is perfectly adequate for the uses it is put to, and the meaning of the term in physics would not allow speakers to express what they mean in these other contexts. (shrink)

Corruption has traversed all lengths and breadth of the Nigerian nation. The corrupt practice is mostly ornamented with language. The present study aims to ascertain the linguistic codings used to mask corruption in educational, civil service, political and social settings. Data for the study were collected from notable online newspaper and media sources, which include: _The Vanguard, The Guardian, The Punch, This Day, The Nation, The Premium, Sahara Reporters, Naira land_ and others published between 2015 and 2021. The data from (...) online sources were complemented by focused group discussions, unstructured interviews and participant’s observation method. The study adopted a qualitative research design and a random sampling method in selecting a total of hundred respondents from the five states that make up the southeast zone in Nigeria. The paper anchored its analyses on the conceptual model of Sapir-Whorf relativity framework and the analyses were done using interpretative textual analysis model. Findings from the study reveal that using words, phrases and expressions which are reflected in coinages, code-mixing, reduplication, metonymy, metaphor, slang, borrowing, pidginization, lexical reversals and creative usages to mask corruption have far-reaching effects on national development. The paper recommends that in considering the fight against corruption, the government should pay attention to the linguistic embellishments that act as the lifeline of the negative practice. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the target article “Arguments Opposing the Radicalism of Radical Constructivism” by Gernot Saalmann. Excerpt: Gernot Saalmann uses the term “radical” in the sense of something “extreme.” For example, in §1, he contrasts “radical” constructivists with “moderate” constructivists. This adjectival usage of the word “radical” as “extreme” is a slang usage from the American sub-culture called “Surfers” which originated in the late 1950s or early 1960s. “Radical,” in their slang means: “At or exceeding limits of (...) control or safety…” (Oxford English Dictionary OED 2007) . (shrink)

In this challenging new book John Holloway explores one of the most significant aspects of contemporary culture, arguing that over the last hundred years or so there has been a radical change in the very nature of individual consciousness. He traces a crucial shift from an 'Apollonian' ideal of human involvement in the widest range of experience (implying a sense of the individual consciousness as spacious, orderly, and comprehensive) to a narrower and less integrated engagement with the world (and a (...) more reductive conception of consciousness as random and fragmented). He plots this shift through a number a quite different fields: there are chapters on the visual arts, on colloquial language and slang, on cartoons, on political rhetoric, and on 'personality' studies by psychologists. He goes on to examine the work of certain literary figures (notably Hardy, Edwin Muir, Wyndham Lewis, Patrick White, John Cowper Powys, and Gary Snyder) who seem to have recognized, and registered in imaginative terms, the pervasive but generally unrecorded changes in consciousness for which the book is arguing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Edmund Husserl’s Influence on Karl Jaspers’s Phenomenology”Jean Naudin (bio) and Jean-Michel Azorin (bio)Keywordsphenomenology, intentionality, intuition, empathy, ambiguitySchwartz and Wiggins’s paper clearly shows that Jaspers’s comprehensive psychiatry draws mainly from Husserl’s phenomenology. This thesis enters a current debate opened by Chris Walker and German Berrios about the influence of Husserlian philosophy on Jaspers’s work. This debate, which emerged at the end of the so-called decade of the brain, (...) could be considered perfectly obsolete. But its topicality relies on taking up the challenge of the scientific bases of comprehension in psychiatric experience. Wiggins and Schwartz perfectly achieve this aim by opposing a theory of seeing and a theory of thinking. Works such as Walker’s are grounded on thinking; they are works about theory. They are not works about experience, but rather epistemological or historical works. In contrast, Wiggins and Schwartz suggest to see, as Jaspers did, and not to think, following Husserl by grounding their psychopathology on intuition and presuppositionlessness. They emphasize Jaspers’s method of “making present” by doing a perfect analysis of the issues of translation of vergegenwärtigung as a co-experiencing of mental processes as if they were directly given. These main principles of direct-givenness, presuppositionlessness, and making present pull the Jaspersian concepts to the Husserlian phenomenological reduction and seem like the foremost principle in Husserlian phenomenology: the intuition of the thing in itself. Whereas Jaspers refuted the principle of eidetic reduction, Wiggins and Schwartz clearly show how much he grounded on the basis of the concept of intentionality, discovered and enlightened during Husserl’s life within the horizon of phenomenological reduction. Actually, it seems that the authors take the side of Jaspers to better support their own vision of psychiatric experience, which they more explicitly argued in Husserlian terms of the later period in some other papers (Schwartz and Wiggins 1985; Wiggins and Schwartz 1988, 1991; Wiggins, Schwartz, and Northoff 1990). However, they take care here to struggle exclusively with the epistemological field of their opponents, considering only Jaspers’s own writings and the Husserlian texts that were accessible to Jaspers when he wrote his psychopathology. There is no room for Kant in Jaspers’s main [End Page 37] principles, and this assumption must lead us to consider the horizon opened by Jaspers, that is, the horizon of a science of meaning essentially built on the lived experiences and the bracketing of any kind of a priori. In contrast to the slight influence of Kant, one idea that emerges is that of the straight impact of Dilthey on both Jaspers and Husserl. We perfectly agree with Wiggins and Schwartz that Jaspers, grounding both on Husserl and Dilthey, arrives at a methodological principle that is all his own, by considering both the connections of the life-stories and the objectivity of symptoms. In other words, we can find the originality and maybe the astonishing modernity of Jaspers in his perfect description of the balance between comprehension and observation, between empathy and its limits, that are obviously found in psychotic processes.We thus focused our comments on the following critiques to Jaspers, although they were already well argued in the brief conclusion of Wiggins and Schwartz: (a) the issue of empathy, (b) the limits of Jaspersian phenomenology, and (c) the merits of its genuine ambiguity.The Issue of Empathy. Indeed we have no reliable scientific mean to guarantee the correctness of our intuitions of the other’s mental life, and this problem might lead one to globally reject the method. The discussion of this problem, classical in the Continental literature since the twenties, led the Continental psychiatrists to unfortunately abandon their own traditions. And it is surprising for a Continental psychiatrist to see this debate coming back into the English-speaking literature. When we address the issue of empathy, we have no easy means to abandon folk psychology. Using philosophical slang weakens the attempt to enlighten its foundations instead of describing its values. The suspicion regarding empathy is partially legitimated by the prejudices of Jaspers himself. As psychiatrists, we have to carry on the Jaspersian research by progressively abandoning it and coming back... (shrink)

L'importanza del significante non deve far sì che questo sia interpretato come l'unica componente del linguaggio umano, sebbene ne sia una delle più elevate; pur intendendo la comunicazione umana come convenzionale, nel convenire occorre distinguere, tra convenzione essenziale e funzionale: è certo vero che solo nella prima, nel linguaggio come nel diritto, si potrà incontrare il significante, ma nella seconda sono concentrati i molteplici prodotti della prima, che si presentano come precipitati o cristallizzati a seguito di una reazione chimica, che (...) hanno perso sì la dimensione esistenziale, ma hanno conservato origine e natura umane. Così deve essere debitamente considerato anche il ruolo del senso già dato, del significato positivo dei vocaboli: in particolare, proprio nel linguaggio giuridico, politico ed economico, si è sempre manifestato il bisogno di uno specifico vocabolario, se non di un gergo, che risponda con maggior aderenza o efficacia alle esigenze delle argomentazioni trattate. Nel linguaggio giuridico ed economico si può riscontrare una certa omogeneità nelle società complesse contemporanee, una comune tendenza alla generazione (o forse degenerazione) di terminologie e fraseologie esoteriche che si spingono ben al di là delle logiche e necessarie esigenze di specializzazione, somigliando più a gerghi approssimativi (ad esempio il legalese, per gli anglofoni, assume sempre più la fisionomia di un vero e proprio slang) che ad appropriati e scientifici codici comunicativi. Un fenomeno comune a tali linguaggi è il frequente ricorso alle sigle, abbreviazioni o acronimi, il cui uso generalizzato conduce spesso ad effetti in contraddizione con la loro causa originaria: espedienti linguistici apparentemente coniati allo scopo di migliorare, velocizzare ed estendere la comprensione di termini e concetti complessi, al contrario, generano frequentemente confusione e misunderstanding al di fuori del loro specializzato e ristretto ambito di provenienza e, qualche volta, anche all’interno. Un'adeguata risposta alla proliferazione e diffusione di nuove e sommarie terminologie, abbreviazioni e slogan, che solo apparentemente arricchiscono il lessico, restringendo sempre più, al contrario, l'ambito della convenzione essenziale, potrebbe essere forse ottenuta solo attraverso il recupero della dimensione ontologica del linguaggio, mantenendone sì l'elevato grado di specializzazione, ma non rinunciando per questo alla ricchezza espressiva tanto dei vocaboli quanto della fraseologia. (shrink)

The book analyses a variety of topics and current issues in linguistics and literary studies, focusing especially on such aspects as memory, identity and cognition. Firstly, it discusses the notion of memory and the idea of reimagining, as well as coming to terms with the past. Secondly, it studies the relationship between perception, cognition and language use. It then investigates a variety of practices of language users, language learners and translators, such as the use of borrowings from hip-hop and (...) class='Hi'>slang. The book is intended for researchers in the fields of linguistics and literary studies, lecturers teaching undergraduate and master's students on courses in language and literature. (shrink)

Recent criticism has already shown that the notoriously unanswered plot questions of The Big Sleep elicit serious philosophical issues, including skepticism about the validity of interpretation itself. The film allegorizes the reason for this questioning in what Derrida calls the "blackmail" of photography--its coercive claim to represent objective truth. Blackmail arising from photography is the main plot premise of The Big Sleep, but it serves as a figure for the "postal" world of signs divorced from referents, finally epitomized in thel (...) groundlessness of Marlowe's logic and final conclusions. Parallels are drawn between this Derridean world and Adorno's writings, in the light of Derrida's acknowledgement of their affinity. The phrase "big sleep" is gangster-slang for death, but this essay argues that it also refers to life, understood in the Buddhist sense of the human illusion of a waking or enlightened life. (shrink)

Though largely unknown today, “Ned Buntline” (Edward Zane Carroll Judson) was one of the most influential authors of 19th-century America. He published over 170 novels, edited multiple popular and political publications, and helped pioneer the seafaring adventure, city mystery and Western genres. It was his pirate tales that Tom Sawyer constantly reenacted, his “Bowery B’hoys” that came to define the distinctive slang and swagger of urban American characters, and his novels and plays that turned an unknown scout into Buffalo (...) Bill, King of the Border Men. But before “Ned Buntline” became a mainstay of the popular press, he had been on his way to becoming one of the nation’s highbrow literary elites. He was praised by the leading critics, edited an important literary journal, and his stories appeared in the era’s most prestigious publications. This study examines how and why “Ned Buntline” moved from prestigious to popular authorship and argues that the transformation was precipitated by one very specific event: in 1846, Edward Z. C. Judson was lynched. A close examination of Judson’s life, writing, and the coverage of him in the newspapers of the day (including the remarkable story of how he survived a lynching) demonstrates that the same issues that led to his lynching also led to his rebirth as a new kind of American author. (shrink)

This study aimed at finding students? perspectives on integrating feature films on digital versatile discs (DVDs) in oral communication classes of advanced English as foreign language (EFL) learners. A total of 29 students being trained as teachers of English participated in the study. Data were collected through a survey questionnaire. All participants unanimously agreed that through films they had the opportunity to learn about how people initiate and sustain a conversational exchange, and how they negotiate meaning; types of exclamation and (...) filling expressions; colloquial English in real?life contexts, and non?verbal communication. Participants also acknowledged that viewing feature films exposed them not only to a wide range of native speakers, each with their own slang, accents and dialects, but also to a wealth of contextualised vocabulary expressions and authentic cross?cultural information. The study suggests that it is possible to exploit feature films in foreign language classes with a wide array of pedagogical options. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 13 Stephanie Yingyi Wang When Tongzhi Marry: Experiments of Cooperative Marriage between Lalas and Gay Men in Urban China Ang Lee’s film The Wedding Banquet could be classic introductory material for tongzhi studies and, particularly, for research on cooperative marriage.1 In the film, Wai-Tung, a Taiwanese landlord who lives happily with his American boyfriend Simon in New York, (...) is troubled by his parents’ constant efforts to try and find him a bride. His partner Simon suggests he could arrange a marriage of convenience with WaiTung ’s tenant Wei Wei who is from mainland China and is also in need of a green card to stay in the United States. However, their plan backfires when Wai-Tung’s enthusiastic parents arrive in the United States and plan a big wedding banquet. As the film critic and scholar Chris 1. Tongzhi, literally “same purpose,” is the Chinese term for “comrade.” Since the 1990s, it has been appropriated to replace the more formal tóngxìnglìan (same-sex love) to refer to gay men and lalas (same-sex desiring women) in the Chinese-speaking world. The translation of xinghun as “cooperative marriage” is debatable, as xinghun literally means “pro-forma marriage.” In other works, “contract marriage,” “fake marriage,” or “pro-forma marriage” are used to refer to gay-lala marriage. Informed by Lucetta Kam’s work, I use “cooperative marriage ” to highlight that such marriage is not merely functional without sustenance, but is contingent on the cooperation and negotiation between multiple parties in the relationship, as my findings suggest. See Lucetta Yip Lo Kam, Shanghai Lalas: Female Tongzhi Communities and Politics in Urban China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), 85. winner of the 2018 Feminist Studies Graduate Student award 14 Stephanie Yingyi Wang Berry points out, analysis of the film rests not on any individual, but on the Confucian family as “it negotiates the interface with globally hegemonic American culture,” suggesting that there exists an understanding of gayness in the context of the family that is distinct in Chinese culture.2 Berry continues to argue that the moral ambivalence produced by the film is structured by different sets of values: the gay person is not merely concerned about individual identity fulfillment, but he also adjusts his actions to satisfy the family expectation; the parents, especially the father figure, is not merely a patriarch with strict moral provisions and standards, but someone who can allow for implicit negotiation to keep the surface harmony as long as he gets a grandson; the woman is not merely an independent agent freed from social constraints, but a bride who is also attached to emotional comfort and conjugal ideals. Just as The Wedding Banquet tactfully reveals one type of cooperative marriage with its mutual benefits and examines the multilayered complexity of each individual player in the marriage game, this research takes as its subject cooperative marriage between gay men and lalas as an exciting departure to understand queer subjectivities and queer kinship intersected with gender, sexuality, class, and tongzhi politics in urban China.3 Though seemingly monolithic, marriage and family have become contested terrains for tongzhi to negotiate their gender performance, queer desires, and aspirations for better lives. The transnational makings of gayness and rights-based identity politics have contributed to the increasing awareness of a cosmopolitan gay identity and the desiring of alternative life choices of Chinese tongzhi, which lays the very foundation of their motivation to seek ways to cope with the heteronormative family model. Coming out and gay marriage are upheld as primary tropes of identity politics, facilitated by the self-identified tongzhi grassroots groups that emerged during the initiation of AIDS work in 1994 for gay men and at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, which gathered hundreds of lesbians from around the world in Beijing.4 How2. Chris Berry, “Wedding Banquet: A Family (Melodrama) Affair,” in his Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 183. 3. Lala is a slang term in China for same-sex desiring women and includes lesbian, bisexual, and trans women. 4. Katie King, “‘There Are No... (shrink)

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois introduces double consciousness as a result of racial prejudice and oppression. Explained as a state of confliction felt by black Americans, Du Bois presents double consciousness as integral to understanding the black experience. Later philosophers question the importance of double consciousness to current race discussions, but this paper contends that double consciousness provides valuable insights into black and white relations. To do this, I will utilize the modern slang term, “Oreo,” (...) to highlight how a perceived incompatibility between blacks and whites could prevent America from achieving a greater unity. (shrink)

This paper proposes different approaches to design, referring to gambiarra practices and artifacts and their relation to complexity theory, evoking critical theorists that take undecidability into account in order to link gambiarra to operations that breed complexity and responsibility. The word gambiarra comes from Brazilian slang and describes an intervention or artifact meant to provide a provisory solution to an unexpected event or crisis. This kind of alternative design differs radically from conventional design because it does not come from (...) formally trained, engineer-minded, projects. Instead, it lacks control, stability and durability. As it offers no permanent solution, it opens room for further accidents and is messy, especially if compared to a conservative model for creation that praises human predominance, soundness and efficiency. Therefore, gambiarra often has negative connotations that this analysis aims to challenge, by relating it to principles of complexity theory. Complexity theory is a transdisciplinary field for research aimed at the organization of living systems, with a vast understanding of networks and what life and govern are. It gathers insights from different disciplines to explore the interconnectivity between individuals, their systems and environment. It unveils how ambivalent information/noise relationships are fundamental for the increase of diversity in a system. It also displays the intelligent dynamics resulting from seemingly insignificant neighborhood relations that collectively make it possible to adapt and continuously change structures. With that in mind, the “deficient” aspect of gambiarra becomes more valuable, as it hints at a potential to generate new information and structures beyond entropic models that perpetuate the same logics across time. Michel Serres’s information theory presented in the book The Parasite is brought up in comparison to gambiarra, in order to explore the potential of interdependent ambiguous relationships that may not fit in dominant forms of discourse. Concomitantly, Vilém Flusser’s notion of responsibility reinforces the argument that a fabric of dynamic differences can emerge out of mutual engagement and indeterminacy. Underlying, this paper concerns with drafting ecological discourses and practices that can embrace contradictions and the plurality of worlds, noticing complex phenomena that have been pushed to the margins, while also decentralizing from hegemonic models. It questions the predominance of the prevailing design paradigm in the search for non-eurocentric and non-anthropocentric human-environment relationships and forms of provision of human needs. (shrink)

We investigate 1 factor that influences the success of ideas or cultural representations by proposing that they have a habitat, that is, a set of environmental cues that encourages people to recall and transmit them. We test 2 hypotheses: (a) fluctuation: the success of an idea will vary over time with fluctuations in its habitat, and (b) competition: ideas with more prevalent habitats will be more successful. Four studies use subject ratings and data from newspapers to provide correlational support for (...) our 2 hypotheses, with a negative factoid, positive rumor, catchphrases, and variants of a proverb. Three additional experimental studies manipulate the topic of actual conversations and find empirical support for our theory, with catchphrases, proverbs, and slang. The discussion examines how habitat prevalence applies to a more extensive class of ideas and suggests how habitats may influence the process by which ideas evolve. (shrink)

There were days in the 70s when studying a subject at university and participating in a cultural and social revolution seemed like one and the same thing. When you were studying something like biology there was nothing the least bit strange in the fact that `biomass' became political student slang for the mass of biology students who constantly had to be `mobilized' against the bourgeoisie's reactionary measures directed against the experimental Roskilde University, university Marxism, long student careers and other (...) benefits of the new society. And it seemed quite a matter of course that the biomass could not itself be a revolutionary subject, so it had to be mobilized from without, by the party or the `critical' avant-garde. I don't want to gloat over the romantic revolutionary naiveté of the period - plenty of others do that, although one is unlikely to understand history through irony and condemnation. But in this particular context the thought of the mobilizable mass came up again. Perhaps the very notion of masses - very generally - involves the idea that masses must be without a will of their own, or if they have one, that it is at any rate not very rational and must be given some.. (shrink)

In this challenging 1993 book John Holloway explores one of the most significant aspects of contemporary culture, arguing that over the last hundred years or so there has been a radical change in the very nature of individual consciousness. He traces a crucial shift from an 'Apollonian' ideal of human involvement in the widest range of experience to a narrower and less integrated engagement with the world. He plots this shift through a number of quite different fields: there are chapters (...) on the visual arts, on colloquial language and slang, on cartoons, on political rhetoric, and on 'personality' studies by psychologists. He goes on to examine the work of certain literary figures who seem to have recognized, and registered in imaginative terms, the pervasive but generally unrecorded changes in consciousness for which the book is arguing. (shrink)

The article studies the evolution of countercultural rock during the sixties through the circulation of ideas, cultural goods and people between Buenos Aires and New York. A set of trips by artists and intellectuals, and the creation of an original slang are considered the starting point to discusss how a part of youth took as their own the counter-cultural aesthetics, practices and ideology. This youth interpreted counter-cultural rock as a new specific urban and musical culture that would replace tango. (...) Moreover, this article examines the expectations that the countercultural rock aroused among different social actors interested by the juvenile question. It is argued that in an ideological context hegemonized by a nationalist and revolutionary sensitivity, the expansion of rock towards placed in tension opposite images of the United States that helped to nationalize the interpretation of rock culture. (shrink)

The split in our thinking between "masculine" and "feminine" is probably as old as language itself. Human beings seem to have a natural tendency to divide things into pairs: good/bad, light/dark, subject/object and so on. It is not surprising, then, that the male/female or masculine/feminine dichotomy is used to classify things other than men and women. Many languages actually classify all nouns as "masculine" or "feminine" (although not very consistently: for example, the Spanish masculine noun pollo means "hen", while the (...) feminine polla is slang for "penis"). This is perfectly natural; it is part of the way categorisation works in language. This does not, however, mean that it is right. It is probably unimportant whether a table or a chair is thought of as masculine or feminine. It may not even be very important these days whether we think of the sun as male and the moon as female (like the ancient Greeks) or vice versa (like most of the German tribes). However, when we start associating abstract concepts like Reason or Nature with men and women, we run into serious difficulties. (shrink)

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois introduces double consciousness as a result of racial prejudice and oppression. Explained as a state of confliction felt by black Americans, Du Bois presents double consciousness as integral to understanding the black experience. Later philosophers question the importance of double consciousness to current race discussions, but this paper contends that double consciousness provides valuable insights into black and white relations. To do this, I will utilize the modern slang term, “Oreo,” (...) to highlight how a perceived incompatibility between blacks and whites could prevent America from achieving a greater unity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 11.3 (2001) 219-220 [Access article in PDF] Introduction In the last couple of decades,commodification has become almost a buzz-word in bioethics. As we become technically more adept at detaching elements of human bodies and making use of them for others, it seems as if more and more things-from motherhood to gametes to kidneys to our very DNA-can be borrowed, rented, bought, and sold. Other (...) technology allows us unprecedented influence over the characteristics of our offspring (unprecedented, that is, if we ignore the many cultures in which children were and are routinely discarded because they are the wrong sex, disabled, or the product of multiple births). It is common, for example, for writers to worry that the availability of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis will seduce parents into thinking of their children as commodities, to be ordered in much the same way as automobiles, with the inevitable concomitant that they will want to "return" children who do not measure up to their specifications.Unfortunately, a great deal of the talk about "commodification" has been clumsy and sloppy. The term has been used as a magic bullet, as if saying "But that's commodification!" is the same as having made an argument. In fact, commodification of human persons, human bodies, human labor, human relationships, is a complex matter. In many human dealings, commodified and noncommodified understandings of the same thing, or the same transaction, exist more or less comfortably together. Most Westerners condemn commercial sex, for example, while at the same time knowing that in most times and places in the world, marriage was and is thought of as primarily an economic relationship. The common use of "cheap" in post-World War II American slang to describe a teenage woman who is more sexually available than her peers perfectly captures the market rhetoric inherent in respectable American sexual mores.Given this complexity, it is not surprising that many writers in bioethics have gravitated to the work of Margaret Jane Radin. In her two books, Contested Commodities (Harvard University Press, 1996) and Reinterpreting Property (University of Chicago Press, 1993), and many articles, [End Page 219] Radin has taken on the problem of commodification without falling into either sentimentality or cynicism. She is a careful thinker and a careful (and demanding!) writer. We have long valued her work as we have sought to grapple with the many ways in which the problem of commodification arises in bioethics. In this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, entitled "Who's Afraid of Commodification?," we have asked three colleagues to join us in reflecting on aspects of the problem of commodification in bioethics. We are especially delighted that Radin agreed to respond to our efforts in this direction.Lisa Sowle Cahill takes the discussion of commodification to a new level, as she focuses on global ethics, especially genetic research and the marketing and accessibility of pharmaceuticals. Dena S. Davis explores the debates over refusal of treatment and rational suicide and concludes that to put a value on particular pieces of one's lifespan does not necessarily lead to negative aspects of commodification. Ronald M. Green analyzes Radin's use of Kant. Suzanne Holland addresses commodification of body parts, from gametes to cadaveric tissue, and concludes with some specific recommendations. Thomas A. Shannon takes a fresh look at the problem of whether we should allow the sale of organs; he shares with Holland a special concern for the rhetoric of commodification. Finally, Margaret Jane Radin responds to the preceding essays, asking four "stubbornly difficult" questions, questions that show that the debate about commodification is only just begun. Dena S. Davis and Suzanne Holland... (shrink)

In 1996 Jacques Derrida gave a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on the occasion of Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper, one of the first major international exhibitions to present the avant-garde dramatist and poet's paintings and drawings. Derrida's original title, "Artaud the Moma," is a characteristic play on words. It alludes to Artaud's calling himself Mômo, Marseilles slang for "fool," upon his return to Paris in 1946 after nine years in various asylums, while playing (...) off of the museum's nickname, MoMA. But the title was not deemed "presentable or decent," in Derrida's words, by the very institution that chose to exhibit Artaud's work. Instead, the lecture was advertised as "Jacques Derrida... will present a lecture about Artaud's drawings." For Derrida, what was at stake was what it meant for the museum to exhibit Artaud's drawings and for him to lecture on Artaud in that institutional context. Thinking over the performative force of Artaud's work and the relation between writing and drawing, Derrida addresses the multiplicity of Artaud's identities to confront the modernist museum's valorizing of originality. He channels Artaud's specter, speech, and struggle against representation to attempt to hold the museum accountable for trying to confine Artaud within its categories. Artaud the Moma, as lecture and text, reveals the challenge that Artaud posed to Derrida—and to art and its institutional history. A powerful interjection into the museum halls, this work is a crucial moment in Derrida's thought and an insightful, unsparing reading of a challenging writer and artist. (shrink)

Vida Guerra is a Cuban model from northern New Jersey. She made her name in hiphop videos and in "gentlemen's magazines" but quickly became in intermediate supermodel, with her own calendars, making-of-the-calendar DVDs, official website, fan websites, television show, and controversy over a "leaked" nude photo. . . . Vida's popularity has caused one writer to suggest "You may now move over J-Lo, and make way for Vida;" in short, tiene culo, to borrow the Spanish slang that adorns one (...) of her virally distributed Internet images. . . .this information about Guerra's body explains her popularity by raising additional questions. If the shape of her body makes her popular, what makes that shape popular? Specifically, what accounts for the shift in body fashions that raises the stock of female cults--"rumps with bumps"--at the expense of "stick figures"? And what further shift requires J-Lo to "make way for Vida"? These are questions specifically about the conditions that make Vida Guerra a public figure and that constitute her body as beautiful. (shrink)

Introduction: Another Diction The hack. The salesman. The fired cop. The drifter. The betrayed criminal. Each of these constitutes a novel literary invention; each gives a new sense to the investigative character. They are not modifications of the classical model, stamped with the rational imprimatur of Sherlock Holmes, C. Auguste Dupin, or Joseph Rouletabille – there is no line of filiation from these to Vachss’s Burke, Pelecanos’s Nick Stefanos, or Himes’s Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Even Lacan’s powerful (...) psychoanalytic reading of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” reveals Dupin to be a genius only in a game whose dialectical structure is given in advance. Although the subjects that come to occupy this structure only acquire determination through the assumption of their places, the dynamic form of the dialectic is itself “foreclosed” by the phallus whose circulation organizes the system. Dupin understands the circulation of the signifier only because this circulation is the figure of the law. Rejecting the phallocentric rationality of the mastermind, the new figurations of Vachss, Pelecanos, Himes, and others retain only in order to parody the grand orchestration of reason – their language is slang not deduction. They are not detectives but “dicks”: a name that incorporates within its reduction an empirical transformation of the transcendental. In fact, it is a transformation of the very sense of inquiry that requires this new type of conceptual personae in order to traverse its contours. The philosophical project of Gilles Deleuze – which he characterizes as a “transcendental empiricism” – is directed toward freeing thought from its determination by the philosophical traditions that constitute its history. Such a freeing would allow for a philosophical conceptualization of present events that are no longer able to be adequately conceptualized by that history. The distinctive character of Deleuze’s project comes from his insistence on the discontinuity between the tradition of thought and the new formulations that it is called upon to generate. For Deleuze, the philosopher is the one who asks about the generation of new concepts and thereby places herself in a double bind. On the one hand, the philosopher is historically conditioned, thrown into a tradition whose tools present a limited number of possible conceptual resolutions of a particular event. On the other hand, this conditional determination of philosophical thought is repeated, perpetually, so that the philosopher is always a parody of herself: solving the question of the determination of a present event by resolving the question of the determinability of the present by the past. This situation of parody is the limit of thinking; it is where thinking develops according to the vicissitudes of history. (shrink)

This article deals with totalitarianism and its language, conceived as both the denial and to some extent the reversal of liberalism and its conceptual framework. Overcoming liberal language meant not only setting up new political terminology, but also replacing words with symbols, ideas with sensations. This is why the standard political lexicon of totalitarianism became hardly more than a slang vocabulary for domestic consumption and, by contrast, under those regimes—mainly Italian fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism—a amboyant universe of images, sounds, (...) and metaphors arose. Many of these images revolved around the human body as a powerful means to represent a charismatic leadership and, at the same time, an organic conception of their national communities. Totalitarian language seems to be a propitious way to explore the “dark side” of conceptual history, constituted by symbols rather than words. (shrink)

Lars Porsena Or the Future of Swearing Robert Graves Originally published in 1927 "Not for squeamish readers." Spectator "A deliciously ironical affair." Bystander "Humour and style are beyond criticism." Irish Statesman As relevant now as when it was first published, this volume and its ironic look at the political correctness of society has become a classic of the Today & Tomorrow series. 90pp Breaking Priscian’s Head Or English As She Will Be Spoke and Wrote J Y T Greig Originally published (...) in 1928 "The most vehement attack we have ever read." Morning Post "A rollicking book" Spectator This volume discusses the nature of language, grammar, the influence of America, of slang dialect and many other subjects. 90p **************** Delphos The Future of International Language E Sylvia Pankhurst Originally published in 1927 In this volume, Sylvia Pankhurst argues that an international language would be one of the greatest assets to modern civilization. She surveys past attempts from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries and predicts the arrival of the inter-language, its form, its social and cultural utility and its influence for world peace. 90pp Pomona or the Future of English Basil de Sélincourt Originally published in 1926 "Equal to anything yet produced in this brilliant series." Spectator An analysis of the present condition of the English language and the paths along which it is progressing. 88pp. (shrink)

Adopting Fairclough's multidimensional approach, this corpus-based study explores discursive changes in current Taiwanese society, with a particular focus on conversationalization in printed media. Data were collected from three major newspapers catering to different readerships during three time periods. The analyzed linguistic features include noun phrases, Chinese four-character set expressions, mixing of local dialect, and slang. My analysis shows that over the past two decades there has been an increase of conversational features in all three newspapers. In addition, a cross-sectional (...) comparison has revealed that soft news texts include more conversational features than hard news texts. It is also found that the newspaper which stresses local values and advocates an independent Taiwan identity tends to adopt more conversational features, particularly the mixing of Taiwanese in Mandarin news texts. Finally, I suggest that this trend of conversationalization in the Taiwanese press can be linked to substantive democratization and marketization of the Taiwanese society as well as the change and development of modern written Chinese. (shrink)