Subject
5 entries
Language
Bookmarks
Words We Don't Have
A site exploring words from other languages that don't have English equivalents — concepts like saudade, schadenfreude, or hygge that reveal how different cultures carve up emotional and social experience. Language as a lens into cultural cognition.
The Human Animal Ep. 1 — Language in the Body
Episode 1 of The Human Animal (1994), Desmond Morris's BBC series applying zoological observation to human behavior. The language episode examines gesture, facial expression, and body language as evolved communication systems — treating humans as the animals we are.
Burgled vs. Burglarized: Which Is More Correct?
English Stack Exchange answer on 'burgled' vs 'burglarized' — mapping the geographic distribution and tracking when the American form diverged from the British. Saved from a tweet noting something changed in usage in the 1960s.
The Crayola-fication of the World: How We Gave Colors Names (Part II)
Part II of an Empirical Zeal series on how naming colors changes how we perceive them — connecting Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity to neuroimaging studies showing that named colors are processed differently across brain hemispheres. One of the best accessible treatments of how language shapes perceptual categories.
CoffeeScript
CoffeeScript homepage bookmarked at its 2012 peak — a language that compiles to JavaScript, borrowing syntax from Ruby and Python. Preceded Babel and TypeScript in proving that transpilation was a viable path to better JS.