full transcript
From the Ted Talk by John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!
Unscramble the Blue Letters
The saslh is ienrtntseig. I don't really even know what Jake is talking about after that, but you notice that he's changing the topic. Now that seems kind of mundane, but think about how in real life, if we're having a cseirtoovann and we want to change the topic, there are ways of doing it gracefully. You don't just zip right into it. You'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance, or you'll say something like, "Hmm, makes you think —" when it really didn't, but what you're really — (Laughter) — what you're really trying to do is cghane the topic. You can't do that while you're texting, and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium. All seokpn languages have what a linuigst calls a new information marker — or two, or three. Texting has developed one from this slash.
Open Cloze
The _____ is ___________. I don't really even know what Jake is talking about after that, but you notice that he's changing the topic. Now that seems kind of mundane, but think about how in real life, if we're having a ____________ and we want to change the topic, there are ways of doing it gracefully. You don't just zip right into it. You'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance, or you'll say something like, "Hmm, makes you think —" when it really didn't, but what you're really — (Laughter) — what you're really trying to do is ______ the topic. You can't do that while you're texting, and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium. All ______ languages have what a ________ calls a new information marker — or two, or three. Texting has developed one from this slash.
Solution
- interesting
- spoken
- slash
- conversation
- change
- linguist
Original Text
The slash is interesting. I don't really even know what Jake is talking about after that, but you notice that he's changing the topic. Now that seems kind of mundane, but think about how in real life, if we're having a conversation and we want to change the topic, there are ways of doing it gracefully. You don't just zip right into it. You'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance, or you'll say something like, "Hmm, makes you think —" when it really didn't, but what you're really — (Laughter) — what you're really trying to do is change the topic. You can't do that while you're texting, and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium. All spoken languages have what a linguist calls a new information marker — or two, or three. Texting has developed one from this slash.
Frequently Occurring Word Combinations
ngrams of length 2
collocation |
frequency |
young people |
5 |
emergent complexity |
2 |
casual speech |
2 |
fingered speech |
2 |
message board |
2 |
Important Words
- calls
- change
- changing
- conversation
- developed
- developing
- distance
- gracefully
- information
- interesting
- jake
- kind
- languages
- laughter
- life
- linguist
- marker
- medium
- mundane
- notice
- pat
- real
- slash
- spoken
- talking
- texting
- thighs
- topic
- ways
- wistfully
- zip