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Slang

Slang

Slang is the non-standard use of words in a language of a particular social group, and sometimes the creation of new words or importation of words from another language. It is a type of neologism. Slang can be described as deviating away from standard language use. Slang functions in two ways; the creation of new language and new usage by a process of creative informal use and adaptation, and the creation of a secret language understood only by those within a group intended to understand it. As such, slang is a type of sociolect aimed at excluding certain people from the conversation. Slang initially functions as encryption, so that the non-initiate cannot understand the conversation, or as a further way to communicate with those who understand it. Slang functions as a way to recognize members of the same group, and to differentiate that group from the society at large. Slang terms are often particular to a certain subculture, such as musicians, skateboarders, and drug users. Slang generally implies playful, informal speech. Slang is distinguished from jargon, the technical vocabulary of a particular profession, as jargon is (in theory) not used to exclude non-group members from the conversation, but rather deals with technical peculiarities of a given field which require a specialized vocabulary.

Functions and origins of slang

One use of slang is a simple way of circumventing social taboos. The mainstream language tends to shy away from explicitly evoking certain realities. Slang, and also the informal forms of language, permit one to talk about these realities in a special language stripped of the usual connotations in the normal register. Slang vocabularies are particularly rich in certain domains, such as sexuality, violence, crime, and drugs. There is not just one slang, but very many varieties—or dialects—of slang. Different social groups in different times have developed their own slang. The importance of encryption and identity vary among the various slangs. Slang must constantly renew its process of expression, and specifically its vocabulary, so that those not part of the group will remain unable to understand the slang. The existence of slang dictionaries, of course, cancels the effectiveness of certain words. Numerous slang terms pass into informal mainstream speech, and thence sometimes into mainstream formal speech. Originally, certain slang designated the speech of people involved in the criminal underworld, hooligans, bandits, criminals, etc. Therefore, their vocabulary carried very vulgar connotations, and was strictly rejected by speakers of "proper" language. Other groups developed their own slangs. In general, groups on the margins of mainstream society who were excluded or rejected by it.

Examples of slang

Historical examples of slang are the thieves' cant used by beggars and the underworld generally in previous centuries: a number of canting dictionaries were published. A famous current example is Cockney rhyming slang in which, in the simplest case, a given word or phrase is replaced by another word or phrase that rhymes with it. Often the rhyming replacement is abbreviated further, making the expressions even more obscure. A new rhyme may then be introduced for the abbreviation and the process continues. Examples of rhyming slang are apples and pears for stairs and trouble (and strife) for wife. An example of truncation and replacement of rhyming slang is bottle and glass for arse (ass). This was reduced to bottle, for which the new rhyme Aristotle was found; Aristotle was then reduced to Aris for which plaster of Paris became the rhyme. This was then reduced to plaster. Backwards slang, or Back slang, is a form of slang where words are reversed. English backward slang tends to reverse words letter by letter while French backward slang tends to reverse words by syllables. Verlan is a French slang, that uses backward words, similar in its methods to the back slang. Louchebem is French butcher's slang, similar to Pig Latin. The usage of slang very often involves the creation of novel meanings for existing words. It is very common for such novel meanings to diverge significantly from the standard meaning. In fact, one common process is for a slang word to take on exactly the opposite meaning of the standard definiton. This process has given rise to the positive meaning of the word 'bad' such as in the Michael Jackson song of the same title. Nadsat is a form of slang used in the book A Clockwork Orange, which borrows words from Russian and from various types of English slang. Polari is an interesting mixture of Italian and Cockney back slang (in other words common words pronounced as if spelled backward, for example ecaf for face, which became eek in Polari). Polari was used in London fish markets and the gay subculture in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, becoming more widely known from its use by two camp characters, Julian and Sandy, in Round the Horne, a popular radio show.

External links

- [http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/ British slang]
- [http://www.noslang.com Internet Slang translator and website validator]
- [http://www.talkingcock.com/html/lexec.php?op=LexView&lexicon=lexicon Singaporean slang]
- [http://www.bio.nrc.ca/cockney/process.html Cockney rhyming slang]
- [http://www.shartwell.freeserve.co.uk/humor-site/rhymingslang.htm Disability rhyming slang]
- [http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/dict/ A canting dictionary] - illustrates the tendency for English to adopt and make respectable words that were originally coined by the criminal classes .
- [http://members.aol.com/frij/ More on Polari]
- [http://www.urbandictionary.com/ American slang]
- [http://www.fiftiesweb.com/fashion/slang.htm American slang from the 1950s]
- [http://www.irishslang.net/ Irish slang]
- [http://slangi.net Finnish slang]
- [http://slang.pl Dictionary of Polish slang] Category:Sociolinguistics Category:Figures of speech ja:俗語 simple:Slang

Language

A language is a system of symbols, generally known as lexemes and the rules by which they are manipulated. The word language is also used to refer to the whole phenomenon of language, i.e., the common properties of languages. Though language is commonly used for communication, it is not synonymous with it. Human language is a natural phenomenon, and language learning is instinctive in childhood. In their natural form, human languages use patterns of sound or gesture for the symbols in order to communicate with others through the senses. Though there are thousands of human languages, they all share a number of properties from which there are no known deviations. Humans have also invented (or arguably in some cases discovered) many other languages, including constructed human languages such as Esperanto or Klingon, programming languages such as Python or Ruby, and various mathematical formalisms. These languages are not restricted to the properties shared by natural human languages.

Properties of language

Languages are not just sets of symbols. They also contain a grammar, or system of rules, used to manipulate the symbols. While a set of symbols may be used for expression or communication, it is primitive and relatively unexpressive, because there are no clear or regular relationships between the symbols. Because a language also has a grammar, it can manipulate its symbols to express clear and regular relationships between them. For example, imagine going on a walk with a person who only knew individual symbols, or words. If you saw a dog, he might say, "Dog scare" or "Scare Dog". Although any English speaker would have some notion of what he was talking about, the relationship between the words is unclear. Is he scared of dogs? Or just that dog? Or does he want to scare the dog off? Does he think the dog is scared? But if you respond, "I’m not scared of dogs," the relationship between dog and scare is quite apparent and hence the meaning of the utterance. Another important property of language is the arbitrariness of the symbols. Any symbol can be mapped onto any concept (or even onto one of the rules of the grammar). For instance, there is nothing about the Spanish word nada itself that forces Spanish speakers to use it to mean nothing. That is the meaning all Spanish speakers have memorized for that sound pattern. But for Croatian speakers nada means hope. However, it must be understood that just because in principle the symbols are arbitrary does not mean that a language cannot have symbols that are iconic of what they stand for. Words such as meow sound similar to what they represent, but they could be replaced with words such as jarn, and as long as everyone memorized the new word, the same concepts could be expressed with it.

Human languages

Human languages are usually referred to as natural languages, and the science studying them is linguistics. Making a principled distinction between one language and another is usually impossible. For example, the boundaries between named language groups are in effect arbitrary due to blending between populations (the dialect continuum). For instance, there are dialects of German very similar to Dutch which are not mutually intelligible with other dialects of (what Germans call) German. Some like to make parallels with biology, where it is not always possible to make a well-defined distinction between one species and the next. In either case, the ultimate difficulty may stem from the interactions between languages and populations. (See Dialect or August Schleicher for a longer discussion.) The concepts of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache, and Dachsprache are used to make finer distinctions about the degrees of difference between languages or dialects.

Origins of human language

Scientists do not yet agree on when language was first used by humans (or their ancestors). Estimates range from about two million (2,000,000) years ago, during the time of Homo habilis, to as recently as forty thousand (40,000) years ago, during the time of Cro-Magnon man. The nature of speech means that there is almost no data on which to base conclusions on the subject.

Language taxonomy

The classification of natural languages can be performed on the basis of different underlying principles (different closeness notions, respecting different properties and relations between languages); important directions of present classifications are:
- paying attention to the historical evolution of languages results in a genetic classification of languages—which is based on genetic relatedness of languages,
- paying attention to the internal structure of languages (grammar) results in a typological classification of languages—which is based on similarity of one or more components of the language’s grammar across languages,
- and respecting geographical closeness and contacts between language-speaking communities results in areal groupings of languages. The different classifications do not match each other and are not expected to, but the correlation between them is an important point for many linguistic research works. (There is a parallel to the classification of species in biological phylogenetics here: consider monophyletic vs. polyphyletic groups of species.) The task of genetic classification belongs to the field of historical-comparative linguistics, of typological—to linguistic typology. See also: Taxonomy, Taxonomic classification—for the general idea of classification and taxonomies.

Genetic classification

The world’s languages have been grouped into families of languages that are believed to have common ancestors. Some of the major families are the Indo-European languages, the Afro-Asiatic languages, the Austronesian languages, and the Sino-Tibetan languages. The shared features of languages from one family can be due to shared ancestry. (Compare with homology in biology.)

Typological classification

An example of a typological classification is the classification of languages on the basis of the basic order of the verb, the subject and the object in a sentence into several types: SVO, SOV, VSO, and so on, languages. (, for instance, belongs to the SVO language type.) The shared features of languages of one type (= from one typological class) may have arisen completely independently. (Compare with analogy in biology.) Their cooccurence might be due to the universal laws governing the structure of natural languages—language universals.

Areal classification

The following language groupings can serve as some linguistically significant examples of areal linguistic units, or sprachbunds: Balkan linguistic union, or the bigger group of European languages; Caucasian languages. Although the members of each group are not closely genetically related, there is a reason for them to share similar features, namely: their speakers have been in contact for a long time within a common community and the languages converged in the course of the history. These are called areal features. NB. One should be careful about the underlying classification principle for groups of languages which have apparently a geographical name: besides areal linguistic units, the taxa of the genetic classification (language families) are often given names which themselves or parts of which refer to geographical areas.
Constructed languages
One prominent artificial language, called Esperanto, was created by L. L. Zamenhof. It is a compilation of various elements of different languages, and it is intended to be an easy-to-learn language. Another prominent artificial language, called Ido, is intended to be reformed Esperanto. Other constructed languages strive to be more logical than natural languages; a prominent example of this is Lojban. Other writers, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, have created fantasy languages, for literary, artistic, or personal reasons. One of Tolkien’s languages is called Quenya, which is a form of Elvish. It has its own alphabet, and its phonology and syntax are modelled on Finnish. Linguist Mark Okrand has devised Klingon and Vulcan for Star Trek, which have since been developed into full languages.
The study of language
The oldest surviving written grammar for any language is believed to be the Tolkāppiyam (தொல்காப்பியம்), a book on the grammar of the Tamil language, written around 200 BCE by Tolkāppiyar. Its classification of the alphabet into consonants and vowel was a breakthrough. The historical record of the study of language begins in North India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BCE grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, known as the (अष्टाध्यायी). grammar is highly systematized and technical. Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme, and the root; the phoneme was only recognized by Western linguists some two millennia later. In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760 CE in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi an-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics from phonology. Later in the West, the success of science, mathematics, and other formal systems in the 20th century led many to attempt a formalization of the study of language as a "semantic code". This resulted in the academic discipline of linguistics, the founding of which is attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure.
Animal (nonhuman) language
While the term animal languages is widely used, most researchers agree that they are not as complex or expressive as human language; a more accurate term is animal communication. Some researchers argue that there are significant differences separating human language from the communication of other animals, and that the underlying principles are not related. In several widely publicised instances, animals have been trained to mimic certain features of human language. For example, chimpanzees and gorillas have been taught hand signs based on American Sign Language; however, they have never been taught its grammar. There was also a case in 2003 of Kanzi, a captive bonobo chimpanzee allegedly independently creating some words to mean certain concepts. While animal communication has debated levels of semantics, it has not been shown to have syntax in the sense that human languages do. Some researchers argue that a continuum exists among the communication methods of all social animals, pointing to the fundamental requirements of group behaviour and the existence of "mirror cells" in primates. This, however, may not be a scientific question, but is perhaps more one of definition. What exactly is the definition of the word "language"? Most researchers agree that, although human and more primitive languages have analogous features, they are not homologous.
Formal languages
Mathematics and computer science use artificial entities called formal languages (including programming languages and markup languages, but also some that are far more theoretical in nature). These often take the form of character strings, produced by some combination of formal grammar and semantics of arbitrary complexity.
See also

- Common phrases in different languages
- Computer-assisted language learning (a historical perspective)
- Deception
- Ethnologue, which provides a fairly complete list of languages, locations, population and genetic affiliation
- Extinct language
- FOXP2 (Language gene)
- ILR scale (defines five levels of language proficiency)
- ISO 639 (2- and 3-letter codes for language names)
- Language education
- Language reform
- Language policy
- Language school
- Linguistic protectionism
- Linguistics basic topics
- List of language academies
- List of languages
- List of official languages
- Naming
- Non-verbal communication
- Non-sexist language
- Official language
- Orthography
- Philology and Historical linguistics
- Philosophy of language
- Profanity
- Psycholinguistics
- Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
- Slang
- Symbolic communication
- Speech therapy
- Terminology
- Tongue-twister
- Translation
- Whistled language
References

- Crystal, David (1997). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
- Crystal, David (2001). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
- Katzner, K. (1999). The Languages of the World. New York, Routledge.
- McArthur, T. (1996). The Concise Companion to the English Language. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
- Kandel, Jessel, and Schwartz (1991). Principles of Neural Science. McGraw Hill (esp. p. 1173).
External links

- [http://www.zompist.com/ Mark Rosenfelder’s Metaverse] provides a useful listing of 5000 languages and dialects (grouped by their relationships), where the numbers one to ten in each language may be found
- [http://www.geocities.com/agihard/mohl/mohl_languages.html Museum of Languages]
- The [http://www.ethnologue.com/ Ethnologue], a catalog of the world’s languages
- [http://www.language-capitals.com Language Capitals] Guide to 8 major languages of the world with facts, characteristics and varieties
- [http://www.vistawide.com/languages/ World Languages and Cultures] — Practical information and resources on languages and language learning
- [http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/animals/animals.html Animal sounds in different languages]
- [http://www.netz-tipp.de/languages.html Distribution of languages on the Internet]
- [http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/ Speech accent archive]
- [http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/G_Kunkel/homepage.htm a collection of bird songs] provides many kinds of bird songs
- [http://acp.eugraph.com The Animal Communication Project]
- [http://reference.allrefer.com/encyclopedia/categories/lang.html Language Articles]
- [http://www.primitivism.com/language.htm Language: Origin and Meaning by John Zerzan] Category:Technology als:Sprache zh-min-nan:Gí-giân ko:언어 ms:Bahasa nb:Språk ja:言語 simple:Language th:ภาษา

Word

A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together. Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create phrases, clauses and sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together is called a compound. compound]]

Difficulty in defining the term

The precise definition of what a word is depends on which language the definition is for, and the dividing line between words and phrases is not always clear. In most writing systems, a word is usually marked out in the text by interword separation such as spaces or word dividers used in some languages such as Amharic. In other languages such as Chinese and Japanese, and in many ancient languages such as Sanskrit, word boundaries are not shown. Even in writing systems that use interword separation, word boundaries are not always clear; for example, even though ice cream is written like two words, it is a single compound because it cannot be separated by another morpheme or rephrased like iced cream or cream of ice. Likewise, a proper noun is a word, however long it is. A space may not be even the main morpheme boundary in a word; the word New Yorker is a compound of New York and -er, not of New and Yorker. In English, many common words have historically progressed from being written as two separate words (e.g. to day) to hyphenated (to-day) to a single word (today), a process which is still ongoing, as in the common spelling of all right as alright.

Words in different classes of languages

In synthetic languages, a single word stem (for example, love) may have a number of different forms (for example, loves, loving, and loved). However, these are not usually considered to be different words, but different forms of the same word. In these languages, words may be considered to be constructed from a number of morphemes (such as love and -s). In polysynthetic languages, the number of morphemes per word can become so large that the word performs the same grammatical role as a phrase or clause in less synthetic languages (for example, in Yupik, angyaghllangyugtuq means "he wants to acquire a big boat"). These large-construction words are still single words, because they contain only one content word; the other morphemes are grammatical bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone. Matters seem easier for analytic languages. For these languages, a word usually consists of only a root morpheme, which is often single-syllable. However, it is common even in those languages to combine roots into a compound stem.

Complexity of word boundaries in speech

In spoken language, the distinction of individual words is even more complex: short words are often run together, and long words are often broken up. Spoken French has some of the features of a polysynthetic language: je ne le sais pas ("I do not know it") tends towards //. As the majority of the world's languages are not written, the scientific determination of word boundaries becomes important.

Determining word boundaries

There are five ways to determine where the word boundaries of spoken language should be placed: ;Potential pause :A speaker is told to repeat a given sentence slowly, allowing for pauses. The speaker will tend to insert pauses at the word boundaries. However, this method is not foolproof: the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic words. ;Indivisibility :A speaker is told to say a sentence out loud, and then is told to say the sentence again with extra words added to it. Thus, I have lived in this village for ten years might become I and my family have lived in this little village for about ten or so years. These extra words will tend to be added in the word boundaries of the original sentence. However, some languages have infixes, which are put inside a word. Similarly, some have separable affixes; in the German sentence "Ich komme gut zu Hause an," the verb ankommen is separated. ;Minimal free forms :This concept was proposed by Leonard Bloomfield. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves. This correlates phonemes (units of sound) to lexemes (units of meaning). However, some written words are not minimal free forms, as they make no sense by themselves (for example, the and of). ;Phonetic boundaries :Some languages have particular rules of pronunciation that make it easy to spot where a word boundary should be. For example, in a language that regularly stresses the last syllable of a word (like Hebrew), a word boundary is likely to fall after each stressed syllable. Another example can be seen in a language that has vowel harmony (like Turkish): the vowels within a given word share the same quality, so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. However, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occasional exceptions. ;Semantic units :Much like the abovementioned minimal free forms, this method breaks down a sentence into its smallest semantic units. However, language often contains words that have little semantic value (and often play a more grammatical role), or semantic units that are compound words. In practice, linguists apply a mixture of all these methods to determine the word boundaries of any given sentence. Even with the careful application of these methods, the exact definition of a word is often still elusive.

External links

- [http://www.sussex.ac.uk/linguistics/documents/essay_-_what_is_a_word.pdf What Is a Word?] (PDF)
- [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=word Urban Dictionary: word], used as a slang Category:Linguistic morphology Category:Syntax ja:語 simple:Word

Neologism

A neologism is word, term, or phrase which has been recently created ("coined") —often to apply to new concepts, or to reshape older terms in newer language form. Neologisms are especially useful in identifying inventions, new phenomena, or old ideas which have taken on a new cultural context. Neologisms are by definition "new," and as such are often directly attributable to a specific individual, publication, period or event. The term "neologism" was itself coined around 1800; so for some time in the early 19th Century, the word "neologism" was itself a neologism. It can also refer to an existing word or phrase which has been assigned a new meaning.

Changing culture

Neologisms tend to occur more often in cultures which are rapidly changing, and also in situations where there is easy and fast propagation of information. They are often created by combining existing words (see compound noun and adjective) or by giving words new and unique suffixes or prefixes. Those which are portmanteaux are shortened. Neologisms can also be created through abbreviation or acronym, by intentionally rhyming with existing words, or simply through playing with sounds. Neologisms often become popular by way of mass media, the Internet, or word of mouth (see also Wiktionary's Neologisms:unstable or Protologism pages for a wiki venue of popularizing newly coined words). Every word in a language was, at some time, a neologism, though most of these ceased to be such through time and acceptance. Neologisms often become accepted parts of the language. Other times, however, they disappear from common usage. Whether or not a neologism continues as part of the language depends on many factors, probably the most important of which is acceptance by the public. Acceptance by linguistic experts and incorporation into dictionaries also plays a part, as does whether the phenomenon described by a neologism remains current, thus continuing to need a descriptor. It is unusual, however, for a word to enter common use if it does not resemble another word or words in an identifiable way. (In some cases however, strange new words succeed because the idea behind them is especially memorable or exciting). When a word or phrase is no longer "new," it is no longer a neologism. Neologisms may take decades to become "old," though. Opinions differ on exactly how old a word must be to no longer be considered a neologism; cultural acceptance probably plays a more important role than time in this regard.

Cultural acceptance

After being coined, neologisms invariably undergo scrutiny by the public and by linguists to determine their suitability to the language. Many are accepted very quickly; others attract opposition. Language experts sometimes object to a neologism on the grounds that a suitable term for the thing described already exists in the language. Non-experts who dislike the neologism sometimes also use this argument, deriding the neologism as "abuse and ignorance of the language." Some neologisms, especially those dealing with sensitive subjects, are often objected to on the grounds that they obscure the issue being discussed, and that such a word's novelty often leads a discussion away from the root issue and onto a sidetrack about the meaning of the neologism itself. Proponents of a neologism see it as being useful, and also helping the language to grow and change; often they perceive these words as being a fun and creative way to play with a language. Also, the semantic precision of most neologisms, along with what is usually a straightforward syntax, often makes them easier to grasp by people who are not native speakers of the language. The outcome of these debates, when they occur, has a great deal of influence on whether a neologism eventually becomes an accepted part of the language. Linguists may sometimes delay acceptance, for instance by refusing to include the neologism in dictionaries; this can sometimes cause a neologism to die out over time. Nevertheless if the public continues to use the term, it always eventually sheds its status as a neologism and enters the language even over the objections of language experts.

Versions of neologisms

- Unstable - Extremely new, being proposed, or being used only by a very small subculture.
- Diffused - Having reached a significant audience, but not yet having gained acceptance.
- Stable - Having gained recognizable and probably lasting acceptance.

Types of neologism

- Scientific — words or phrases created to describe new scientific discoveries or inventions. Examples:
- beetle bank (early 1990s)
- black hole (1968)
- laser (1960)
- prion
- quark (1964)
- radar (1941)
- posterized
- Science fiction concepts created to describe new, futuristic ideas. Examples:
- Ringworld (1971)
- Dyson Sphere (circa 1960)
- Political — words or phrases created to make some kind of political or rhetorical point, sometimes perhaps with an eye to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Example:
- dog-whistle politics (1990)
- soccer moms (1992)
- pro-life
- pro-choice
- meritocracy (1958)
- political correctness (1970)
- sie and hir (pronouns)
- homophobia (1969)
- genocide
- Chindia (2004)
- Some political neologisms, however, are intended to convey a negative point of view. Example: brutalitarian
- Pop-culture — words or phrases evolved from mass media content or used to describe popular culture phenomena (these may be considered a subsection of slang). Examples:
- blog
- carb
- prequel
- jumping the shark
- Chuck Cunningham syndrome
- Keyshawning
- Baldwin (a good-looking man, such as one of the Baldwin family of actors)
- Scooby Gang (a group which humorously resembles the teens on the cartoon Scooby-Doo)
- From "D'Oh" to "Scotchtoberfest" - many neologisms from The Simpsons are now used in real life. For a long list see Made-up words in The Simpsons
- Imported — words or phrases originating in another language. Typically they are used to express ideas that have no equivalent term in the native language. (See loanword.) Examples:
- tycoon
- potato (1565)
- zen (1727)
- ao dai (1960s)
- Vietcong (1960s)
- Tet (1968)
- anime (1988)
- détente (1960s)
- manga
- Trademarks are often neologisms to ensure they are distinguished from other brands. If legal trademark protection is lost, the neologism may enter the language as a genericized trademark. Example: Laundromat, Hoover
- Nonce words — words coined and used only for a particular occasion, usually for a special literary effect.
- Inverted — words that are derived from spelling (and pronouncing) a standard word backwards. Example: redrum
- Paleologism - a word that is alleged to be a neologism but turns out to be a long-used (if obscure) word. Used ironically.
Neologisms in literature
Many neologisms have come from popular literature, and tend to appear in different forms. Most commonly, they are simply taken from a word used in the narrative of a book; for instance, McJob from Douglas Coupland's Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture and cyberspace from William Gibson's Neuromancer. Sometimes the title of the book will become the neologism. For instance, Catch-22 (from the title of Joseph Heller's novel) and Generation X (from the title of Coupland's novel) have become part of the vocabulary of many English-speakers. Also worthy of note is the case in which the author's name becomes the neologism, although the term is sometimes based on only one work of that author. This includes such words as Orwellian (from George Orwell, referring to his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four) and Ballardesque (from J.G. Ballard, author of Crash). Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle was the container of the Bokononism family of Nonce words. Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky" has been called "the king of neologistic poems" as it incorporated some dozens of invented words. The early modern English prose writings of Sir Thomas Browne 1605-1682 are the source of many neologisms as recorded by the OED.
Quotation
: "Yesterday's neologisms, like yesterday's jargon, are often today's essential vocabulary."
: – Academic Instincts, 2001^{[http://www.wordspy.com/waw/garber-marjorie.asp]}
See also

- buzzword
- doublespeak
- euphemism
- jargon
- newspeak
- Langmaker
- portmanteau
- propaganda
- protologism
- retronym
- onomatopoeia
- siamese twins (English language)
External links, resources, references

English

- Fowler, H.W., "The King's English," Chapter I. Vocabulary, [http://www.bartleby.com/116/103.html Neologism], 2nd ed. 1908.
Information

- Root knowledge : [http://folk.uio.no/iroggen/Root_knowledge.html The need for neologisms]
- Neologism [http://www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/history.html History & Evaluation]
- International Dictionary of Literary Terms : [http://www.ditl.info/art/definition.php?term=3101 Neologisms]
Wiktionary

- Wiktionary: Neologisms
- Wiktionary: Neologisms unstable
- Wiktionary: Neologisms diffused
- Wiktionary: Neologisms stable
Indices

- [http://www.neologisms.us The Internalational Dictionary of Neologisms]
- [http://rdues.uce.ac.uk/neologisms.shtml Neologisms in Journalistic Text]
- [http://involution.org/neologisms.html Lexicon of Neologism]
- [http://web.bham.ac.uk/johnstf/neo.htm Internet Neologisms]
- [http://www.oneletterwords.com Neologisms in the Dictionaries of All-Consonant and All-Vowel Words]
- [http://www.wordspy.com/ wordspy.com]
- [http://www.langmaker.com/db/eng_a2z_index.htm Neologisms A-Z]
- [http://www.unwords.com/ unwords.com]
- [http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words04/neologisms/a.html Collected by Rice Universtiy linguistics class, 2003]
- [http://www.figarospeech.com It Figures-Figures of Speech] ----
Miscellaneous
In psychology, a neologism is a word invented by a person suffering from a language disorder, which may occur in the context of psychosis (see thought disorder) or aphasia acquired after brain damage ; clinicians can sometimes use these neologisms, which often have meaning only to the subject, as clues to determine the nature of the disorder. In theology, a neologism is a relatively new doctrine (for example, rationalism). In this sense, a neologist is an innovator in the area of a doctrine or belief system, and is often considered heretical or subversive by the mainstream church. Category:Types of words Category:Word coinage

Sociolect

In linguistics, a sociolect is the language spoken by a social group, social class or subculture. In this regard it differs from the idiolect, which is the form of a language peculiar to an individual. Sociolect is also distinct from dialect, which is a form of speech peculiar to a certain area. However, dialects often have a particular social status, so that a given variant may be considered simultaneously a dialect and a sociolect. For example, Parisian French is a dialect in that it is peculiar to the city of Paris, but it is a sociolect in that it is the national prestige language, and is used throughout the country by people of high social status.

Encryption

:This article is about algorithms for encryption and decryption. For an overview of cryptographic technology in general, see cryptography. For the movie, see Encrypt (movie)" In cryptography, encryption is the process of obscuring information to make it unreadable without special knowledge. While encryption has been used to protect communications for centuries, only organizations and individuals with an extraordinary need for secrecy have made use of it. In the mid-1970s, strong encryption emerged from the sole preserve of secretive government agencies into the public domain, and is now employed in protecting widely-used systems, such as Internet e-commerce, mobile telephone networks and bank automatic teller machines. Encryption can be used to ensure secrecy, but other techniques are still needed to make communications secure, particularly to verify the integrity and authenticity of a message; for example, a message authentication code (MAC) or digital signatures. Another consideration is protection against traffic analysis.
Ciphers
A cipher is an algorithm for performing encryption (and the reverse, decryption) — a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative term is encipherment. The original information is known as plaintext, and the encrypted form as ciphertext. The ciphertext message contains all the information of the plaintext message, but is not in a format readable by a human or computer without the proper mechanism to decrypt it; it should resemble random gibberish to those not intended to read it. The operation of a cipher usually depends on a piece of auxiliary information, called a key or, in traditional NSA parlance, a cryptovariable. The encrypting procedure is varied depending on the key, which changes the detailed operation of the algorithm. A key must be selected before using a cipher to encrypt a message. Without the same key, it should be difficult, if not impossible, to decrypt the resulting ciphertext into readable plaintext. "Cipher" is alternatively spelled "cypher"; similarly "ciphertext" and "cyphertext", and so forth. The word descends from the Arabic word for zero: ifr or صِفْر, like (the Italian) zero (which remained in use for 0, the crucial innovation in positional Arabic versus Roman numerals) but soon was used for any decimal digit, even any number. While it may have come to mean encoding because that often involved numbers, a theory says conservative Catholic opponents of the Arabic (heathen) numerals equated it with any 'dark secret'.
Ciphers versus codes
: Main article: Code (cryptography) In non-technical usage, a "(secret) code" is the same thing as a cipher. Within technical discussions, however, they are distinguished into two concepts. Codes work at the level of meaning — that is, words or phrases are converted into something else. Ciphers, on the other hand, work at a lower level: the level of individual letters, small groups of letters, or, in modern schemes, individual bits. Some systems used both codes and ciphers in one system, using superencipherment to increase the security. Historically, cryptography was split into a dichotomy of codes and ciphers, and coding had its own terminology, analogous to that for ciphers: "encoding, codetext, decoding" and so on. However, codes have a variety of drawbacks, including susceptibility to cryptanalysis and the difficulty of managing a cumbersome codebook. Because of this, codes have fallen into disuse in modern cryptography, and ciphers are the dominant technique.
Types of cipher
There are a variety of different types of encryption. Algorithms used earlier in the history of cryptography are substantially different from modern methods, and modern ciphers can be classified according to how they operate and whether they use one or two keys. history of cryptography Historical pen and paper ciphers used in the past are sometimes known as classical ciphers. They include substitution ciphers and transposition ciphers. During the early 20th century, more sophisticated machines for encryption were used, rotor machines, which were more complex than previous schemes. Encryption methods can be divided into symmetric key algorithms and asymmetric key algorithms. In a symmetric key algorithm (e.g., DES and AES), the sender and receiver must have a shared key set up in advance and kept secret from all other parties; the sender uses this key for encryption, and the receiver uses the same key for decryption. In an asymmetric key algorithm (e.g., RSA), there are two separate keys: a public key is published and enables any sender to perform encryption, while a private key is kept secret by the receiver and enables him to perform decryption. Symmetric key ciphers can be distinguished into two types, depending on whether they work on blocks of symbols usually of a fixed size (block ciphers), or on a continuous stream of symbols (stream ciphers).
See also

- Famous ciphertexts
- ID-based cryptography
- Caesar cipher
- Public-key cryptography
- Private-key cryptography
External links

- [http://www.hermetic.ch/crypto/intro.htm An Introduction to the Use of Encryption]
- [http://www.securitydocs.com/Encryption SecurityDocs] Resource for Encryption Whitepapers
- [http://www.mycrypto.net/encryption/crypto_algorithms.html Encryption Algorithms]
- [http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/security/fwencrypt.html Freeware Encryption Software]
- [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/RSAEncryption.html RSA Encryption]
- [http://www.nabble.com/Encryption-f942.html Encryption Forum]
- [http://www.securestandard.com/Cryptology SecureStandard] Directory of Encryption Whitepapers
- [http://www.elfqrin.com/codecracker.html Code Cracker] Cracks many classic encryption codes (up to the 20th century) Category:Computer security Category:Cryptography ja:暗号 th:การเข้ารหัส

Subculture

:For the term in biology, please see Subculture (biology). As understood in sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a set of people with a distinct set of behavior and beliefs that differentiate them from a larger culture of which they are a part. The subculture may be distinctive because of the age of its members, or by their race, ethnicity, class and/or gender, and the qualities that determine a subculture as distinct may be aesthetic, religious, political, sexual or a combination of these factors. Subcultures are often defined via their opposition to the values of the larger culture to which they belong, although this definition is not universally agreed on by theorists. According to key theorists of subculture such as Dick Hebdige, members of a subculture will often signal their membership through a distinctive and symbolic use of style. Therefore, the study of subculture often consists of the study of the symbolism attached to clothing, music and other visible affectations by members of the subculture, and also the ways in which these same symbols are interpreted by members of the dominant culture. If the subculture is characterized by a systematic opposition to the dominant culture, then it may be described as a counterculture. More simply, subcultures are groups of individuals who, through a variety of methods (conspicuously clothing and behavior), present themselves in opposition to the mainstream trends of their culture. Their specifics vary immensely, and in fact many would find it appropriate to include groups as diverse as ravers, Nazi-Skinheads, BDSM fetishists, and fundamentalist Christians under the category 'subculture'. It may also be difficult to identify subcultures because their style (particularly clothing and music) may often be adopted by mass culture for commercial purposes, as businesses will often seek to capitalise on the subversive allure of the subculture in search of cool, which remains valuable in selling any product. This process of cultural appropriation may often result in the death or evolution of the subculture, as its members adopt new styles which are alien to the mainstream. A common example is the punk subculture of the United Kingdom, whose distinctive (and initially shocking) style of clothing was swiftly adopted by mass-market fashion companies once the subculture became a media interest. In this sense, many subcultures can be seen to be constantly evolving, as their members attempt to remain one step ahead of the dominant culture. In turn, this process provides a constant stream of styles which may be commercially adopted.

Subcultures resisting commercialisation

Many people would consider that the most visible examples of subcultures are youth groups which identify themselves through distinctive styles of dress, activity and music. However, there is a certain difficulty in supplying examples, in that the process by which subcultural style is incorporated by the dominant culture provokes a state of constant evolution in many subcultures. Musical subcultures are particularly vulnerable to this process, and so what may be considered a subculture at one stage in its history (jazz, punk, hip-hop, rave culture) may represent mainstream taste within a short period of time. However, many subcultures also reject or modify the importance of style, stressing membership through the adoption of an ideology which may be much more resistant to commercial exploitation. Indeed, the resistance to commercial exploitation may often represent a key part of this ideology. Perhaps the best example would be the punk subculture, which has progressed through several cycles of revival and commercial appropriation in its history. Members of the punk subculture can often be identified by their distinctive clothing, hair, jewellery and tattoos. In contrast to its commercialised variant, many punks consider that the subculture also possesses a distinctive punk ideology which rejects commercialism and conformity. A similar philosophy may be found in underground hip hop, which has also faced mass-market commercialisation and dilution of its ideals.

References

- Hebdige, Dick (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Routledge, March 10, 1981; softcover ISBN 0415039495).
- Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music, p.155. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0335152759.
- Negus, Keith (1996). Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0819563102.
- Riesman, David (1950). "Listening to popular music", American Quarterly, 2, p.359-71.
- Roe, K. (1990). "Adolescents' Music Use", Popular Music Research. Sweden: Nordicom.
- Thornton, Sarah (1995). Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Skateboard

A skateboard is a narrow wheeled platform (usually made of plywood), used for recreation and transportation. It was developed in the twentieth century by surfers, who first made them using rollerskates. They are typically part of western youth culture. The skateboard has evolved a lot since the 50s, not only in shape but also materials used. Boards in the past were often in the shape of a surfboard, with little concave and had 1 ply of wood. The wheels were rather large compared to most of todays sizes and were usually made of clay. The trucks (axles) were also larger in size and less sturdy. Another difference is that the boards of the past had a very small nose, todays boards have almost identical noses and tails (the nose is usually a bit steeper however).

Composition

The Deck - Skateboards are composed of several parts. The deck forms the body of the skateboard and provides a place to stand. It is covered with grip tape, which adds friction to its surface. Decks were originally a single piece of wood but are now usually made from seven plies of Canadian Hard Rock Maple glued together. The plies of maple are cross-laminated, meaning the direction of the wood grain alternates between plies. This is what gives the deck its strength. Sometimes other composite materials, such as fiberglass and Kevlar, are incorporated into deck construction, usually to lighten the board or increase its strength or rigidity. The deck is normally 7 1/2 to 8 inches wide. Wider decks are better suited to vert skaters who need more control and stability while riding down the steep slopes and riding the transitions and walls of a quarter or halfpipe. Narrower decks are suited to street skaters who like to perform more technical tricks; a wide board often makes it awkward to pull off such maneuvers. Skateboard decks are usually between 28 and 32.5 inches long. The longboard, a common variant of the skateboard, has a longer deck. longboard The Trucks - Attached to the deck are two metal (usually aluminum) trucks, which connect to the wheels. The trucks are further composed of two parts. The top part of the truck is screwed to the deck and is called the baseplate, and beneath it is the hanger. Between the baseplate and the hanger are bushings, also rubbers or grommets, that provide the spring mechanism for turning the skateboard. The bushings cushion the truck when it turns. The stiffer the bushings, the more stable the skateboard. The softer the bushings, the easier it is to turn. A bolt called a kingpin holds these parts together. The Wheels - The wheels attach to each hanger. The wheels, usually made of polyurethane and come in nine different sizes and suit different types of skating. Larger sizes like 65-80mm roll faster which makes riding vert ramps easier. Smaller sizes like 52-55mm keep the board closer to the ground and are lighter which makes tricks easier to perform. For general cruising most users prefer larger, softer wheels. Bearings - Inside each wheel are seven precision ball bearings, secured by a plastic "crown". Bearings are graded according to the ABEC scale, which goes from 1-9, in odd numbers. It was designed with machines in mind, not skateboards, so the ABEC rating rates the precision of the bearing. This means that as the rating goes up, the bearing usually gets weaker but smoother - since skateboarding puts a lot of pressure on the bearings anyway, they won't last long. It's better to use ABEC 5 bearings, because they are durable and smooth enough. Even though ABEC 9s are smoother than ABEC 5s you won't notice the difference, unless you are going incredibly fast. Today, there have been many scientific advances in the bearing technology, including a different speed-rating scale. It is somewhat rare to find a bearing scaled by ABEC, due to its lack of accuracy for the speed of the bearings. Currently, companies have switched to scales such as ceramic, titanium, and even marble; named after the materials in which produce the speed and prevent the right amount of friction. Risers - There are special products available to help raise the board away from the trucks and the ground. Risers are placed in between the underside of the deck and the truck. This rises the deck from the ground slightly, helping to avoid "wheel-bite", where the deck makes contact with the wheel, often on a hard turn, causing the board to stop suddenly and a hole to be burned in the deck. Another reason riders install risers is that they evenly distribute impact force from the trucks to the deck, meaning less chance of the deck cracking under pressure. More risers will equal a higher board which also increases the "pop" a rider gets when pushing down on the tail to perform an ollie, requiring less effort to get a higher ollie.

"Obsolete" components

Rails - Rails are narrow plastic strips that were fastened under the deck along the edges. They used to be popular among vert skaters to whom they provided additional grip during aerial tricks. They also provide a more slippery surface and protect the deck from scratches during board slides. Most skateboarders no longer use rails, since the boards have become lighter and thus holding a grab during aerial tricks has become easier. Copers - Copers are plastic covers fastened under the truck's hanger which provide a more slippery surface when grinding. They were invented during a time when street skating was in it's infancy but were not very popular since they wore out very quickly and had to be replaced often. Lappers - Lappers are plastic covers fastened on the inside of the truck that covered the kingpin and the baseplate. Their purpose is to prevent the skateboard from being stopped when the truck hits an obstacle (for example when rolling up a curb). It's also called a "Bird" since it's shape resembles the shape your hand makes when giving someone the bird. Nose guard - Nose guards are plastic "bumpers" fastened to the nose of a skateboard. It's purpose is to protect the nose of the deck from being damaged when the skateboard hits an obstacle. Tail bone - Tail bone is a piece of plastic fastened under the tail of a skateboard. It's purpose is to protect the tail of the deck from wear. Because a tail bone makes the execution of an ollie more difficult and because the skateboard decks today don't last as long as in the 1980's a tail bone is today a very rare accessory.

Use

Skateboards are used for skateboarding and skateboarding tricks. A person who rides a skateboard is a skateboarder or a skater. Skateboarders may wear protective clothing, including but not limited to helmets, gloves, knee and elbow pads or wrist braces especially when riding in skateparks (where it may be required by skatepark rules). A substantial amount (in fact, virtually all) of street riders scorn all safety equipment, citing better mobility and supposed lack of need.
- [http://www.churf.com/ Canadian skateboard resource]
- [http://skateboarddirectory.com/ The Skateboard Directory]
- [http://www.skimthefat.com/ SkimTheFat] Category:Skateboarding Category:Sporting goods Category:Human powered vehicles ja:スケートボード

Psychoactive drug

A psychoactive drug or psychotropic substance is a chemical that alters brain function, resulting in temporary changes in perception, mood, consciousness, or behaviour. Such drugs are often used for recreational and spiritual purposes, as well as in medicine, especially for treating neurological and psychological illnesses. Many of these substances (especially the stimulants and depressants) can be habit forming, and lead to abuse. Conversely, others (namely the psychedelics) can help to treat and even cure such addictions. addiction

Psychoactive drug chart

The following Venn diagram attempts to organize the most common psychoactive drugs into intersecting groups and subgroups based upon pharmacological classification and method of action. Items within each subgroup are proximitied close to those of most similar action, and also follow a general placement in accordance with the legend below the diagram. Primary intersections are represented via color mixing. (Note: this is a work in progress. Please discuss errors, changes and suggestions on the talk page).

Image:BlankDrugChart.png

STIMULANTS

Sympathomimetic Amines

Psychomotor Stimulants

Aminoketones

Methylxanthines

Atypical antipsychotics

Quetiapine

Olanzapine

Typical antipsychotics

SSRIs

Cholinergics

Sedative Hypnotics

Benzodiazepines

Narcotic Analgesics

Psychedelics

MDMA MDA

Dissociatives

Ibotenic acid Muscimol

Deliriants

Legend

- Blue: Stimulants generally increase in potency to the upper left.
- Red: Depressants generally increase in potency to the lower right.
- Green: "Hallucinogens" are psychedelic to the left, dissociative to the right, generally less predictable down and to the right, and generally more potent towards the bottom.
- Pink hue: The so called "antipsychotics". A new and controversial addition to the chart.

Sub-sections

- White: Overlap of all three main sections (Stimulants, Depressants and Hallucinogens) — Example: cannabis exhibits effects of all three sections.
- Magenta (purple): Overlap of Stimulants (Blue) and Depressants (Red) — Example: nicotine exhibits effects of both.
- Cyan (light blue): Overlap of Stimulants (Blue) and Psychedelics (Green) — Primary psychedelics exhibit a stimulant effect
- Yellow : Overlap of Depressants (Red) and Dissociatives (Green) — Primary dissociatives exhibit a depressant effect

A brief history of drug use

Drug use is not a new phenomenon by any means. There is archaeological evidence of the use of psychoactive substances dating back at least 10,000 years, and historical evidence of cultural use over the past 5,000 years. While medicinal use plays a very large role, it has been suggested that the urge to alter one's consciousness is as primary as the drive to satiate thirst, hunger or sexual desire. Some may point a finger to marketing, availability or the pressures of modern life as to why we are such a pill-popping, coffee-swilling, beer-guzzling society, but one only has to look back at history, or even to children with their desire for spinning, swinging, sliding amongst other activities to see that the drive to alter one's state of mind is universal. This relationship is not limited to humans. A surprising number of animals consume different psychoactive plants and animals, berries and even fermented fruit, clearly becoming intoxicated. Traditional legends of sacred plants often contain references to animals that introduced man to their use. Biology suggests an evolutionary connection between psychoactive plants and animals, as to why these chemicals and their receptors exist within the nervous system.

Other psychoactive drugs

- Aphrodisiacs
- PT-141
- In a broader sense also:
- Antiemetics
- Analgesics
- Antiepileptics

Ways psychoactive drugs affect the brain

There are many ways in which psychoactive drugs can affect the brain. While some drugs affect neurons presynaptically, others act postsynaptically and some drugs don't even attack the synapse, working on neural axons instead. Here is a general breakdown of the ways psychoactive drugs can work. # Prevent The Action Potential From Starting #
- Lidocaine, TTX (they bind to voltage-gated sodium channels, so no action potential begins even when a generator potential passes threshold) # Neurotransmitter Synthesis #
- Increase - L-Dopa, tryptophan, choline (precursors) #
- Decrease - PCPA (inhibits synthesis of 5HT) #
- Causes increased sensitivity to the five senses, due to an increasing number of signals being sent to the brain. # Neurotransmitter Packaging #
- Increase - MAO Inhibitors #
- Decreasing - Resperine (pokes holes in the synaptic vesicles of catecholamines) # Neurotransmitter Release #
- Increase - Black Widow Spider (Ach) #
- Decrease - Botulinum Toxin (Ach), Tetanus (GABA) # Agonists - Mimic the original NTs and activate the receptors #
- Muscuraine, Nicotine (Ach) #
- AMDA, NMDA (Glu) #
- Alcohol, Benzodiazepines (GABA) # Antagonists - Bind to the receptor sites and block activation #
- Atropine, Curare (Ach) #
- PCP (Glu) # Prevent Ach Breakdown - #
- Insecticides, Nerve Gas # Prevent Reuptake #
- Cocaine (DA), Amphetamines (E) #
- Tricyclics, SSRIs - based on information taught in NSC 201, Vanderbilt University

Jargon

:For the glossary of hacker slang, see Jargon File. Jargon is a type of terminology which is used in conjunction with a specific activity, e.g. medical jargon, legal jargon, and other proffessions as well as specific fields. The social purposes of jargon are threefold: communication, inclusion and exclusion. The first goal of any jargon is to facilitate communicating information, often by the invention of shorthand terms or the use of technical terms that may be obscure to most people but useful to people who use them on a daily basis. However, while jargon may be born in and mainly refer to a specific activity or profession, activities which have jargon often also are to a certain extent a subculture and thus a jargon can also be a type of slang. Therefore, it serves as a means of inclusion and exclusion : someone who speaks a group's jargon is identified as a fellow member, while someone who does not understand the same jargon is marked as an outsider. Jargon is used for instance in sports, where technical sportsman terms but also sport-related metaphors for other events in life are used by sports fans for the aforementioned purposes. For obvious reasons, jargon is used a lot in technical professions; see Technical terminology. The rise of information technology and the Internet created many overlapping jargons used by nerds, geeks and hackers to communicate, the very proper usage of these words being a major prerequisite for inclusion in these groups. See Jargon file. Often, beginning writers and speakers in uncertain social roles make the mistake of using specialized jargon inappropriately. When the jargon is used incorrectly, this is often known as a Malapropism. The term comes from the name of a character in a play--The Rivals--by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. However, Mrs. Malaprop did not restrict herself to misusing technical or scientific words. Another error may be the description of any complex word as "jargon", where the speaker or writer's idea or feeling is the target. The clearest statement of this type of error is found in The Jargon of Authenticity by Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno, where the author identifies a certain type of "authentic" language, said to be free of complex jargon, as itself a jargoning and used against certain types of feelings associated with "high" culture in favor of a "people's" culture. Adorno himself was accused by Bertolt Brecht and Frankfurt students of inauthenticity in that Adorno used words from high culture to describe his own attitudes, and for this reason, The Jargon of Authenticity was a bit of a
- cri de coeur
- despite its lofty tone, somewhat in the manner of Dr.Zhivago's father in Pasternak's novel, who, upon being thrown out of his
- dacha
- , cries "I'm one of the people too!". To describe an idea as jargon accomplishes in Bourdieu's terms several tasks. It maintain's the speaker's "distinction" and social role as critic and judge, while at time excusing the speaker from listening or reading with attention, and it also expresses a safe, egalitarian attitude. Indeed, these meta-attitudes and this more sophisticated use of the concept of jargon is today possibly more frequent than guild-like insider jargon. As it happens, today's professional organizations have legal structures of access which enable their members to override differences in "jargon" in such a manner that doctors, and to an extent lawyers, can understand each other across national and cultural boundaries. In technical efforts across those borders, terms of art and jargon are readily resolved as part of daily life in informative conversation. In daily affairs, one indication that the use of "jargon" as an accusation of intellectual insider trading may be in some bad faith is the fact that people feel, when subject to a barrage of terms of art in literary criticism, where the author makes an effort to define each such term of art, that the author is still guilty of using jargon. The late Jacques Derrida, and his adepts, were accused of inappropriately using a specialized jargon despite the fact that much of their work is a prolix attempt to define "deconstruction" and other such terms of art while doing justice to the necessity of self-application, and not standing outside the phenomenon of the text, in more bad faith. The accepted feeling, as reflected in journalistic accounts which in turn reflect settled educated opinion about these matters (an opinion not without its problems), is that the matters of which the author, such as the literary critic, speak, can be spoken of without terms of art or "jargon". The problem then becomes the repetition of definitions which in replacing catch-phrases only expand the text, leading to further weariness with mere prolixity, which itself is misidentified often as jargon. Indeed, there are contexts, especially electronic mail, where the use of deliberate and not-so-deliberate errors in style, grammar and spelling is so fashionable that mere grammatical writing and spelling can itself be the target of an accusation of "jargon". The jargon of authenticity, and the readiness to accuse the writer or speaker of jargoning, is far more common than first-order jargon today, as is the fear of guild formation and the fear of nonmonetary "insider trading" when members of a profession or para-profession collaborate, and generally, today, economic demands for results prevent this from occuring. Instead, a looser and demotic "terminology" takes hold in contexts where the midlevel fear of giving offense to powerful but aliterate outsiders (such as CEOs and politicians) overrides anything like professional solidarity or precision in speech. The jargon of "jargoning" itself evolved from a pleasant association about the time of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who referred in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to the "sweet" jargoning of birds to today's usage, which is "unpleasant sounds I don't understand". This is a shift in attitude about language and mystery in which the listener and the reader demands clarity at all costs and today is unimpressed by fancy words. Coleridge was writing about unmapped regions of the globe, and unexplored regions of experience, but today, an all-pervading sense of surveillance, both directed at the common reader, and also under his power as on the Internet, makes us, perhaps, feel that any mysteries are being deliberately manufactured by "jargon".

External link

- [http://www.LanguageMonitor.com LanguageMonitor] - Watchdog on contemporary English usage See also Jargon compliance, lingo, pidgin, Wiktionary: Jargon, slang and for examples:
- Jargon code
- Chinook jargon
- Corporate jargon
- Mathematical jargon
- Computer jargon
- Poker jargon
- List of lumberjack jargon
- List of baseball jargon Category:Language varieties and styles ja:隠語 simple:Jargon

Taboo

:For other uses of taboo, see Taboo (disambiguation). A taboo is a strong social prohibition (or ban) relating to any area of human activity or social custom declared as sacred and forbidden; breaking of the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society. The term was borrowed from the Tongan language and appears in many Polynesian cultures. In those cultures, a tabu (or tapu or kapu) often has specific religious associations. Its first use in English was recorded by James Cook in 1777. When an activity or custom is classified as taboo it is forbidden and interdictions are implemented concerning the topic, such as the ground set apart as a sanctuary for criminals. Some taboo activities or customs are prohibited under law and transgressions may lead to severe penalties. Other taboos result in embarrassment, shame, and rudeness. Taboos can include dietary restrictions (halal and kosher diets, religious vegetarianism, and the prohibition of cannibalism), restrictions on sexual activities and relationships (intermarriage, miscegenation, homosexuality, incest, zoophilia, pedophilia, necrophilia), restrictions of bodily functions (burping, flatulence), restrictions on the use of psychoactive drugs, restrictions on state of genitalia (circumcision, sex reassignment), exposure of body parts (ankles in the Victorian British Empire, women's faces in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, nudity in the US), and restrictions on the use of offensive language. No taboo is known to be universal, but some (such as the incest taboo) occur in the majority of societies. Taboos may serve many functions, and often remain in effect after the original reason behind them has expired. Some have argued that taboos therefore reveal the history of societies when other records are lacking. Taboos often extend to cover discussion of taboo topics. This can result in taboo deformation (euphemism) or replacement of taboo words. Marvin Harris, a leading figure in cultural materialism, endeavoured to explain taboos as a consequence of the ecologic and economic conditions of their societies. Also, Sigmund Freud provided an analysis of taboo behaviours, highlighting strong unconscious motivations driving such prohibitions. In this system, described in his collections of essays Totem and Taboo, Freud postulates a link between forbidden behaviours and the sanctification of objects to certain kinship groups.

Taboo and art

Many contemporary artists deal with taboo images and ideas including:
- Matthew Barney
- Maurizio Cattalan
- Damien Hirst
- Joel-Peter Witkin
- Bill Viola and
- Pedro Almodóvar
- Luis Buñuel
- Derek Jarman
- Tom Green

External links

- [http://www.avert.org/aidsstigma.htm Stigma, discrimination and attitudes to HIV]
- [http://samvak.tripod.com/taboo.html Review of taboos around the world and their history] Category:Sociology Category:Freudian psychology ja:タブー

Violence

Violence refers to acts —typically connotative with aggressive and criminal behaviour —which intend to cause or is causing of injury to persons, animals, or (in limited cases) property. Harm to non-human animals may be considered violence, though this depends on the social mores related to animal cruelty, and the situational context in which such acts take place. The concept of violence can also be extended to any abuse, usually depending on severity. Damage to property is typically considered minor relative to violence against persons. Violence falls into essentially two forms —random violence, which includes unpremeditated or small-scale violence, and coordinated violence, which includes actions carried out by sanctioned or unsanctioned violent groups —as in warfare (ie. inter-societal violence) and terrorism. Since the Industrial Revolution, the lethality of modern warfare has steadily grown to levels considered universally dangerous. As a practical matter, warfare on a massive scale is considered to be a direct threat to the prosperity and survival of individuals, cultures, societies, and the world's living populations. In specific regard to warfare, journalism, because of its increasing capability, has served to make matters of violence which were once in the domain of the military into moral matters within the domain of the society at large. Transculturation, due to modern technology, has served to diminish the moral relativism typically associated with nationalism, and in this general context a international "