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Showing posts from March, 2026

Curb appeal: manicuring your home and language

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Imagine you’re walking or driving down a street where every house looks like a Beverly Hills MacMansion. The lawns are thick & green, with flowerbeds that are perfectly trimmed, and the front doors are painted in high-gloss colors. In real estate, this is called Curb Appeal. It’s the art of making the exterior look so flawless that you don't even think to check if the pipes are leaking or the basement is flooding. This effect is based of your own intuition and expections, no one would assume of Beverly Hills mansion extoiroir would look like a crack house in the interior. But this effect isn’t only limited to real estate, but it has very real world carryovers into language, specifically with informal speech as we have seen in class with ‘words don't mean what they mean. If you were asked, which of the 2 homes do you think would contains a nicer family?      If you’re like majority of people, you picked the bottom photo. But why? Mathematically, it’s the same square fo...

A dive into the socio-linguistics of naming

 for those unfamiliar with the term, Think of socio-linguistics as the study of how "who you are" and "where you are" changes "how you talk." essentially, it is the intersection of sociology (the study of groups and power) and linguistics (the study of language). In a more broader and anthropological sense, language separates us into ‘tribes’ of different social groups, As seen in ‘the F word’ with Dumas highlights the generational gap with how her parents kept their names, but she felt the need to change hers.  Research from the UCLA found that immigrant parents are significantly more likely to give daughters "native-sounding" or English names than sons, to shield them from the extra judgment that many women face in school and hiring with more ‘exotic’ names.       As stated by Christina Sue and Edward Telles in their sociology research paper: ‘Assimilation and Gender in Naming’, they state that "for immigrants and their descendants, first ...

The yorts of Michigan

A people group inhabits the cold, unyielding forest of concrete and cement, in a valley between two decrepit stone paths by the name of  14th Mile  and the  Southern Boulevard . Inside this perimeter, an undisclosed tribe of the  Yort-Hgh —a tribe of  Sleep-Deprived Alchemists —dedicates life to one purpose: to maintain their  Four-Point Oracle  in order to break free from the bounds of the forest. These Alchemists wake up against their own will at the dawn of the day, where they dress and present themselves in a manner to uphold their social hierarchy status. Once the process is complete, the younger Alchemists are jailed in the bounds of a  yellow enclosure  and shipped off, again against their own will. The older Alchemists, who come from nurturers of more abundant lucre, are able to ship themselves in their own capsules. They arrive at sunrise in a zombified state to  The Great Concrete Incubation-Chamber , where they must rush throu...