Metamorphemis

People often grow irritated by an excessive use of emojis and emoticons, wishing for fewer smiley faces and more meaningful words to convey emotion, yet emojis have been around for millennia. With ancient hieroglyphs dating back to around 3300 BC , the use of symbols as a language is not a new concept - however, many of the potential sentiments capable of portrayal are modernized and even meta. Emojis get a lot of flak for their seemingly immature usage. It's not uncommon to find an excessive usage of emojis in Facebook posts and tweets by teenagers. Some even use emojis as intensifiers , hoping to accentuate their "lol"s and "haha"s with laughing and crying emojis. While it can be annoying to see "100" written repeatedly (typically used to indicate truth or sincerity), the nature of the emoji is intriguing. It serves as a symbol used to convey a message in place of text, yet it is also used alongside text. Studying symbols through iconography ,

Yesterday I was playing video games with my friend, Tyler, when we lost a match by a landslide. Although we were discouraged and frustrated, one of the players from the other team sent me a message. gg, wp Four simple letters made the difference between me turning off my Xbox and readying up for another round. For the non-gamers out there, gg  stands for "good game," while wp  means "well-played"*. It might not mean much to the person who said it, but getting a pat on the back after being absolutely dominated makes a difference. I decided I want to study the use of language between players in video games, because it had such a profound effect on me and my team, so I experimented with messaging my opponents after each round. Sending positive messages such as "you did really well" or "that was a close game" resulted (for the most part) in positive replies and more amiable gameplay. On the flip side, belittling my opponents after bea

So I was listening to my teacher drone on and on about economics, and I was literally about to die of boredom. My mom told me I wasn't allowed to go to Warped Tour and I honestly couldn't believe she would do that to me. Last Saturday I tried to buy beer at the grocery store and the lady was being totally rude about it. It's hard to figure out when exactly these words changed meaning, or rather when they accumulated additional meanings - but that is the beauty of metamorphemis. These three adverbs are examples of the somewhat modern phenomenon of words becoming "intensified," aptly labelling them as  "intensifiers." In a 2015 study regarding the nature of intensifiers , Kendra Calhoun surveyed popular media outlets to find out why these words have shifted/added meaning. As all linguistic conundrums draw from the age old argument, the issue of prescriptivism vs. descriptivism manifested, creating a perfect background for discussion. According

Thanks to social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, everyone is given a platform to have their voices heard. While useful for celebrities to interact directly with the public, and helpful for news outlets trying to spread information as fast as possible, social media creates a very unique experience for the singular, average user. As I said before, social media lets people have their voices heard, but when everyone  is speaking at the same time, nobody stands out. Some interesting things result from this issue, and some odd behavior can be seen: for example, in order to stay fresh and relevant, many users advertise their various media fronts underneath each post. Wasn't that CRAZY?? XD XD Like and favorite! Follow me on #insta and @twitter, hit the snap. Branding yourself has become a regular occurrence, because if any person wants to one day hit social media stardom, e.g. the vine legends and massive Facebook pages, you need a catchphrase, a following

The other day I was lost in Target, looking for some candy to buy my girlfriend, when I stumbled upon a very interesting sign. .25 Bananas by the each Some of you may never have heard of this new unit of measurement, "each"; more likely accustomed to quantifying fruit based on weight or assortment, such as "peaches by the pound" or "apples by the bushel." Well, what do you call bananas if not "each"? Bananas are commercially sold together in what are often referred to as bunches , stalks , and stems , but the thread doesn't seem to stop there. According to Bananasaver.com , a cluster of bananas is quantified as a hand , and each individual banana is therefore a finger . Even in that description, though, the term cluster is used too. So why the usage of "the each"? For one thing, the word each  denotes no determinative characteristics - it could refer to hands or it could refer to fingers of bananas. It's possible that t

Oftentimes we find ourselves flustered online, heatedly typing out counter-arguments to smash that random Facebook aggressor into pieces. Why do they think they know more about foreign affairs and logistics regarding gun control than I do? How could I possibly be outsmarted by someone with a car for a profile picture? It's within this firefight that people slip up, their grip on the argument loosening, and mistakes are made - typically, the grammatical errors and misspellings. In a fury of passion, simple mistakes are often overlooked, but to the keen defendant, every slip is ammo in the arsenal. So that random kid from Ohio calls you out, commenting back "*your." What do you do? Clearly he understood what you were trying to say, and he only critiqued your grammar because he didn't know how else to respond...or maybe there's something else here. Is grammar really that important? This all-too-familiar anecdote is an example of the battle of the prescriptivist