Clipmarks | Nouns Clips

Shakespeare would have had a blog

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:24:30 GMT

clipped by: akonkka

Clip Source: www.moreintelligentlife.com

In any case, Shakespeare would have loved the internet. (This is something Mark Rylance cleverly suggested in last year's play "The Big Secret Live ‘I Am Shakespeare' Webcam Daytime Chat-Room Show", an ambitious comedy that resurrects the bard using the electric human power of the web.) Our beloved neologising court jester of coinage, Shakespeare invented some 2,000 new and compound words and a host of now-familiar phrases. He was particularly partial to turning nouns into verbs--to cudgel, to champion, to gossip--just as we like to twitter, to spam or to blog (he would surely have gorged himself on Google like a kid in a sweetshop). He created numerous compounds from existing words (farmhouse, bloodsucking); we do the same (homepage, podcasting). The man who first used the falconry term ‘hoodwinked' to describe human trickery might even have enjoyed being rick-rolled.

Pic-lits

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:15:25 GMT

clipped by: teacherina
clipper's remarks: Artistic way of creating sentences for artistic photos. Cool activity for ESL.

Clip Source: piclits.com

Home Explore the Gallery My PicLits Learn It About Manage Site

CREATE DRAG-N-DROP or FREESTYLE

NOUNS

ADJECTIVES

ADVERBS

VERBS

UNIVERSAL

Today's word of the day: Hendiadys

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:52:07 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: A "hendiadys" (fr. Gk. "one through two") is a literary figure in which a pair of concepts in a subordinate relationship are presented as conjoined. Examples: "nice and warm" instead of "nicely warm"; "sound and fury" instead of "furious sound"; "pain and toil" intead of "painful toil"; and so forth. First spotted in Robert Alter's footnote to Genesis 5.29.

Clip Source: en.wikipedia.org

Hendiadys

Hendiadys (a Latinized form of the Greek phrase ἓν διὰ δυοῖν hen dia duoin 'one through two') is a figure of speech used for emphasis — "The substitution of a conjunction for a subordination". The basic idea is to use two words linked by a conjunction to express a single complex idea.

The typical result is to transform a noun-plus-adjective into two nouns joined by a conjunction.

For example, "sound and fury" (from Act V, Scene V of Macbeth) seems to offer a more striking image than "furious sound". In this example, as typically, the subordinate idea originally present in the adjective is transformed into a noun in and of itself.

"The kingdom and the power and the glory" (from the Lord's Prayer) extends the principle, transforming the idea of a "glorious, powerful kingdom" into a sequence of three nouns joined by conjunctions.

Tags: language, literature, words, bible, cie100

WordNet

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:08:19 GMT

clipped by: akipta

Clip Source: wordnet.princeton.edu

WordNet® is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser. WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing.

Tags: lexicon database vocabulary search-engine

Wiki on Capitalisation

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:12:00 GMT

clipped by: judect
clipper's remarks: English Grammar.

Clip Source: en.wikipedia.org

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Capitalization

1 What to capitalize

1.1 Pronouns
1.2 Places and geographic terms
1.3 Nouns
1.4 Adjectives
1.5 Others

2 How to capitalize

2.1 Headings and publication titles
2.2 Compound names
2.3 Accents
2.4 Digraphs and ligatures
2.5 Initial mutation

Scientists create brain scan reader

Sat, 31 May 2008 06:59:31 GMT

clipped by: A53GG4

Clip Source: www.upi.com

Scientists create brain scan reader

Published: May 30, 2008 at 11:48 PM

U.S. researchers said they're working on a computer model that could eventually read brain scans to identify what someone is thinking.

Carnegie Mellon University said a computer model developed by computer scientist Tom M. Mitchell and cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just is able to predict brain activation patterns associated with names for things that you can see, hear, feel, taste or smell. The computational model was constructed by using functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) activation patterns for 60 concrete nouns.

Tags: science

Researchers can predict which noun a person is visualizing.

Fri, 30 May 2008 17:12:39 GMT

clipped by: shunyax
clipper's remarks: Models such as this one could also be useful in diagnosing disorders of language or helping students pick up a foreign language. In semantic dementia, for example, people lose the ability to remember the meanings of things - shown a picture of a chihuahua, they can only recall 'dog', for example - but little is known about what exactly goes wrong in the brain. “We could look at what the neural encoding is for this,” says Mitchell.

Clip Source: www.nature.com

A computer model has been developed that can predict what word you are thinking of. The model may help to resolve questions about how the brain processes words and language, and might even lead to techniques for decoding people’s thoughts.

Researchers led by Tom Mitchell of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 'trained' a computer model to recognize the patterns of brain activity associated with 60 images, each of which represented a different noun, such as 'celery' or 'aeroplane'.

The team started with the assumption that the brain processes words in terms of how they relate to movement and sensory information. Words such as 'hammer', for example, are known to cause movement-related areas of the brain to light up; on the other hand, the word 'castle' triggers activity in regions that process spatial information.

The researchers designed the model to try and use these semantic links to work out how the brain would react to particular nouns.

Tags: neuroscience, language

Appositives - designate same thing

Tue, 20 May 2008 00:31:34 GMT

clipped by: bernard-english

Clip Source: www.al.com

Appositives are nouns or pronouns that designate the same person or thing and that bear the same grammatical relationship to the rest of the sentence.

Attack of the killer ravens: Flocks are suddenly slaughtering lambs

Mon, 05 May 2008 10:50:09 GMT

clipped by: michellezm
clipper's remarks: "Research published last year in the Scientific American also showed the raven to be one of the most intelligent species on the planet - up there with dolphins and apes and, unlike most other birds and animals, capable of learning from their own actions and from observing others' behaviour.

They're thought to be one of the few birds that can count, and some have even learned to fashion leaves into special tools for extracting grubs from crevices in trees.

In Japan, they were reportedly found dropping nuts onto a dual-carriageway, then darting down to eat them once the cars had cracked them open.

Although older ravens (they live up to 25 years) mate for life and travel in pairs, young birds may form flocks of up to several hundred - collective nouns for ravens include an "unkindness", a "conspiracy", and a "murder" - which swoop on farm animals"

Clip Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

these sinister looking birds are feasting on something far larger - newborn lambs.

And instead of hanging around for a few discarded bones or a forgotten carcass to pick and claw at, they've started killing live farm animals - by pecking them to death, in horrific scenes reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier's The Birds, turned by Alfred Hitchcock into one of the most chilling movies of all time.

Throughout Britain, traumatised farmers have reported a sudden and disturbing rise in the number of livestock being attacked by ravens.

According to Johnny Hall, of the National Farmers Union of Scotland, it's no longer just lambs: "Raven attacks have become a huge problem across a wide area of the country.

"We have substantial evidence of them attacking adult sheep and calves, too

The question is, why have ravens suddenly started to attack livestock?

some believe it is simply the pressure on food resources caused by the dramatically increasing raven population

Thumbing through the dictionary

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:58:08 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth

Clip Source: www.ironicsans.com

Thumbing through the dictionary

I recently noticed how many body parts have made the leap from noun to verb. Here are a few things you can do with your body parts as verbs:

Shoulder the burden.
Face the music.
Arm yourselves!
Foot the bill.
Stomach an awful movie.
Finger the suspect.
Elbow a pushy jerk on the subway.
Neck with your girlfriend.
Tongue her if she’ll let you.
Bone her once your parents go to sleep.
Mouth along with the music.
Head out of here.
Skin a cat.
Scalp the cat’s owner.
Back out on your commitment.
Eyeball the hot girl at the club.
Hand over your cash.
Knee a mugger in the nuts.
Thumb your nose at the President.
Heart New York.
Butt out.

Tags: english, language, nouns, verbs, words, slang

Interesting facts about the Japanese Language

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 04:48:53 GMT

clipped by: chris49
clipper's remarks: Why more info on site

Clip Source: www.kt70.com

Interesting facts about the Japanese Language

Is there anything easy about Japanese?

No verb conjugation!
No gender of nouns!
No articles (a, the)
Number (singular and plural) not important and barely exists!
Not hard to learn to pronounce as there are only 48 sounds consisting of 5 vowels and 11 consonants!
Syntax or the word order of a sentence, excepting the final verb, is totally free!

Why then is Japanese considered difficult to learn?

The written language has 3 methods of writing: Thousands of Chinese characters called Kanji and 2 Japanese syllabaries of 48 characters each called Hiragana and Katakana. Japanese is therefore considered the most complex written language in the world. In order to get barely by, you need to learn all of the Hiragana and Katakana and at least a few hundred Kanji.

So learning Japanese is almost like learning the vocabulary of 2 languages at once!

Modification

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:04:30 GMT

clipped by: bernard-english

Clip Source: www.criticalreading.com

Modification is a somewhat technical term in linguistics. It does not mean to change something, as when we "modify" a car or dress. To modify means to limit, restrict, characterize, or otherwise focus meaning. We use this meaning throughout the discussion here.

Tags: optional. separate by commas., nouns

Mass Nouns

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:22:05 GMT

clipped by: bernard-english

Clip Source: www.usingenglish.com

Mass Nouns
A mass noun has no plural form, often referring to a substance. EG: butter; smoke; money - These nouns have no plurals.Mass nouns are also called uncountable.

Tags: nouns

Adjectival Nouns

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:19:11 GMT

clipped by: bernard-english

Clip Source: www.usingenglish.com

An Adjective can sometimes function as a Noun; the young, the rich, etc. These are Adjectival Nouns, meaning the people who are young, the people who are rich, etc.

Tags: adjectives

Girl, You'll Be A Woman

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:57:53 GMT

clipped by: debbyski

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

AT 8 or 9 years old, the typical American schoolgirl is perfecting her cursive handwriting style. She's picking out nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in sentences, memorizing multiplication tables and learning to read a thermometer.

She's a little girl with a lot to learn.

And yet, in increasing numbers, when girls this age run across the playground in T-shirts, there is undeniable evidence that their bodies are blossoming. The first visible sign of puberty, breast budding, is arriving ever earlier in American girls.

Some parents and activists suspect environmental chemicals. Most pediatricians and endocrinologists say that, though they have suspicions about the environment, the only scientific evidence points to the obesity epidemic. What's clear, however, is that the elements of female maturity increasingly are spacing themselves out over months, even years -- and no one quite knows why.

Tags: sooner, than, expected