Language
14 articles-
The Strange Physics of How Babies Talk
Different arrangements of words can be likened to microstates in statistical mechanics—the total set of ways a system’s constituent particles can be configured.Photo illustration by Khomich Yauheni / Shutterstock Like all new parents, I must sound like a kook when I babble along with my 9-month-old daughter. That’s okay: It delights her. I sometimes ask […]
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Why Campaigns to Change Language Often Backfire
Opponents of the phrase “car accident” argue that language is intertwined with accountability.Photograph by Alan Poulson Photography / Shutterstock In the first decades of the 20th century, people around the world began succumbing to an entirely new cause of mortality. These new deaths, due to the dangers of the automobile, soon became accepted as a […]
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Making a Future Among the Stars
Elon Musk has helped to advance self-driving electric cars and an implantable brain-machine interface, but when he greeted the crowd in Boca Chica, he said, gesturing at Starship, “This is the most inspiring thing I’ve ever seen.”Photograph by SpaceX In Boca Chica, Texas, presenting SpaceX’s latest prototype vehicle, Starship, Elon Musk remembered how, 11 years […]
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Why Symbols Aren’t Forever
The removal of cultural emblems is not the erasure of history but part of it.
