Popular Elsewhere
15:00 UK time, Friday, 9 September 2011
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Atlantic readers are getting it off their chest and a popular article let one person from an occupation from each letter of the alphabet have a rant. So there鈥檚 a referee who complains people don鈥檛 believe them when they say they don鈥檛 care who wins a game. And there鈥檚 the waiter explaining he has to pay if customers don鈥檛 tip. But which job begins with x? Atlantic have found a xenobiologist. That鈥檚 someone who studies what life outside our planets might be like. And this xenobiologist wants readers to know that possible aliens are not like in the movies.
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Readers may be forgiven for not knowing much about the jobs in a popular Wired article. It lists - those that have cropped up in the 10 years of war which followed the attacks. Among them is the irony that unmanned aircrafts require pilots, albeit on the ground. And not all the jobs are at the forefront of technology. The US army also employs its own "war donkey handlers" to get equipment across Afghanistan鈥檚 rugged terrain.
From new jobs over to new words at the Wall Street Journal. And the surprise continued growth of men鈥檚 fashion despite the economic downturn has brought with it a whole set of jargon. Readers are clicking on an article which says as men鈥檚 fashion increasingly get feminised, these garments need labels. Creating the correct is easy 鈥 you just replace the first letter of the existing word with an m.
鈥淢en can also wear 鈥榤andals鈥 (male sandals), 鈥榤urses鈥 (purses), 鈥榤antyhose鈥 (pantyhose) and 鈥榤ankinis鈥 (swimsuit variants) - though not necessarily all at the same time.鈥
It notes even President Obama has been getting into the act, sporting his own mandals.
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And a popular Time article makes you realise that a word like murse conveys quite a lot in one little word. This goes some way to explain . It turns out it isn鈥檛 just imagined, but a study from the University of Lyon found that we take the same amount of time to convey meaning, but some languages use more syllables than others to do that.
鈥淭he more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second - and the slower the speech thus was. English, with a high information density of .91, is spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, rips along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edges past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49.鈥
All of which took quite a lot of syllables to explain.
