The idiom: Tomaten auf den Augen haben.
Literal translation: “You have tomatoes on your eyes.”
What it means: “You are not seeing what everyone else can see. It refers to real objects, though — not abstract meanings.”
http://blog.ted.com/40-idioms-that-cant-be-translated-literally/
“The respected rabbi James Rudin has written, ‘I abhor the term Old Testament,’ because it suggests’Judaism has been replaced by Christianity and that the New Testament is superior to the Old Testament.”
“Is he right? Is ‘Old Testament’ an abhorrent and offensive phrase? I don’t think so. The phrase ‘Old Testament’ is not ideal. Yet, it is better than any of the alternatives.”
“Fruit bats stand in for vocal-learning mammals in isolation tests to test language development”
“As children, we all have the instinct to acquire a set of rules and to apply them. Any toddler is already a grammatical genius. Without conscious effort, we combine words into sentences according to a particular structure, with subjects, objects, verbs, adjectives and so on. We know that a certain practice is a rule of grammar because it’s how we see and hear people use the language.”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/there-is-no-proper-english-1426258286?mod=e2fb
“As a general rule, it is difficult for people in public life to change their minds. There is an immediate rush to portray politicians as ‘flip-floppers’ when they shift position on anything, even if they do so following a careful consideration of an issue rather than a meeting with a pollster. The hecklers will reliably accuse them of lacking the ‘courage of their convictions,’ of being ‘typical politicians,’ even though the typical politician actually tries to change his mind as rarely as possible, to avoid the hecklers.”
“Just as the Bush administration and the U.S. media re-labelled ‘torture’ with the Orwellian euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques” to make it more palatable, the governments and media of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance are now attempting to re-brand ‘mass surveillance’ as ‘bulk collection’ in order to make it less menacing (and less illegal). In the past several weeks, this is the clearly coordinated theme that has arisen in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand as the last defense against the Snowden revelations, as those governments seek to further enhance their surveillance and detention powers under the guise of terrorism.”
“Surely any person going to work outside their country is an expatriate? But no, the word exclusively applies to white people.”
What makes a word offensive? This article gets into a discussion that has been going on for some time about who can say what words and what makes them offensive. It’s an interesting discussion on language and what gives it meaning and also what makes it offensive…or not.
http://news.yahoo.com/morning-joe-finds-real-racists-oklahoma-rap-musicians-145348684.html
“Robert Seyfarth describes how monkey calls used by Vervet Monkeys might be precursors to language.”
“Climate change activists blasted Florida Governor Rick Scott on Monday for leading an ‘Orwellian’ campaign to ban employees of the state’s lead environmental agency from using such terms as ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change.'”
http://news.yahoo.com/florida-bans-climate-change-state-agency-report-163805011.html
TOK Topics 