February 2012
16 posts
“If women do something like uptalk or vocal fry, it’s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional or even stupid,” said Carmen Fought, a professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. “The truth is this: Young women take linguistic features and use them as power tools for building relationships.”
-NYTimes.com, They’re, Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve
The trend is pretty clear. Fifty years ago, America was groupy. People were more likely to be enmeshed in stable, dense and obligatory relationships. They were more defined by permanent social roles: mother, father, deacon. Today, individuals have more freedom. They move between more diverse, loosely structured and flexible networks of relationships.
We can all think of reasons for this...
I am sure every girl can recall, at least once as a child, coming home and telling their parents, uncle, aunt or grandparent about a boy who had pulled her hair, hit her, teased her, pushed her or committed some other playground crime. I will bet money that most of those, if not all, will tell you that they were told “Oh, that just means he likes you”. I never really thought much about it...
Hey SF, LA, CHI, DC —> looking for experiential field producers for hire through June. Know someone? Are you that someone? DM me.
“The best feature is that it works” explains Systrom. “You compare our history to other social media startups and it’s been very good. We’ve been very careful about scaling.”
And to that end the team has spent much of the last year planning for growth. Because they don’t want to revamp the system while its under load, that’s meant doing things like...
