They don’t count and they have no number words

A small group of hunter/gatherers living in the Amazon rain forest is overturning some fundamental assumptions about the mind. Although linguists have long believed that counting and having words for numbers are basic, if not innate, to human cognition, the Pirahã people in Brazil have no words to express numerical concepts such as “one,” “two,” or “many.” “They don’t count and they have no number words,” says MIT cognitive scientist Edward Gibson, who headed a study published in the journal Cognition [pdf]. (via Discover)

One of your remarkable discoveries is that water responds to words, whether they are spoken, written, or even thought, as in prayer. Kind, uplifting words tend to produce beautifully shaped water crystals, while angry discordant expressions have produced warped crystals. via HADO | Interview with Dr. Emoto
"The poets are supposed to liberate the words – not chain them in phrases. Who told the poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing. Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?" ('Cut-Ups Self-Explained' in Brion Gysin Let the Mice In)
The dominance of Google is radically changing written language on the internet - through their search engine and advertising programmes such as AdSense they are homogenising the meanings of words. This provides a strong impetus for newspapers to ignore whatever editorial ethics they had left in their desperate rush towards the money from online advertising. Article continues here. via (s)word | The LoveHowlMuse Blog
Frame analysis reveals the complexity of mundane social activities and it brings out the arbitrary nature of any fixed, social-domain or activity-based dichotomy between what is "staged" and what is "real". It brings out the reality-constructing capacities of what is staged, but also the staged nature of the everyday tangibly real. Note in this respect for instance that mass-media communication - including especially the solidly real called "news broadcasting" - is saturated by frame laminations which are deliberately and purposefully staged. What's more, an understanding of media communication is rather hard to arrive at, unless one comes to terms with the constructed pretense of an absence of mediation and the audiences' routine submission to an illusion of direct communication - even in situations where such a pretense becomes extremely hard to sustain... via Stef Slembrouck | What is meant by discourse analysis?
A linguistic archaeologist digs for the very roots of our languages, many millennia before writing was invented. He or she considers all the different possibilities of language development and has to be suspicious of anything taught as "fact" in our universities. This person must be free to bring totally new ideas forward about languages origins, unaffected by dogma or tradition. It is a rather lonely position to take but it has its advantages. Having no formal education in linguistics turned out to be both very helpful and also a big drawback. It was helpful because I avoided what is described as: "It is customary for students to be introduced to their fields of study gradually, as slowly unfolding mysteries, so that by the time they can see their subject as a whole they have been so thoroughly imbued with conventional preconceptions and patterns of thought that they are extremely unlikely to be able to question its basic premises. This incapacity is particularly evident in disciplines concerned with ancient history. Their study is dominated by the learning of difficult languages, a process which is inevitably authoritarian: one may not question the logic of an irregular verb or the function of a particle. At the same time as the instructors lay down their liguistic rules, however, they provide other social and historical information that tends to be given and received in a similar spirit. While this facilitates learning and gives the scholar thus trained an incomparable feel for Greek or Hebrew, such men and women tend to accept a concept, word or form as typically Greek or Hebrew without requiring an explanation as to its specific function or origin" In other words, linguistic students tend to be brainwashed in our Universities and are trained to reject other ways of looking at a subject, because other views are inherently inconsistent with their training. Now the whole world spoke one language (Gen. 11:1) Every time new research results are made available about the activities and thinking of our distant ancestors, these results remind us that we have acquired the habit of grossly underestimating, even denigrating our ancestors' knowledge and abilities in many fields of endeavour. One such field is linguistics. Almost all academics working in this "science" have unquestioningly adopted, and religiously defended, the family tree model for linguistic change, the so-called standard model. Any other approaches to the development of languages are being brushed aside saying that they are not scientifically provable because they are incompatible with the model and the comparative method. As a result of this thinking many, if not most of our university linguists, have become the guardians of the status quo and are disdainful of anybody embarking upon a relentless search for academic truth. They refuse to admit that many of the very early scholars may have been able to do things which are now considered impossible, such as language invention of major languages and their introduction. My work shows that, instead of staunchly defending the genetic model of naturally evolving languages, very early scholars are likely to have been responsible for inventing all major languages existing on earth, without exception. It appears that highly skilled professional linguists have been busy over a period of 4,000 years developing a large number of artificial languages. If this is correct, then the immediate result is that the standard model must be relegated to the study of primitive, natural languages and the comparative method is to be drastically overhauled or scrapped entirely. This of course means that our modern linguists will have to also re-examine everything they know more critically. via Edo Nyland art by Debra Tomson