Neanderthal Language

John Hawks commenting on this account of a talk by Francesco D'Errico:

Given the confluence of the recent evidence from genetics, archaeology, and anatomy, I do not see how anyone can maintain the hypothesis that Neandertals (and presumably, other Late Pleistocene humans) did not have language.

Update on Sun 2008-03-16 by Tristram Brelstaff

There is a very good interview with John Hawks here which provides a nice introduction to his work on the evolution of the human genome.

Google as Problem Solver

Google search can be used to solve in seconds problems that were effectively insoluble a couple of decades ago.  See this post by Mark Dominus for a good example.

Language Evolution driven by Prudishness

The operators of online games that are used by children go to great lengths to prevent their young players from swearing.  However, these attempts are doomed when faced with the inventiveness of children when it comes to language.  Last night, I looked over Zoe's shoulder as she was playing Runescape and noticed that every third word that she and her friends were saying was aids.  She explained that as they weren't allowed to use proper swear words, and as AIDS was something bad, they used that instead.

Update on Fri 2008-03-07 by Tristram Brelstaff

There is a good precendent for using the names of a disease as a swear word.  Here is Paul Halmos talking about John von Neumann:

Once the telephone interrupted us when we were working in his office.  His end of the conversation was very short; all he said between "Hello" and "Goodbye" was "Fekete pestis!", which means  "Black plague!".  Remembering, after he hung up, that I understood Hungarian, he turned to me, half apologetic and half exasperated, and explained that he wasn't speaking of one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse, but merely of some unexpected and unwanted dinner guests that his wife just told him about.

New Words

A couple of new words (well, new to me), via my daughter:

• Monobrow - a pair of eyebrows that join up; a person with such eyebrows
• Luvvage - love (Eg: "luvvage, xxx" on a Christmas card)

Monobrow is already quite common, there is even a wikipedia page devoted to it and its synonym, Unibrow.

Mahoosive Meme

A week or two ago my daughter started using the word "mahoosive" to mean "very big", "huge" or "massive".  She  seems to have caught this from her school friends.  A quick search on Google reveals the following variant spellings:

• Mahoosive - 19,700 hits
• Mahusive - 5,620 hits
• Mahousive - 1,300 hits

I presume that this first appeared as an embellishment of "massive".  The earliest appearance in Google Groups is in a post from 1999, so it is not an entirely new coinage.  I suppose it could have been around a lot longer.