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As it has every year since 1976, Lake Superior State University has released its latest “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse, and General Uselessness.” The annual list, the impish brainchild of LSSU’s Public Relations Office, contains the twelve most nominated words among the thousands sent mostly by folks from the United States and Canada. The 2012 list of unfriended words includes the following: amazing (the most nominated), baby bump (a close second), shared sacrifice, occupy, blowback, man cave, the new normal, pet parent, win the future, trickeration, ginormous, and thank you in advance.

Alas, language changes whether we want it to or not. They have to: things change, we change, and language changes so we can talk about it all. As University of Illinois linguist Denis Baron says, “Like all living languages, English is always changing: new words are coined and old ones are modified or discarded, as we scramble to keep up with the human imagination and an ever-changing world.” And that means words broaden and narrow their meanings, or we metaphorically extend words ready at hand. “Holy Day” became “holiday;” “cool” once referred to a specific style of jazz rather than a general expression of approval. “Meat” once indicated any kind of food, “deer” any kind of animal, “vulgar” once meant ordinary, “girl” any young person. We “surf” the Internet, likely using a “mouse” to do so and hoping to experience no “bugs” or “viruses” or “worms.” Language is irrepressibly mutable, gloriously so, I think. The only immutable languages are dead languages.

[…] As the life of any language reveals, language conservatism is a position cannot be long occupied, is thankless in advance, and will not win the future. Language change is the old normal. The spoken word always has and always will amble blithely away from its written tradition, with scarcely a backward glance.

Arbesman, a senior scholar at the Kaufmann Foundation and an expert in scientometrics, looks at how facts are made and remade in the modern world. And since fact-making is speeding up, he worries that most of us don’t keep up to date and base our decisions on facts we dimly remember from school and university classes that turn out to be wrong.

Since scientific knowledge is still growing by a factor of ten every 50 years, it should not be surprising that lots of facts people learned in school and universities have been overturned and are now out of date.  But at what rate do former facts disappear? Arbesman applies the concept of half-life, the time required for half the atoms of a given amount of a radioactive substance to disintegrate, to the dissolution of facts. For example, the half-life of the radioactive isotope strontium-90 is just over 29 years. Applying the concept of half-life to facts, Arbesman cites research that looked into the decay in the truth of clinical knowledge about cirrhosis and hepatitis. “The half-life of truth was 45 years,” reported the researchers.

Arbesman also delves into what he calls “hidden public knowledge.” Consider again that nearly 850,000 new articles dealing with biomedical research were published in 2009; lots of true information will be overlooked in that deluge.

People also cling to selected “facts” as a way to justify their beliefs about how the world works. Arbesman notes, “We persist in only adding facts to our personal store of knowledge that jibe with what we already know, rather than assimilate new facts irrespective of how they fit into our worldview.” All too true; confirmation bias is everywhere.

Toward the end, Arbesman suggests that eventually “exponential knowledge growth cannot continue forever.” Among the reasons he gives for the slow-down is that current growth rates imply that everyone on the planet would one day be a scientist. The 2010 study in Scientometrics mentioned above also mused about the growth rate in the number of scientists and offered a conjecture “that the borderline between science and other endeavors in the modern, global society will become more and more blurred.”

We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return. What I and people of my kind expect is to be allowed to live our lives in decent privacy. I own newspapers, but I don’t like them. I regard them as a constant menace to whatever privacy we have left. Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on. …

— Harlan Potter in The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler

Somewhat related(?): Google Rakes In More Ad Dollars Than U.S. Print Media

Hearing, in short, is easy. You and every other vertebrate that hasn’t suffered some genetic, developmental or environmental accident have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. It’s your life line, your alarm system, your way to escape danger and pass on your genes. But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are leaping into your ears every fifty-thousandth of a second — and pathways in your brain are just waiting to interrupt your focus to warn you of any potential dangers.

Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.

And yet we dare not lose it. Because listening tunes our brain to the patterns of our environment faster than any other sense, and paying attention to the nonvisual parts of our world feeds into everything from our intellectual sharpness to our dance skills.

Luckily, we can train our listening just as with any other skill. Listen to new music when jogging rather than familiar tunes. Listen to your dog’s whines and barks: he is trying to tell you something isn’t right. Listen to your significant other’s voice — not only to the words, which after a few years may repeat, but to the sounds under them, the emotions carried in the harmonics. You may save yourself a couple of fights.

You love having lots of choices.

But having more choices isn’t always a good thing — ever see so many good options that you end up picking… nothing?

Barry Schwartz has spent a great deal of time researching this issue and in his excellent book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less he explains how we can make ourselves happier and more fulfilled by reducing choice.

What are the 5 steps?

1. We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them.

2. We would be better off seeking what was “good enough” instead of seeking the best (have you ever heard a parent say “I want only the ‘good enough’ for my kids”?)

3. We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions.

4. We would be better off if the decisions we made were nonreversible

5. We would be better off if we paid less attention to what others around us were doing. 

A good overview of Barry Schwartz’s “The Paradox of Choice”. Also features a related TED talk.

Ryan Holiday’s book Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, offers a penetrating look behind the incentives of media. Holiday is a practitioner of the dark arts of media manipulation.

For me the most interesting part of the book was the history of the press, which begins with the Party Press, moves on to the infamous Yellow Press and ends with the Modern Press (aka Subscription Press).

The One-Off Problem shaped more than just the design and layout of the newspaper. When news is sold on a one-off basis, publishers can’t sit back and let the news come to them. There isn’t enough of it, and what comes naturally isn’t exciting enough. So they must create the news that will sell their papers. When reporters were sent out to cover spectacles and events, they knew that their job was to cover the news when it was there and to make it up when it was not.

Just take a look at Gawker and The Huffington Post. It’s the modern version of the One-Off problem. Instead of trying to sell you a copy of the newspaper by shouting on the street corner, today’s media want page views. In yellow journalism, headlines and promotions were more important than content.