'Yo' as a Gender-Neutral Pronoun

Margaret Troyer, a former Baltimore-area teacher, published the first paper showing that "yo" is being used to replace "he" and "she." Troyer first noticed it while she was teaching middle-school kids in the area. "Some examples would be 'yo wearing a jacket,' " Troyer says, referring to her research. "Another example from the paper is, 'Yo threw a thumbtack at me,' which is a typical middle school example." So Troyer began to study her students. She gave them blank cartoons and asked them ...

 The Power of the Chinese Ideogram

As everyone knows, the Chinese do not have letters, as we do, but symbols for whole words. This has, of course, many inconveniences: it means that, in learning to write, there are an immense number of different signs to be learnt, not only 26 as with us; that there is no such thing as alphabetical order, so that dictionaries, files, catalogues, etc., are difficult to arrange and linotype is impossible; that foreign words, such as proper names and scientific terms, cannot be written down by so...

 A Brief History of Signals

Prior to the advent of practical electrical communication, human beings had been signaling over a distance in all kinds of ways. The bell in the church tower called people to religious services or “for whom the bell tolls”—the announcement of a death. We knew a priori several things about church bells. We knew approximately when services were to begin, and we knew that a long, slow tolling of the bells announced death. Thus we could distinguish one from the other, namely a call to relig...