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"Aloha." "Hola." "Shalom." These are ways to say "hello" in Hawaiian, Spanish and Hebrew, respectively. But just because you can say something doesn't mean it's always appropriate. On the surface, simple greetings and phrases from other races and cultures may seem fine to sprinkle into our vernacular. Inclusive even. But did you know that "aloha" doesn't just mean hello or goodbye? "It's a greeting or a farewell, but the meaning is deeper," says Maile Arvin, the director of Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Utah. "One of my Hawaiian language teachers taught it to me as 'Aloha means recognizing...

Throughout Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s massive report on the Hillary Clinton email investigation are lots of strange things. One of the weirdest is the extent to which the FBI went to make up words and phrases to disguise reality.An early draft of the 2016 FBI report on the email scandal was reportedly subjected to linguistic surgery to exonerate Mrs. Clinton, who at the time was secretary of State. Mrs. Clinton was originally found to be “grossly negligent” in using an illegal email server. That legalistic phrase is used by prosecutors to indict for violation of laws governing the...

An engineering student who was an LGBTQ activist was shot and killed by Georgia Tech campus police on Saturday night, officials said Sunday. The school identified the victim as Scout Schultz, 21, a fourth-year engineering student from Lilburn, Georgia, who police said was armed with a knife. Schultz, president of Georgia Tech's Pride Alliance, identified as non-binary and intersex and preferred to be referred to with they/them gender pronouns, according to the alliance's website. At a news conference Monday, Schultz's family's attorney said the student was experiencing a "mental breakdown" on the night of the shooting.

Reprinted from the September 13, 1991 issue of GUN WEEK: THE UNABRIDGED SECOND AMENDMENT by J. Neil Schulman If you wanted to know all about the Big Bang, you'd ring up Carl Sagan, right? And if you wanted to know about desert warfare, the man to call would be Norman Schwartzkopf, no question about it. But who would you call if you wanted the top expert on American usage, to tell you the meaning of theSecond Amendment to the United States Constitution? That was the question I asked Mr. A.C. Brocki, Editorial Coordinator of the Los Angeles Unified School District...

HOUSTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush has long opposed making English the country's national language, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said on Friday, a day after the Senate voted to do so, but the White House said later Gonzales had got caught in a "linguistic snare." The Senate vote came in an amendment to proposed legislation overhauling U.S. immigration law and directed the government to "preserve and enhance" the role of English. Opponents said it could affect the status of some multilingual services offered by government organizations. Adding to the confusion, the Senate also adopted a softer amendment calling English...

Seoul tries to shock parents out of linguistic surgery By Kathy Marks in Sydney 03 January 2004 In South Korea's society of lofty aspirations, mastery of the English language is so highly prized that ambitious parents are forcing their children to have painful tongue surgery in order to give them perfect pronunciation. The operation, which involves snipping the thin tissue under the tongue to make it longer and supposedly nimbler, has become so common that the government has produced a film in an effort to shock parents into shunning the practice. The film, made by the National Human Rights Com-mission,...

Pariah Against A Prophet By Marc Miyake, Amritas.Com Many conservatives regard Chomsky as a linguist who falters out of his field. Unfortunately, they are giving Chomsky too much credit. Chomsky's linguistics are as warped as his politics. As someone with a PhD in linguistics, I think I am qualified to judge his professional credentials. Prior to Chomsky, linguists engaged in a lot of data collection to understand the diversity of human language. I'm vehemently anti-PC, but in this case, I think the word 'diversity' is justified. There's a lot out there, and someone's got to catalog it. However, Chomsky...

(June 26) -- The National Fair Housing Alliance has partnered with Stanford University education and linguistics professor Dr. John Baugh to study the impact of linguistic profiling on housing discrimination. This summer, Baugh will track the instances of bias that the housing markets show toward speakers of non-standard English over the telephone. Baugh says speakers who do not "sound white" often are discriminated against over the telephone. "Even though the courts are reasonably well equipped to prosecute cases of face-to-face discrimination," says Dr. Baugh, "they have a hard time understanding and applying the law to linguistic profiling, and that's where...