We usually don’t pay much attention to pauses in language – it’s easy to assume they’re just meaningless gaps between the meaningful words. But pauses are everywhere in spoken language – and, as Andrew Leong has been studying, in written language too. Pauses are not just an absence of meaning, but can drastically shift the meaning of the words around them. From an American short story, to a Japanese coming-of-age novel to a Japanese-American play, Andrew argues that pauses are a device for hinting at things left unsaid.
Tag: homosexuality
We tend to have a visceral response to someone we think is dirty. But Stephanie Newell argues that judging other people as dirty is more in our minds than it is about medical reality. Through examples ranging from the travel diaries of colonial British traders in West Africa to the surprising ways Nigerian popular culture makes comedy out of disease, Stephanie shows how judging people to be dirty always involves a failure to understand them – but sometimes can also spark empathy.