Ever been blown ashore?

The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic is the first museum in North America to explore the lives of gay and lesbian mariners in this special exhibit. It combines an exhibit adapted from National Museums Liverpool (NML) in England with an exhibit created by the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic. The NML exhibit explores the unique subculture created by gay men working as stewards on British ocean liners from the 1950s to the 80s. The Canadian component compares that experience to the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex mariners in Canada up to the present day.

A potted history of polari (click to read full article)

Polari was secretive language widely used by the British gay community from the 1900s to the 1970s. It was based on slang words deriving from a variety of different sources, including rhyming slang, and backslang (spelling words backwards).

In the eighteenth century it was mainly used in pubs around the London dock area. The language was soon picked up by merchant seafarers and brought back on ship. From the 1930s to 1970s the language was mostly used in gay pubs, theatre and on merchant ships.

The language helped gay men talk to each in front of straight people. It enabled gays to feel like part of an exclusive group. Polari was used in crew shows on ship and some straight shipmates picked up the language from these shows.

Imitate an Accent to Understand It Better

According to a new study, the key to understanding someone with a different accent is to repeat what he says and to approximate the accent. The work appears in the journal Psychological Science. [Patti Adank, Peter Hagoort and Harold Bekkering, "Imitation Improves Language Comprehension"]

Humans imitate each other during social interaction. This imitative behavior streamlines social interaction and aids in learning to replicate actions. However, the effect of imitation on action comprehension is unclear. This study investigated whether vocal imitation of an unfamiliar accent improved spoken-language comprehension. Following a pretraining accent comprehension test, participants were assigned to one of six groups. The baseline group received no training, but participants in the other five groups listened to accented sentences, listened to and repeated accented sentences in their own accent, listened to and transcribed accented sentences, listened to and imitated accented sentences, or listened to and imitated accented sentences without being able to hear their own vocalizations. Posttraining measures showed that accent comprehension was most improved for participants who imitated the speaker’s accent. These results show that imitation may aid in streamlining interaction by improving spoken-language comprehension under adverse listening conditions.

Puck U : "Pansy" no more

Hockey commentator Ron MacLean faced off against a gay-rights advocate over the use of the word "pansification" during Saturday's Hockey Night in Canada broadcast.

Hockey Night commentator Mike Milbury coined the expression to describe how the NHL would lose its edge and go soft should the league heed calls to ban fighting.

Helen Kennedy, the executive director of Egale Canada, told MacLean the group was "inundated with emails and phone calls who were upset and offended by the use of the word."

"It's used in a derogatory fashion to bully young, effeminate, gay men. It's a word that was coined to basically bully young men in Britain, many years ago," Kennedy said, adding that the word is also used to bully "kids who are perceived to be gay."

A VIDEO OF THE INTERVIEW IS AVAILABLE AFTER THE LINK

I'd recognize that ASS anywhere

Chimpanzees may not forget a familiar face — or a behind, a new study says.

In a recent experiment, captive primates were able to identify photos of their acquaintances' rears and match them with the right faces.

The ability suggests that the animals possess mental "whole body" representations of other chimps they know.

Each participating chimp was flashed a picture of another's bum, with visible genitals, then shown the face of the derriere's owner and another face of the same gender.

Both males and females were successful in this anatomical match game, pairing faces and posteriors with much greater frequency than chance alone—but only if the photos showed chimps they already knew.

How dum is American spelling?

This guy is probably responsible for American spelling of words like 'colour' without the U, but if you click on the link at the bottom you can watch his video rationale.

What is a hero?

You may know him from the Stanford Prison experiment where he put people into a prison scenario as either a prison guard or prisoner, then watched what happened.

Now Dr. Philip Zimbardo, with a team of researchers, is conducting a new study concerning helpful behavior. The goal is to discover how individuals perceive the behavior of helpfulness.

Unfortunately, it seems that this survey has officially closed, but I found that doing the survey offered me the chance to understand what I think a hero is - you might want to try it yourself.

You can find more about the Hero Workshop at thejanuscenter.com/heroworkshop.

You don't have to speak English to play golf

Under a new LPGA Tour policy effective next year, players might be suspended or prevented from playing at all if an official deems the player is ineffective in English.

"You don't have to speak English to play golf," Cabrera said Thursday in Spanish, joining a chorus of male players perplexed by the LPGA Tour's decision to punish women golfers for not speaking English in pro-ams, trophy presentations and media interviews.

Spanish for Dummies

It's so great that the U.S. outlawed slavery so many years ago.

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Pop = Soda = Coke

"When on a hot summer?s day you buy a carbonated beverage to quench your thirst, how do you order it? Do you ask for a soda, a pop or something else? That question lay at the basis of an article in the Journal of English Linguistics (Soda or Pop?, #24, 1996) and of a map, showing the regional variation in American English of the names given to that type of drink...