Disappearing Slang and Cultural Variants: How Australian English Is Changing
Readers reflect on the country’s many different accents.
Circular Quay, a tourist area in Sydney, Australia.Credit.Matthew Abbott for The New York Times to get it by email.
Last week, I wrote about whether an Asian-Australian accent existed and asked for your thoughts on how the Australian accent is changing. Dozens of readers wrote in about their experiences navigating regional, cultural and ethnic Australian accents, observing that the way we speak is becoming more homogenized, and to correct my own Australian linguistic error yes, you’re right, we throw prawns, not shrimp, on the barbie.
I Sang Through Labor to Manage the Pain
Turns out, women have been singing, chanting and humming through childbirth for centuries. But can it actually provide relief?
Credit.Lily Snowden-Fine
March 9, 2021
Back in the summer of 2016, when I was about to give birth and enduring one debilitating contraction after another, I was struck with an idea: What if I were to sing through the agony?
With a karaoke YouTube video pulled up on my husband’s phone, I began belting out lyrics to Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” straight from my hospital bed.
“Nibblin’ on sponge cake,” I began singing, uncertain, wondering if I was in some sort of labor-induced mania. I kept going. By the end of “stepped on a pop top,” the waves of torment had somehow diminished. I wasn’t on pain medication, but I felt like I had been transported to a more calm, pleasant place where I wasn’t counting every second of discomfort as I had been. Time seemed to pass more quickly.
Neanderthals Listened to the World Much Like Us
A reconstructed Neanderthal ear adds a new piece to the puzzle of whether the early humans could speak.
To begin to figure out whether Neanderthals could talk, researchers studied fossilized ear bones, to reconstruct how and what our early ancestors heard.Credit.The Natural History Museum, London/Science Source
By Sabrina Imbler
March 1, 2021
If you were somehow able to travel back in time some 130,000 years and chance upon a Neanderthal, you might find yourself telling them about some of humanity’s greatest inventions, such as spanakopita and TikTok. The Neanderthal would have no idea what you were saying, much less talking about, but they might be able to hear you perfectly, picking up on the voiceless consonants “t,” “k” and “s” that appear in many modern human languages.
By John Colapinto
As a genre, body part nonfiction would seem to have run its course. We have natural histories of the heart and brain, the skin, the sensory organs. The intestines have a best seller. The penis has a cultural history, and the vagina has its own bible. But wait, you are probably not thinking, where is the 300-page book devoted to the larynx?
It has arrived, and it is exemplary. The author, the New Yorker staff writer John Colapinto, is an amateur rock vocalist with a polyp on his cords. âThis Is the Voiceâ begins with his story, but quickly charges off in surprising and consistently fascinating directions. I did not, for example, expect: national elocutionists, Kim Kardashianâs vocal fry, the last Vatican castrato, the telling silence of lizards, Alexa or the delightful, data-based revelation that humans can reliably hear a smile.