【推荐1】My12-year-old daughter loves to stretch out spoken and written words by adding extra letters. When I read about a new study that analyzed the use of stretchable words (拉长词) in over 100 billion tweets between 2008 and 2016, I texted my daughter a link with the message, “I thought of youuuu when I read this study about streeetccchabblee words.” She replied, “Haaahahaha Youuuu knowww me soooooo wellll!!!”

Stretchability is a powerful linguistic(语言学的) device that makes a written word visually forceful. That goes for the"gooooooaaaaaaal"of a soccer announcer, a teenager’s “finallyyyyy”, and a surfer ’s"aweeeeeesome" And “booooy” is popular on Twitter. Writing in the journal PLOS ONE, the researchers detail how they combed through 100 billion tweets, mapping how often these words are stretched, and how far they are elongated (拉长)ー“haha” versus “hahahahaaaa”, for example. Stretchable words are playful and fun. But, as a parent, I sometimes worry that constantly using misspelled stretched words could make it hard for kids like my daughter who is now in seventh grade to write in a more formal style when it becomes necessary in high school, college, and beyond.

The latest research on stretched words by Tyler Gray and colleagues at the University of Vermont is the most comprehensive study to date that uses big data to analyze how people use stretched words on a social media platform. Notably, the title of Gray 's paper, "Hahahahaha, Duuuuude, Yeeessss! " includes three different examples of stretchable words. All kidding aside, this research provides valuable insights into new linguistic patterns surrounding the dynamics of purposely mistyping and misspelling some words

I have mixed feelings about the increased use of stretched words. On the one hand, I love the occasional use of a stretchable word in a text message; stretched words make written and spoken language more emotive without the use of an emoji or emoticon. It will be interesting to see if stretched words in casual correspondence just indicate a short-lived fashion, or if they are here to stay and need to be added to dictionaries. However, stretching out too many words in a text can be annoying and reduces their effect.

【推荐3】Language and culture are connected to each other in so many ways: language names and explains important events and people. When the Fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-1792) ordered a lunch (so that he didn’t have to leave the gaming tables) there was no word to refer to the bread-and-butter-encased food that has ever since borne his name. Another example is grog, a drink of rum(朗姆酒)mixed with water. The word was coined from the nickname(绰号)of Admiral Edward Vernon (1684-1757)—Old Grog. The nickname came from the cloak(披风)of “ grogram ” which he habitually wore, and it provided the word for watered-down rum which he gave to sailors. In Australia it has become the word for alcoholic(含酒精的)drink of any kind. Both sandwich and grog are known throughout the English-speaking world, and have been borrowed into other European languages—sandwich into French, and grog into German.

In Australia some rather more specialised foods go by the names of local heroes and heroines. The lamington owes its name to Charles Wallace Alexander Napier Cochrane-Baillie, Second Baron of Lamington, who was governor of Queensland from 1896 to 1901. He was well-known for his concern for the treatment of local workers in northern Qucensland. Another sweet, Peach Melba, was invented in 1892 or 1893 by the French cook Auguste Escoffier at the Savoy Hotel, London, to respect the Australian singer Nellie Melba.

Some words have their origin in the sports world. The boxer Larry Foley (1849-1917) stopped boxing at the age of 30, having developed a training school for young boxers. His name is probably the one behind the expression “give someone Larry Dooley". Also a sporting hero was the footballer Roy Cazaly (1893-1963), who is the person in “ Up There Cazaly ” , used well beyond football as an expression of encouragement. He became a great footballer by taking amazingly high marks for the St Kilda and South Melbourne clubs.

【推荐3】Meet the longest-living vertebrate（脊椎动物）in the world, the Greenland shark.

Found primarily in the very cold waters of the North Atlantic, these slow-swimming sharks can be as big as the largest great whites, reaching up to 21 feet in length. They're among the largest of carnivorous（食肉的）fish, and yet grow perhaps only a centimeter or so a year. Such slow growth yet big size is usually an indicator of a long-lived animal.

“We only expected that the sharks might be very old,” Julius Nielsen, at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, told NPR in 2016. “But we did not know in advance. And it was, of course, a very big surprise to learn that it was actually the oldest vertebrate animal.”

Imagine being 150 years old before you're ready to have your first child! Imagine being born before the United States was even a reality. For humans-who rarely make it to a century mark—it's difficult to fully understand.

Little is known about Greenland sharks, even basics such as where they give birth or how many of them there are, though researchers at a July 2017 conference at the University of Exeter thought that they may mate in “hidden” Arctic fjords. No one has even witnessed one hunting, though they have been found to have various vertebrate ones in their stomachs such as polar bear, seals, fast-swimming fish and even moose etc.

Given the shark's incredibly long lifespans, scientists are diving into the sea creature's genome, looking for clues. That conference also highlighted the work being done to separate the shark's longevity gene, with complete DNA information gathered from almost 100 sharks, including some born in the 1750s. Finding such a gene could go a long way in explaining why some vertebrates, like humans, have such limited lifespans.

These sharks also serve as swimming history books. Their tissue, bones and DNA could tell us a great deal about the waters of the world from a time before the Industrial Revolution, large-scale commercial fishing and the pronounced ocean pollution we see today.

Check out what it's like to swim with one in this encounter with what is a small and young—and yet to us, still fairly old—Greenland shark.