If you’ve read this blog before, then you know that my favorite thing about words is how the sound, overt meaning, implied meaning, personal use history and spelling all work together to create an experience of a word, something I celebrate from time to time with “Word of the Day”.

One of the things that I love about words is the way they not only provide a window on our thoughts, they can actually shape our thoughts. There are startling uses of this (hypnotism, suggestion), and controlling uses (advertising, propaganda), of course.

But there’s another commonplace use of words that really intrigues me: the use of internal conversation to influence emotional response. In psychology this power is used to “reframe”, to intentionally use words to encourage one’s attitude to a situation (”How will eating this donut help me with my diet?” instead of “But I want it so badly!”).

It seems to me that inner-conversation has the power to put the rational or logical part of our thinking in control over the emotional or irrational reactions. This is a mighty weapon, and an underused one.

Lately, I’ve seen a number of studies demonstrating the power of inner conversation, for better and for worse. For example, talking about an experience soon after it occurs tends to blunt or dull the emotional reaction to it — thus negative experiences are felt less awfully if you speak (or write) them out, but positive experiences lose their sharpness similarly.

Is the effect of immediate verbalization on event memory (people are more liable to remember an event incorrectly when they speak about it soon after it occurs) related to the emotional blunting? Or is this completely different?

Does reliance on menuing systems for mobile operating system functions contain within itself the seeds of emotional distance and reduced learning capacity? (More on this to come…) Ouch.

A funny translation problem in the Hebrew localized OS [of the Nokia E71] showed up before I switched the phone over to English, which translates as:

“Keypad is locked. Press Unlock and then the function key to unlock.”

Of course, the softkey for “Unlock” wasn’t labeled “Unlock”, it was labeled “Open”. Hm.

Yeas:

• Keyboard better than expected
• Thin
• Has a hole for wrist strap (finally!)
• E-mail setup was fairly easy
• WiFi
• GPS (yay!)
• Great default settings for profiles, home screen application shortcuts
• Overall excellent use of the home screen (idle)
• Very nice mechanism for releasing the back battery cover (squeeze and lift)
• 3.2 MP camera
• Pre-loaded bar-code reader, which looks cool, but I can’t figure out how it works.

Nays:

• Keyboard arrangement a bit odd
• I know it’s really small for a QWERTY keyboard (that’s why I got it), but the E65 was a more comfortable size
• Slow, slow download of e-mail (even just the headers)
• Not yet synced with my Mac PowerBook G4 (which might be a problem with my iSync)
• GPS use costs extra monthly to activate (oh, well…)
• A bit slippery, despite the dot design on the back
• My outgoing test e-mail hasn’t gone out, even though mail is getting in
• The system doesn’t remember the WAP access key for my home wireless network (as was true with my E65), which means I have to manually enter it every time I take the phone online. This is a royal pain in the neck.
• Shiny metal back is not lovely, and attracts fingerprints
• S60 not always behaving as expected, including some quirky softkey labels in the web browser (Messaging?!)
• I haven’t found out how to turn off the feature that automatically locks the keypad after a few minutes of non-use. It’s OK, but I’d like to have control over that.

I am such a sucker for anything that cleverly mixes the real and virtual — even though the virtual, in this case, is more real than most virtual reality. There are a bunch of other (tangible) funky bikes at the link below.

[via FunTim]

Thanks to @DrimoN for the tip.

Quincunx:  An arrangement of [typically five] objects in a square or rectangle, with one at each corner and one in the middle, like the five spots on dice (from the Latin for “five-twelfths”).

Now there’s a word I don’t remember ever seeing before, and certainly have never heard spoken (seen now in Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, in the context of Galton’s mechanical experiments on Gaussian curve formation). Quincunx. It sounds like a hiding place for Lord Voldemort.

Disemvowlmnt: The process of pruning a word of its vowels in order to cram an idea into the requisite 140 characters allowed in a Twitter post.

[word seen at @Quatrainman]

Patterfamilias: Saying something to your child and then realizing that you sound just like one of your own parents.

The idea is that the camera itself is integrated within a pair of sunglasses. Using your fingers to frame the portion of your viewing field you wish to photograph (like a hot-shot photographer framing a scene), wink with one eye to capture the shot. [via Walyou]

OK, clever interface. I love the conceptually seamless interleaving of real and virtual realities. But… I have not yet bought into the “wearable technology” craze. Yes, I think that much technology should be worn, and I believe in tech-integrated accessories; what I don’t buy is that integrating interface technology into clothing is a brilliant idea.

If I have to wear a certain jacket in order to hear music, have to wear a certain pair of sunglasses in order to take a picture, have to wear a certain pair of sneakers in order to track my workout, then I’m going to feel trapped. Who wants to be locked in to an article of clothing? (Note to those wearing chastity belts: line forms to the right.)

You’ve probably put your finger on the ambiguity by now: where do you draw the line between clothing and accessories? You decide.

While the decisions to buy a particular item of clothing or techno-widget might share common back stories, the daily decisions as to what to wear are different: you change styles and items depending on mood, weather, and the need to make an impression. Most of us aren’t prepared to wear the same clothing every day, although we are prepared to wear/utilize accessories much more frequently, even daily.

@copyblogger is hosting a Twitter-based haiku contest, with a MacBook Air as the top prize.

Here are some of my favorite entries:

• “@John, I am pregnant.” / “@Marsha, will you marry me?” / “Yes @John, my tweetheart.”

• My haiku like a website / running I.E. 6 / really running in reverse
• writing a haiku / I need to use my fingers / counting syllables
• how could anyone/describe their life in only /140
• An Adwords haiku / Google didn’t get the joke / Laughter, ROI
• What’s Occam’s Razor? /// It’s a method for questions /// That cut to the chase.
• The joy of Twitter! / Kevin Rose has sneezed again. / Quick! Blog about it!
  (A quick quip which is a reference to Kevin Rose of Digg fame, who recently created a Twitter account especially for his cold.)
• This one’s so perfect / Clever, funny, all that… wait. / Twitter eats my tweet!
• You’ve been told you can’t / Because you happen to be / A girl. Girls Can’t WHAT?
• This is senryu. / I really don’t write haiku. / It’s not my nature.
  (Technically, haikus are about nature.)

The premise of the contest provided some entertainment for me [a.k.a. @Power2B] this morning:

• Twitter makes me think / Short, declarative statements / What will haiku do?
• Tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet / Self-promoting twitterers / Drive me to delete
• Writing poetry / Serves mostly selfish yearnings / All the moreso here
• Economic melt- / down is pulling companies / Under needlessly
• We thought the lovebird / Had broken free once again / Now he’s got a friend
• Heck, writing haiku / Is so much fun, I might not / Get much done today
• Dearest Twitter friends: / I’d like to hear your feedback / Which haiku to send?

If you have any connection with the mobile industry, User Experience, User Interface design or application design, then this presentation is definitely worth your time:
How people really use the iPhone