The British are known for their sense of humor. However, it is often difficult for foreigners to understand their jokes. The main point to remember is that the British often use understatement.

Understatement means saying less than you think or feel. For example, if someone gets very wet in a shower of rain, he might say, “It’s a little damp (潮湿的) outside.” Or, if someone is very impolite and shouts at another person, someone else might say, “She isn’t exactly friendly.” Understatement is often used in unpleasant situation or to make another person look silly. Understatement plays an important part in British humor.

Another key to understanding British humor is that the British like to make fun of themselves as well as others. They often laugh about the silly and unpleasant things that happen to our everyday life when someone accidentally falls over in the street. They also like to make jokes about people from different classes of society. They like to make jokes about their accents, the way they dress and the way they behave. What’s more, the British love to watch comedies (喜剧) about people who do not know how to behave in society. The comedies series Mr. Bean is a good example of this kind of humor.

Mr. Bean is the character created by British actor Rowan Atkinson in 1990. Mr. Bean doesn’t talk often, and instead he uses his body movement and facial expressions to make people laugh. Perhaps what makes Mr. Bean so funny is that he does things that adults in the real world cannot do. Mr. Bean is popular in many countries around the world because you do not have to speak English to understand the humor. Because of this, many people have become familiar with the British sense of humor.

French writer Frantz Fanon once said: "To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture." Since the world changes every day, so does our language.

More than 300 new words and phrases have recently made it into the Oxford Dictionary Online, and in one way or another they are all reflections of today’s changing world.

After a year that was politically unstable, it's not hard to understand the fact that people's political views are one of the main drives of our expanding vocabulary. One example is "clicktivism", a compound of "click" and "activism". It refers to "armchair activists" -- people who support a political or social cause, but only show their support from behind a computer or smart phone.

"We had all the words around Brexit (脱欧) in the last update and we are now starting to see all the words around Trump coming into the dictionary," Angus Stevenson, Oxford Dictionaries' head of content development, told The Guardian.

Lifestyle is also changing our language. For example, "fitspiration -- a compound of fit and inspiration -- refers to a person or thing that encourages one to exercise and stay fit and healthy. The phrase "climate refugee" -- someone who is forced to leave their home due to climate change -- reflects people's concern for the environment.

According to Stevenson, social media was the main source for the new expressions "People feel much freer to coin their own words these days." he said.

But still, not all newly- invented words get the chance to make their way into a mainstream dictionary. If you want to create your own hit words, Angus Stevenson suggests that you should not only make sure that they are expressive and meaningful. but also have an attractive sound so that people will enjoy saying them out loud.

It’s possible that interstellar space explorers could come across problems communicating with previous and subsequent arrivals, as their spoken language has changed in isolation along the way.

Regarding the issue, two American scholars, Andrew McKenzie and Jeffrey Punske, co-authored the article “Language Development During Interstellar Travel”. What has been discussed in the article is the concept of language change over time. They wrote that given more time, new grammatical forms can completely replace current ones.

In a recent interview, McKenzie gamed it out.

“If you’re on a spaceship for 10 generations, new concepts will emerge, new social issues will come up, and people will create ways of talking about them,” McKenzie said, “and these will become the vocabulary particular to the spaceship. People on Earth might never know about these words, unless there’s a reason to tell them. And the further away you get, the less you’re going to talk to people back home.”

So if we have Earth English and spaceship English, and they become different over the years, you will have to learn a little Earth English to send messages back, or to read the instruction manuals and information that come with the spaceship.

Also, keep in mind that the language back on Earth is going to change, too, during that time. So they may well be communicating like we’d be using Latin—communicating with this version of the language nobody uses.

The authors concluded that if a study of the linguistic changes aboard a spaceship could be performed, it would “add to its scientific value”.