As is known to all, “I am sorry.” is the phrase we hear most in daily communication in Britain. What does it mean? Does it always mean you apologize (道歉) for what you have done wrong? Let us review a scene happening in a British street one day.

A young man walked down a road playing with his smart phone when a lady came over in his opposite direction. The man failed to give his way to the lady in time. As a result, he bumped (碰撞) into the lady. As a rule in China, the man must say “I am sorry” first, because he was so busy playing with his smart phone that he got in the way of the lady. However, both the persons apologized to each other by saying “I am sorry.” Why is this the case? As a matter of fact, the phrase “I am sorry” takes on another meaning in Britain. Anyone should speak to the other this way if either of them creates inconvenience (不便). The apology is just a way to avoid unnecessary fights between them.

Another cultural difference about “I am sorry.” can also be found at British restaurants. Supposing an old woman says to a waiter in a pub (酒馆), “I am sorry, but can I order another drink?” This time you must realize it doesn’t mean she apologizes to the waiter for what she has done wrong, but means she really needs the waiter to do something for her.

Buzzwords (流行词汇)

Splinternet

Europe is floating regulation that could impose temporary bans on US tech companies that violate its laws. If such territorial agreements become more common, the globally-connected Internet we know will more like what some have called the “splinternet”, or a collection of different Internets whose limits are determined by national or regional borders.

Cyberpunk

—Do you think we are already in a cyberpunk age?

—I think we are. Just look around us, we are enjoying the fruit of high technology when we order almost everything at our fingertips. But the people delivering the products can’t even have a decent meal. That’s a typical “high tech, low life” contrast.

Mansplaining

—You must follow my instructions to complete the project. Don’t you ever screw up.

—Stop mansplaining, OK? I’m far more experienced than you.

Digital natives

If you are wondering why “Phone” app icon is designed like that and looks almost the same on every smartphone, you are definitely one of the digital natives who don’t know what a telephone is.

Social bankruptcy

Have you ever found it extremely exhausting trying to maintain a balanced relationship with all your social media friends and followers? Perhaps it’s time that you go social bankruptcy. Just close all your accounts and go out and enjoy the sunshine.

When you ask people to judge others by their speech, a trend emerges: Listeners dislike disfluency. Slow talkers producing loads of ums and pauses are generally considered as less charming. But science tells us there may be even more to disfluency.

Disfluencies do not occur in arbitrary positions in sentences. Ums typically occur right before more difficult or low-frequency words. Imagine you’re having dinner with a friend at a restaurant, and there’re three items on the table: a knife, a glass, and a wine decanter (醒酒器). Your friend turns to you and says, “Could you hand me the…um...” What would you assume your friend wants? Since it’s unlikely that they will hesitate before such common words as knife, and glass, chances are you’ll pick up the decanter and ask, “You mean this?”

This is exactly what we demonstrated through controlled eye-tracking studies in our lab. Apparently, listeners hear the um and predict that an uncommon word is most likely to follow. Such predictions, though, reflect more than just simple association between disfluencies and difficult words; listeners are actively considering from the speaker’s point of view. For example, when hearing a non-native speaker say the same sentence but with a thick foreign accent, listeners don’t show a preference for looking at low-frequency objects. This is probably because listeners assume non-native speakers may have as much trouble coming up with the English word for a common object, like a knife, as for unusual ones and can’t guess their intention.

In another experiment, listeners were presented with an atypical speaker who produced disfluencies before simple words and never before difficult words. Initially, participants displayed the natural predictive strategy: looking at uncommon objects. However, as more time went by, and they gained experience with this atypical distribution of disfluencies, listeners started to demonstrate the contrary predictive behavior: They tended to look at simple objects when hearing the speaker say um.

These findings represent further evidence that the human brain is a prediction machine: We continuously try to predict what will happen next, even though not all disfluencies are created equal.