THE IG NOBELS RECOGNIZE THE DISCOVERY THAT “HUH” IS A UNIVERSAL WORD. I posted here about the discovery by Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira, and N. J. Enfield that “Huh†is a universal word—a word that is found in every—or almost every—language. Now, the Ig Nobel prize in Literature for 2015 has been awarded for this discovery.
This article by Jonathan Webb on the BBC web site describes the other Ig Nobel prizes for this year (The prizes are awarded by the journal Annals of Improbable Research). Mary Jane and I thought that the prize for Biology was the most important of the other findings for this year. Bruno Grossi (University of Chile) and colleagues found that “when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked”.