There are few things frustrating as when it feels like someone isn’t listening to you. But as linguistics lecturer Vittorio Tantucci writes, sometimes it may be because the other person shows they are listening in a different way to you. His research shows that middle-class British people have increasingly adopted a linguistic technique called resonance, in which people reformulate the other speaker’s words to show they are engaging with the conversation.

He thinks the middle class’s new enthusiasm for resonance may be a result of government pressure on corporations to demonstrate inclusivity in their language and in the workplace. Unfortunately, it may also end up excluding working-class people, who haven’t changed their use of resonance as much. If you don’t use resonance as much as other people in conversation, it can make you seem disinterested, even when you’re not.

Talking of your mouth revealing more about you than you might realise, it turns out it can also help identify internal diseases. Mouth ulcers, for instance, are more than an uncomfortable nuisance – they can be a sign of immune system problems, Crohn’s disease and coeliac disease. Read our piece advising when to get ulcers and cracks checked out.

And a new study of medieval human DNA has uncovered fascinating clues about communities in Iberia who chose to live in artificial caves rather than villages, as most people did at the time. The remains of one community member survived a sword blow that cut through their skull.

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