Archive for Language & Literature
November 5, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under Language & Literature, History
It’s a good thing I had never heard of Demosthenes when I was a child. I would have gotten in trouble. My mom would have said, “Don’t talk with your mouth full.” And I would have replied, “Don’t you want me to be a famous orator like Demosthenes? I’m training!” And then I would have been sent to my room without any more of whatever my mouth was full of. Kids, this is why grownups are always saying things like, “You’re too young to understand. Just take my word for it.” It’s for your own good. And if you get in trouble for talking with your mouth full, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Repeat After Me
Even as an adult, I get in trouble over Demosthenes. A while back, Morgen and I were watching “My Fair Lady” on TV. For those unfamiliar with the story, a linguistics professor in London named […]
Original post by Joe Kissell
October 20, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under Interesting Places, Society & Culture, Language & Literature, History
In my senior year of high school, all the students in my English class were required to write two term papers. But two of us were granted a special exception. The teacher gave my friend Nick and me the option of handing in alternative projects in lieu of the second paper. In my case, I had written a funny yet tragic account of an unhappy relationship—I use the term loosely—that I had experienced the previous summer. I was writing it just for fun, but my teacher found out about it and said I could type it up and turn it in as my second essay. I did—and got an A, too. Nick was the only student in class who was not required to type his term papers. As long as I’d known him—since kindergarten—he had said he wanted to be an architect. And he had developed an architect’s handwriting: every […]
Original post by Joe Kissell
October 17, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under Language & Literature
When I mentioned to Morgen that I was trying to come up with another good language-related topic to write about, she was silent for a moment, then proclaimed matter-of-factly, “Walloon.” This being a term I’d never heard of, I gave her my standard Scowl of Incomprehension, which she met with her deadly Blank Stare of Shame. This silent exchange is what we do when one of us is incredulous that the other could possibly lack some crucial piece of knowledge. Finally I broke down and said, “OK, what’s that?” Still expressionless, she said, “It’s a language spoken in Belgium.” Hmmmm. French I knew about, but not this one. Sounds really exciting. I said, “Is it interesting?” She said, “Maybe.” And that was that.
It turned out, as it always does, that she was right—it is interesting. But the very first interesting fact I learned about Walloon was one she wasn’t even […]
Original post by Joe Kissell
October 15, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under Language & Literature, History
During college I spent a summer in Indonesia, and naturally I picked up a bit of the language. When I say “the language,” I’m referring to Indonesian or, as it is known in Indonesian, Bahasa Indonesia (“language of Indonesia”). This statement is not as obvious as it may sound; Indonesia is home to hundreds of languages, and of these, Indonesian is not spoken as a first language by the majority of the population. But it is the lingua franca, so it’s useful for citizens and travelers alike. I found Indonesian to be very straightforward and easy to learn, free of most of the irregularities and annoyances of the Romance languages.
What I understood at the time was that Indonesian is, for the most part, the same language as Malay (Bahasa Melayu), the national language of neighboring Malaysia. I assumed that there were some differences, but that the main one was simply […]
Original post by Joe Kissell
October 13, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under Language & Literature
English is widely regarded as a complex language, full of unpredictable spellings, irregular verbs, and etymological inconsistencies. Many other languages are easier to learn (at least for adults) because they’re more consistent. For example, people who speak both French and English often regard French as the more elegant and coherent of the two languages. But some things about French have always puzzled me—such as gender. All French nouns have a gender attribute, and your choice of modifiers and adjective forms to go along with the nouns depends on whether the noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter. But there’s apparently no rhyme or reason for why a given noun has a given gender. Logically enough, the word for man is masculine and woman is feminine, yet masculinity is feminine and vagina is masculine! Likewise, I can see no reason for aphorism being masculine while platitude is feminine. If there’s a logic […]
Original post by Joe Kissell
October 10, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under Society & Culture, Language & Literature
The city in which I grew up is a suburb of Pittsburgh—in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, less than an hour’s drive from both Ohio and West Virginia. Decades ago, the region’s economy was largely based on the production of steel. Pittsburgh was a busy, thriving, industrial city, and the residents—who sometimes refer to themselves as Pittsburghers—were by and large blue-collar working families. But the numerous coal-powered steel mills and factories were not kind to the environment. The air quality made today’s Los Angeles look crystal clear by comparison, and earned Pittsburgh the unfortunate nickname “The Smoky City.” When the mills and factories began closing due to the lower prices of imported steel, Pittsburgh’s air began to clear, and the ever-industrious populace reinvented the city as a center of technology, medicine, learning, and culture. Today’s Pittsburgh is a beautiful city, made all the more colorful by cultural and linguistic remnants […]
Original post by Joe Kissell
October 8, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under Language & Literature
For all its shortcomings, I’m quite fond of the English language and have always been a bit bothered when people misuse it. That’s not to say I never misuse it myself, or that I even believe in such a thing as perfect English. But whenever I hear or read a glaring grammatical mistake—especially one of the common ones that we were all warned against in school—I shake my head and sigh. It’s not that I won’t understand you if you say, “I ain’t got none,” but it’s awkward and inelegant, like using a pair of pliers to turn a screw. Even though it may accomplish your objective, there are better tools for the job. Of all my pet peeves about English, though, the biggest one was something that until recently I didn’t know the name for: a phenomenon known as hypercorrection.
Linguistic Overcompensation
Hypercorrection is what occurs when someone deliberately tries to […]
Original post by Joe Kissell
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