trying on a metaphor
roma★
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Cosimo Galluzzi
wallacepolsom
we're not kids anymore.
Not today Justin
Origami Around
🪼
Sade Olutola
Kaledo Art
if i look back, i am lost
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
One Nice Bug Per Day
JVL
occasionally subtle
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Three Goblin Art
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Kazakhstan
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Croatia
seen from United States
seen from Croatia
seen from Croatia
seen from Croatia
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from Ukraine
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
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seen from Malaysia
@feytasia
The best days of my life started when I met my wife—that’s the truth, it’s not just me saying it because it sounds nice on a card. She’s one of the coolest people, she’s so talented, she’s beautiful, and she’s certainly out of my league. - John Krasinski on Emily Blunt
Opening Night of Mean Girls on Broadway!
basing a foreign speaker’s intelligence on how fluent they are in a foreign language is so ignorant
As my dad always says, “Anyone who speaks with an accent knows one more language than you.”
Mary Poppins Returns (2018)
Hi.
I’m your kid’s teacher, and I would take a bullet for your child. But I wish you wouldn’t ask me to.
.
We had an intruder drill today.
.
I have shepherded children through a lot of intruder drills. I have also, on one memorable occasion, shepherded children through a non-drill. When I was a children’s librarian in a rough suburb, armed men got into a fight in the alley behind our building. We ushered all of the kids - most of whom were unattended - into the basement while we waited for the police.
During intruder drills, some children - from five-year-olds all the way to high school kids - get visibly upset. At one school, the intruder drill included administrators running down the hallways, screaming and banging on lockers to simulate the “real thing.” Kids cry. Kindergartners wet themselves. Teenagers laugh, nudging each other, even as the blood drains from their faces.
Other children handle intruder drills matter-of-factly. “Would the guy be able to shoot us through the door?” they ask, the same way they’d ask a question about their math homework. In some ways, this is worse than the kids who cry. To be so young and so accustomed to fear that these drills seem routine.
And then there are the teachers. There is no way, huddling in a corner with your students, ducking out of view of the windows and doors, to avoid thinking about what happens when it’s not a drill.
.
People really hate teachers. I don’t take it personally. It actually makes a lot of sense: what other group of professionals do we know so well? How many doctors have you had? How many plumbers? How many secretaries?
Over the course of my public school education, I had at least fifty teachers for at least a year each. So of course some of them were bad. You take fifty people from any profession, and a couple of them are going to be terrible at their job.
So I had a couple of teachers who were terrible, and a few teachers who were amazing, inspirational figures - the kinds of teachers they make movies about.
And then I had a lot of teachers who did a good job. They came to school every day and worked hard. They’d planned our lessons and they graded our papers. I learned what I was supposed to, more or less, even if it wasn’t the most incredible learning experience of my life.
Most teachers fall into that category. I’m sure I do.
Looking at it from the other side, though, I see something that I didn’t know when I was a kid.
Those workhorse teachers who tried, who failed sometimes and sometimes succeeded, who showed up every day and did their jobs: those teachers loved us.
.
Of course you can never know what you’ll do in the event. That’s what they always say. In the event of an intruder, a fire, a tornado.
You can never know until you know.
But part of what’s so terrifying, so upsetting about an intruder drill as a teacher, is that on some level you do know. You don’t aspire to martyrdom; you’ve never wanted to be a hero. You go home every night to a family that loves you, and you intend to spend the next fifty years with them. You will do everything in your power to hide yourself in that office along with your kids.
But if you can’t.
If you can’t.
.
When people tell me about why they oppose gun control, I can’t hear it anymore.
I’m from a part of the country where everybody has guns. I used to be really moderate about this stuff, and I am not anymore.
I can’t be.
Every day, I go to work in a building that contains hundreds of children. Every single one of those kids, including every kid that makes me crazy, is a joy and a blessing. They make their parents’ lives meaningful. They make my life meaningful. They are the reason I go to work in the morning, and the reason I worry and plan when I come home.
Parents usually know a handful of kids who are the most wonderful creatures on the planet. I know a couple thousand. It is an incredible privilege, and it is also terrifying. The world is big and scary, and I love so many small people who must go out into it.
So when adults tell me, “I have the right to own a gun”, all I can hear is: “My right to own a gun outweighs your students’ right to be alive.” All I can hear is: “My right to own a gun is more important than kindergarteners feeling safe at school.” All I can hear is: “Mine. Mine. Mine.”
.
When you are sitting there hiding in the corner of your classroom, you know.
The alternative would be unthinkable.
.
We live in a country where children are acceptable casualties. Every time someone tells me about the second amendment I want to give them a history lesson. I also want to ask them: in what universe is your right to walk into a Wal-Mart to buy a deadly weapon more important than the lives of hundreds of children shot dead in their schools?
Parents send their kids to school every day with this shadow. Teachers live with the shadow. We work alongside it. We plan for it. In the event.
In the event, parents know that their children’s teachers will do everything in their power to keep them safe. We plan for it.
And when those plans don’t work, teachers die protecting their students.
We love your children. That’s why we’re here. Some of us love the subject we teach, too, and that’s important, but all of us love your kids.
The alternative would be unthinkable.
.
When you are waiting, waiting, waiting for the voice to come on over the PA, telling you that the drill is over, you look at the apprehensive faces around you. You didn’t grow up like this. You never once hid with your teacher in a corner, wondering if a gunman was just around the corner. It is astonishing to you that anyone tolerates this.
And the kids are nervous, but they are all looking to you. You’re their teacher.
They know what you didn’t know, back when you were a kid, back before Columbine. They know that you love them. They know you will keep them safe.
You’re their teacher.
.
If you are a parent who thinks it’s totally reasonable for civilians to have a house full of assault weapons, and who accepts the blood of innocent people in exchange for that right, it doesn’t change anything for me. I will love your kid. I will treat you, and your child, the same way I treat everyone else: with all of the respect and the care that is in me.
In the event, I will do everything in my power to keep your child safe.
I just want you to know what you are asking me to do.
Masterlist of pop linguistics books and lingfic
Looking for pop linguistics books or linguistics-related fiction to read, find in a library, ask for as a gift, or give to a language nerd in your life? Here’s an extensive list of books you might be interested in.
Recent general books
John McWhorter has many pop linguistics books, including notably: The Language Hoax, The Power of Babel, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, What Language Is, Word on the Street
David Crystal also has many pop linguistics books, including more recently: the history of English spelling, A Little Book of Language (note that Crystal also writes “interesting facts about words” books, so check the description if this is a relevant factor for you)
The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker (the one style book on this entire list, because he approaches it from a genuinely linguistic perspective: see my review here).
The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox (about cracking Linear B)
You Are What You Speak by RL Greene
The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher (about the history of language)
How Babies Talk by Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek
In The Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent (my review)
The Art of Language Invention by David J. Peterson (my livetweet)
Older general books
(Most of these I read when I was getting into linguistics so I can vouch for them being interesting enough when I read them such that they’ve stuck in my mind many years later, but I’m not sure how they’d stack up on re-reading. Just so you know.)
Steven Pinker’s pop linguistics books have gotten older but are still classics: The Language Instinct, Words and Rules, The Stuff of Thought
Older David Crystal books: How Language Works, The Stories of English
Verbatim (a collection of essays on pop linguistics, edited by Erin McKean - my comments)
Talk, Talk, Talk by Jay Ingram
A Mouthful of Air by Anthony Burgess
Alpha Beta by John Man (about the history of the alphabet)
Specific Topics
Hearing Gesture by Susan Goldin-Meadow
Talking Hands by Margalit Fox (my comments)
The Language of Food by Dan Jurafsky
Babel No More by Michael Erard
Latin Alive: The Survival of Latin in English and the Romance Languages by Joseph Solodow (my review)
Predicting New Words by Allan Metcalf
Shady Characters by Keith Houston (about punctuation marks - my comments)
Speculative Grammarian’s satirical linguistics book (my review - you should probably already know some linguistics before reading it though)
An ABC for Baby Linguists (great for linguist parents!)
The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder (conlangs, older)
How to Keep Your Language Alive and Language Revitalization for Families, both by Leanne Hinton (see also Ola!, and my thoughts on it)
Beginner-friendly textbooks
Comprehensive but more friendly than actual textbooks:
Linguistics for Dummies
Linguistics for Everyone
Introducing Linguistics: An Illustrated Guide
Actual textbooks, still at an introductory level:
Language Files
Contemporary Linguistics (the fifth edition is also fine, and cheaper)
iLanguage (previous edition is cheaper)
Describing Morphosyntax is popular among budding conlangers
LingFic
Fiction that contains a significant linguistic element, enjoyable for both practising linguists and language enthusiasts:
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn (my comments)
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (my livetweet)
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (my comments) and Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin, both of which do interesting things with language & gender
Carry On by Rainbow Rowell (my livetweet)
Eunoia by Christian Bök (my comments). It’s entirely online here.
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani (review from @superlinguo)
Native Tongue trilogy by Suzette Haden Elgin
“The Story of Your Life” (short story) by Ted Chiang (the movie based on it is called Arrival and stars a linguist)
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Embassytown by China Miéville
The Lord of the Rings books
See also more recommendations on the #lingfic hashtag and this list at conlang.org
Anyone else have pop linguistics books (or #lingfic) to recommend, or reviews to link to? I’ll try to keep this list updated as I hear of and review other books, old and new, so make sure to check out the source post and my books tag if you’re viewing it as a reblog. There are some great additions in the disqus comments below, as well as extensive reblogs by Stan Carey and Superlinguo.
Updates:
Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer (my livetweet)
The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin (my two livetweets)
Pygmalion and My Fair Lady are classics, although real linguists aren’t nearly as keen on “proper” English as Henry Higgins
The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis features a philologist
Afficher davantage
Link to the original tweet
Tag yourself: IPA symbols (text version)
me: i study linguistics
everyone over the age of 40: oh good u can sort out all those uneducated people who don’t speak properly!
me:
‘Proper grammar is racist’ ?????????????? I’m sorry wh
“Proper” grammar has long been decided by and canonized by the upper (predominately white) class- causing lower class and minority dialects (and the people who speak them) to be treated as inferior and uneducated.
I have a vested interest in proper grammar and punctuation. I am a working class peasant, and a writer.
Care to, maybe, reassess that statement?
I am an English teacher, with an education in linguistic history and sociolinguiatics. Consider that maybe your personal relationship with language is not universal.
So what you’re saying here @fandomsandfeminism is that the solution is allow the breakdown of English into mutually hostile class and regional dialects rather than, ya know, teach everyone English.
People who speak AAVE and Appalachian English ARE speaking English already.
Which version of English is the one you think deserves to be the only one?
I learned standard English because my parents had some grammar books lying around and I read them. Had I not done that or had access to said books, my job prospects would be even more dismal than they are. The only realistic alternative to teaching upper-class norms in the schools is ensuring that they’re only taught to the children of the upper class, or of the children of the few not-upper-class parents who buy a lot of books.
But I notice that a lot of the people who insist that teaching the standard is bad are also active producers of upper-class norms, and are invested in making them as complex and as distasteful as they can. So maybe that’s the point!
Nobody in this thread said anything against teaching the standard variety. The original tweet even said, “multiple english vernaculars”.
This is just like John McWhorter’s observation that whenever he talks about how AAVE/Black English has a complete grammatical structure and is not inherently worse than any other variety of English, someone always goes “But interviews! Interviews! What do think will happen if they speak that way at job interviews!” —Well he didn’t say anything about job interviews, damn it! He didn’t say we should abandon Standard English; the point he’s making is that it’s diglossia - one variety isn’t inherently more correct, it’s about two different varieties being used in different areas of life and society.
Claire Foy Wins Best Actress in a TV Series, Drama at the 2017 Golden Globes (Jan 8, 2017)
*Caire is nominated again for Best Actress in 2018. The Crown is nominated for Best Television Series - Drama. The Golden Globes will be held on Sunday Jan 7 in Los Angeles.
Claire Foy and Matt Smith The Crown Season 2. Photo Credit:Claire-Foy.com
