Sometimes it’s easy to know when you aren’t wanted. What gives that away might not be specific words said. The giveaway might instead be the arrangement of words, the justification of exclusive policies, or the perpetuation of vague criteria like “company fit” that keep the same old kinds of people in and the same old […]
The portal of language
I’m a few chapters into the recent film Arrival. (I intend to finish watching over the next two weeks so if you’ve seen it and are going to see me, please: no spoilers!) The story begins with Dr. Louise Banks, a linguistics college professor who’s in class the day that 12 giant pods from an extraterrestrial civilization […]
Get Lit: Pro-Literacy Poetry
“The greatest lessons you will ever teach us will not come from your syllabus. The greatest lessons you will ever teach us, you will not even remember… “There are things missing from our history books. But we were taught that it was better to be silent than to make Them uncomfortable.” —The Get Lit Players, […]
Why Communicating Can Be So Hard
Steven Pinker is a Harvard psychologist who has spent the last few years studying language and morality. You may recognize his curly grey locks from his 2007 TED talk on the international violence rate: “The surprising decline of violence.” In a new column posted to the Chronicle of Higher Education this week—just in time to drive traffic […]
Worlds Apart: The Incommensurability Problem
When I was about 7 years old, my brother had a series of children’s songs on cassette tape. One of the songs included this chorus: Danke schön, mein Herr! Danke schön, danke schön! Thank you, my King— For life is so wunderschön! The problem? I didn’t yet speak German. So what I heard instead was […]
Confusing Clear English
A Fresh View of George Orwell (Salon) The essential promise of Politics and the English Language was that “if you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.” Does this ring true in 2013? From the US State Department’s carefully-worded missives to the tightly-constructed soundbites of Whitehall Britain’s counterpart to the White House, our […]
