Michael Erard
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Veteran US diplomat Richard Holbrooke died yesterday after being hospitalized and going into heart surgery to repair a torn aorta, and today the newspapers are full of eulogies and obituaries. But I’m interested in reports of what his last words were. According to the Washington Post:
As Mr. Holbrooke was sedated for surgery, family [...]
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Historical polyglots: Jeremiah Curtin, Joseph Mezzofanti, Barthold Niebuhr, Johann Baratier, Conon Gabelentz, and Georg Gabelentz.
I love the Even More Amazing trope of these descriptions (which I need to rename): there was this guy, but he couldn’t match this guy, and even more incredible was this guy, who was surpassed by this guy. (All guys, [...]
Continue Reading →I stumbled on the National Library of Australia’s excellent digital collection this morning, and searching for polyglot-related materials, came across this appraisal from the Brisbane Courier from 1929:
It will take a long while for America to settle down solely to the use of the English tongue. This comes home to one when it is [...]
Continue Reading →Back in 2005, Tom Delay spoke to prosecutors about his PAC’s swap of soft corporate money for hard campaign money with the RNC. This conversation was captured on tape. Now, in his trial for money laundering, his culpability seems to hinge on whether or not he knew ahead of time that an aide, Jim Ellis, [...]
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A couple of weeks ago, I went to NYC on some business, and dropped by the Foundry offices to see my agent. By the kitchen I saw this incredible spread of food:
An everyday occurrence? Not at all. So what was going on? As David explained, another Foundry agent had sold a book recently [...]
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Walking today along the Eastern Promenade’s lower trail, I stopped by the Yacht Services to show Iver (in my backpack) a boomtruck that was stacking floats, an autumn task. The kid loves wheels and trucks, and the older man and woman who had also been checking out the truck, loved the baby, made googly eyes, [...]
Continue Reading →I was describing Babel No More to someone I met yesterday, who said that her desired superpower has always been to be able to speak and understand all the languages in the world.
“Why don’t you want to be able to communicate with all living things?” someone standing near our conversation asked. “Wouldn’t it be [...]
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Dick Hudson sent me this WSJ article about Ellen Jovin, who is trying to outdo Katherine Russell Rich (of Dreaming in Hindi fame) and Deborah Fallows (of Dreaming in Chinese fame) by learning 13 languages in 3 years. From the article, I gather that’s Italian, Chinese, German, Russian, French, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, [...]
Continue Reading →I wrote a review of the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style for Design Observer, pointing out how thoroughly they’ve departed from their bookish bibliocentrism and embraced, as never before, the digital reality. Apparently I noticed some things that no one had seen before, such as this fact:
The words “electronic,” “software,” [...]
Continue Reading →Whatever Twitter is for, it does (depending on whom you follow) create some interesting juxtapositions of themes. Today’s juxtaposition was language acquisition (this Perri Klass piece from the NYT about babbling) and language attrition (also from the NYT, a piece by Gina Kolata about correlations between memory decline and age of retirement, as [...]
Continue Reading →Reading Richard Boyd’s 1979 essay, What is a metaphor a metaphor for?, where he says this:
Experts play a crucial role in reference for theoretical terms (and relatively esoteric terms generally) precisely because it is they who provide nonpassive epistemic access to the referents of those terms.
Which is a nonpassively esoteric way of saying [...]
Continue Reading →I’ve been watching Iver’s phonological development closely and wondering what his first word will be, but after reading around in the child phonology literature, I realized that he already has a first word, and that we hear it every day. It’s “ka.”
Children’s first words often aren’t like adult words; they’re called “nonsense words,” “protowords,” [...]
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