Michael Erard
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Going through old boxes the other night, came across this from Roland Barthes that I copied a decade ago:
I am increasingly convinced, both in writing and in teaching, that the fundamental operation of this loosening method is, if one writes, fragmentation, and, if one teaches, digression, or, to put it in a preciously ambiguous [...]
Continue Reading →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 [...]
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 →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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I’m back from two weeks of traveling to Anchorage, Alaska, and the Aleutian islands for vacation, then to Sonoma, California, for a day job meeting. When skies were sunny, they looked like this:
Continue Reading →Needless to say, we’ve talked more about signing than we’ve actually signed. DOG and CAT get into regular rotation, as does MORE. Other than that, we’re using spoken English. All throughout the last couple months, the baby’s said phantom words a couple of times. For instance, you ask him some question, and he responds with [...]
Continue Reading →Managed to remember to teach the sign for “dog” today. Also invented a sign for “outside,” which I know is going to come back and haunt me — the boy poking one finger through the other hand’s closed fingers, over and over and over. But what the hell. And sometimes, we’ll want to be outside.
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So our baby is 6 months old, and we’re about to start using baby sign language, which I view with some trepidation — oh, great, another language to stumble around in. On the other hand, kids don’t seem to develop very big repertoires of signs, so even though I’m sleep-deprived and distracted, I think I [...]
Continue Reading →Over at Design Observer, my Dream Job Project was recently launched. In this first post, I invited people to post the concrete aspects of the work they do or the work they want to do. Later I’m going to boil down this input into a set of parameters that would serve as the outlines [...]
Continue Reading →The second paragraph of my new essay, an homage to my time at the Dobie Paisano ranch, up at Design Observer:
Cutting cedars is a lot like writing, but it doesn’t replace writing, and I’ve never gone out until I’ve done my daily. Standing, searching, bending, cutting, standing: it’s repetitive work but has [...]
Continue Reading →This is the fourth piece I’ve published since 1996 about Joe, a friend I made during the summer I lived in Alpine, Texas. It begins like this:
Remember Joe, my old friend from Alpine? He would be 80 years old this year, but he’s long gone. Survived cancer long enough to see the truth [...]
Continue Reading →A short piece I did for the Texas Observer is here.
If you think people in America should speak only English, maybe Texas isn’t the state for you. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of people who reported speaking a language that’s not English at home rose by 860,000 to 6.86 million. They now [...]
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