Michael Erard
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I want to put together a multilingual video for Babel No More, and I need your help. I’m envisioning a video where people from all over the world each contribute a line from a story in a different language, and that these are edited together.
Below is a set of instructions, and the script.
1. [...]
Continue Reading →Modish public speaking coaches will tell you that it’s OK to say “uh” or “um” once in a while, but the prevailing wisdom is that you should avoid such “disfluencies” or “discourse particles” entirely. It’s thought that they repel listeners and make speakers appear unprepared, unconfident, stupid, or anxious (or all of these together). Perhaps [...]
Continue Reading →This blog gets spam comments from time to time, congratulating me on thoroughness of my observations and the relevance of my blog. But today brought a new approach: critical spam.
The next time I read a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as a lot as this one. I imply, I know it [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Continue Reading →It’s rare that the federal government ventures into anything that directly impacts design, but this week the Senate finally voted in favor of rules directing federal agencies to use “plain language” in public documents. But the Plain Language Act isn’t law yet! Now it goes back to the House (which passed the act 386-33 [...]
Continue Reading →My brother, who’s done a lot of sailing and just got back from a trip in the Pacific, sent me a document that relates the sinking of the Concordia back in February of 2010, a tall ship used for education purposes that was full of Canadian high school students when it went down. The document [...]
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Colin Dickey (who wrote an awesomely creepy intellectual history, Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, about the 19th century fascination with the skulls of geniuses, which were dug up, dissected, hidden, stolen, lost) alerted me to Kevin McCann’s article in the newest Cabinet Magazine about Louis Wolfson, an American writer who, starting [...]
Continue Reading →Pioneering bilingual researcher Francois Grosjean has just published a new book with Harvard University Press, Bilingual: Life and Reality, which explores some of the misunderstandings held about bilinguals. He outlines some of the myths in a post for the HUP website.
Another common misconception is that bilinguals have equal knowledge of their languages. In [...]
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