Headlines of the Week (Or Whatever)

Because I am a giant English nerd.


E-Prime would make language so much better.

On word spacing and incapping.

Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong (or, the lies typographers tell about history).

The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age.

Monster Porn Is the Latest Wrinkle in Self-Published Smut

On Language Development

From a writing prompt on our Honors Psychology Discussion Board:

I chose to read about Genie, the ‘wild child’, because I had previously seen the film ‘Mockingbird Don’t Sing’, which was based on her life and case history, from the point of view of her predominant worker, Dr. Susan Curtiss, a trained linguist. As I followed links around the Internet, going everywhere from linguistic case studies to film reviews; I began to wonder how environment affects language acquisition. Everything I read focused on the negative impact of a linguistically lacking environment, but I did not see anything that considered the theoretical positive effects of a linguistically rich environment.

On Education and Language

From my Honors Colloquium II mid-term exam:

“The teacher’s thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students’ thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her thoughts on them.”

–Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed: The Banking Concept of Education

On Language

From my weekly comments for Honors Colloquium:

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
–George Orwell, 1984

This week’s readings and discussion centered on the idea of language. We did not discuss language itself, which we would call semantics; rather, we centered on language as a concept. What species have it? What forms does it take? Into what form do we shape language and how does our language, in turn, shape our society? It was strange to think of language as an idea, as opposed to a universal constant. Having not considered language before, again rather than semantics, I found our discussion to be interesting and enlightening, and the readings even more so.