The Natural Linguist

Yesterday, I was on my lunch time walk and had an interesting experience. It lasted perhaps less than 2 seconds and yet I've been thinking about it on and off ever since. I was trundling along at my usual brisk pace, on the right-hand side of the path. A few yards off, I spied a man walking toward me on my side of the sidewalk, two trains heading toward each other on the same track. As we grew closer, I instinctively hugged the right-hand margin a little closer and he did the same. When it became clear that we were on a collision course, the image of the old Dr. Seuss story about the North-going Zax and the South-going Zax popped into my head. In the story, the two Zaxes meet and stand there for years, each too stubborn to give way to the other, while a city grows up around them. For about a quarter of a second, I contemplated such a pissing contest and realized that such a course of action did not advance my goal of getting back to work in time for my 2:00 meeting. So I swerve...

Brian Greene's elegant book about the Universe offers one of the clearest explanations I've ever read of Einstein's theories. During my latest reading of the book, I was frustrated by the image of the rubber membrane and the bowling ball as an analogy for how mass curves space-time. Everyone's seen it. I understand that it's difficult to convey the idea of a four-dimensional phenomenon in a two-dimensional representation, but I find this particular analogy to be a more a hindrance than a help when I'm thinking about the idea of mass causing space time to war. It's hard to shake the two-dimensional image in my mind's eye. I always think of one of those large bowls where a coin spirals down toward the hole in the bottom. Instead, I try to cultivate in my mind the understanding that gravity pulls one toward the center of a massive object and it exerts the pull in every direction. I still can't grasp the bit about the warping of time. Enough ranting. T...

When it comes to climate change, I have more questions than answers. There is so much churn and disagreement on this question that cool-headed understanding is hard to come by. There are those who espouse climate change with religious fervor; there are those who deny it with equal passion. From my perspective, we seem to be awash in overheated rhetoric, but very short on actual facts. Every decision we make, every action we take comes with consequences - both good and bad. When we base our decisions on incomplete or one-sided information, we easily fall prey to the Law of Unintended Consequences . If the unintended consequences are good, we smile and call it an unexpected benefit. If they are bad, we pay the price. In the 1970s, we decided the price of gas was too high, so we decided to simply declare what the maximum price was allowed to be. This sounded like good and kind thing to do to help those with little money, but it was a decision based on incomplete information and the result...

I was driving back from Lexington today, a long but beautiful drive up I-81. To pass the time, I was listening to to the Virginia Insights show on NPR and there was a eye-opening and rather moving show featuring a wonderful lady named Kay Allison of the Quest Institute . Her organization sponsors a program called Books Behind Bars which provides free books for prison inmates. On the show, they mentioned the great need for dictionaries. One thing many of us take for granted is that we have easy access to a dictionary or two. Not so in prison, where these are considered a valuable and prized possession. Here's why: many "on the inside" either have not had (or have not taken best advantage of) educational opportunities. When they arrive in prison and find they have plenty of time to reflect on their lives, some experience the desire to improve their minds and make a better life. So they turn to books. Those who never picked up a book before their time in prison naturally...

This is somewhat a manifesto. English is not Latin. We can put prepositions at the end of a sentence if we want to. And we can start sentences with a conjunction! If we want to boldly split infinitives, then we're perfectly welcome to do so. Why? Because these are all syntactically correct constructs in English; they parse. And even more, they convey meaning to other speakers of the language, which is the real test of whether something is permitted in a language. My seventh grade English teacher, Mrs. Doane, a throwback to the 19th century prescriptivist grammarians, would no doubt sniff disapprovingly and peer with narrowed eyes over her Far Side-style glasses at such goings on. However, now I have the M.A. in Linguistics and can scowl back with gravitas. And so I will echo those marvelous Churchillian words: " This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put. " But in the end, I must confess that it was Guy Deutscher who freed me from the pointless tyran...