Clik here to view.
Stop! Don’t move a centimeter!
(Posted by Sandeep) “You know I’d walk 1609.3 kilometers if I could just see you tonight.” – Vanessa Carlton’s famous ballad, A Thousand Six Hundred and Nine and Three Tenths Kilometers A few reasons...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Language in the movies
(Posted by John) Check out this clip of an interview with Quentin Tarantino and Brad Pitt. They’re talking about Tarantino’s film, Inglourious Basterds. If you don’t know, the movie is a World War II...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The effects of txt
(Posted by Sandeep) If you’ve ever transcribed a free-form conversation, you have probably been struck by how little of a spoken exchange is made up of true grammatical sentences. Listen to your...
View ArticleClik here to view.
They, their, and them
(posted by John) We all use ‘they’ as a singular pronoun when we want to be gender-neutral. It’s so common these days that we hardly notice it, and nobody has ever corrected me when I’ve said ‘they’ in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Advice from E.B. White (especially good for aspiring lawyers…)
“Some day I mean to have a fireside chat with my government, that we may come to know each other a little better, for it is by a better understanding of the other’s traits that a government and its...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The English literature academy’s glorification of elegant…
The English literature academy’s glorification of “elegant variation” in which one attempts to vary one’s nouns and adjectives when referring repeatedly to the same thing is anathema to the law. Kuney...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“Inimical to our own safety”: regulating heritage languages
With the country waiting for the Supreme Court to release its decision on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, I thought it would be fun to revisit an older Supreme...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Wading into language politics in South Africa (uh, Suid Afrika? iNingizimu...
I arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa, a few days ago to begin my work with a human rights litigation group for the next two months. I came to South Africa cold—I knew little about its languages....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The costs of switching to English
French was the official language in Rwanda until 2008, when the government decided to transition to English in a bid to increase Rwanda’s viability in the global market. The government at the time...
View ArticleClik here to view.
One euro, two euro, many euro
The currency here in South Africa is the Rand, named after the Witwatersrand, which means “white waters ridge” in Afrikaans. (Witwatersrand refers to the area where Johannesburg was first built. A...
View Article
