Bama is known for its success in football, winning another national championship last night. That’s two in a row and 15 total (depending on who is counting). What is less well known outside of the Deep South, is that there were other national championship teams on our campus in 2012: softball, women’s golf, and women’s gymnastics — also for…
I’m working on a post about taboo words (that means swearing or profanity) that’s not ready for prime time — and recovering from the flu. In the meantime, I highly recommend today’s post over at Motivated Grammar. Gabe’s point is that, when people don’t actually understand how language works, they see decline and deterioration in language different…
This is too good not to pass along!
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for my blog. Thanks for making my first 6 months in the blogosphere a success! Here’s an excerpt: 600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 9,500 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest…
If you’re entertained by invented languages, you’ll enjoy this podcast from The World in Words. It lists both old and new novels which include an invented language. Plus a weather report in Elvish for Tolkien fans. Enjoy! Related articles New Zealand Weatherman Gives Forecast in Elvish (VIDEO) (blippitt.com) Auden and Elvish (newyorker.com)
I think this video is a terrific way to share the spirit of the holidays for those of us who believe in the power of words. Life has gotten in the way of blogging since Thanksgiving. I can’t apologize as it would be insincere. But I do promise more content soon!
I just read a Forbes piece from a while back that’s worth a minute: Why Trying to Learn Clear Writing in College is Like Trying to Learn Sobriety in a Bar. Writing education in the US does not empower our students. They are not encouraged to write in a way that communicates to workplace readers….
My name is Jessica Crew. I’m a graduate student at the University of Alabama studying Communication Studies and have a personal interest in business and organizational communication. For these reasons I enrolled in Dr. Campbell’s Leadership Communication course. The exam below is an analysis of Nelson Mandela’s effectiveness as a leader in the movie Invictus. This was…
If you need evidence that people feel passionately about language, check out a plain language summary of research published by Kate Burridge, Professor of Linguistics at Monash University in Australia. The summary appeared today in the Linguistics Research Digest, a terrific resource for locating more than platitudes about communication. Their goal is “to provide up-to-date reports on the…
I posed a linguistic puzzle about the Chickasaw language, and I owe you the answers. By process of comparison and contrast based on the data given, here are my translations of the six sentences presented in the challenge: The man loves the woman. → Hattakat ihooã hollo. The cat stinks. → Kowi’at shoha. I love…