Ok, I fixed it. Longest night stories, a wee bit late, here:

Happily Ever After

and here:

Fields of Athenry.

Enjoy? Please?

I'm not going to post much of a description of this exercise, except that it was inspired by bearsir's post here.

My own contributions to the Longest Night are, first, a speech I wrote senior year of high school in praise of storytelling, "Happily Ever After."

Click here to listen to it as an .m4a fileThe second, which is mostly for the gratification of ( Read more... )

I remember the moment I probably started becoming a linguist. It was early in the first term of the Clinton presidency, so I must have been eight or nine. I was in the shower, thinking deep thoughts - like you do - and it occurred to me that the purpose of language was to communicate information to people. I thought that was a pretty profound ( Read more... )

Hey, all -

So, a friend asked me a question the other day, and I had no good answer, so I thought I'd pass it on to you.

Is there a particular term used to describe a d/Deaf-hearing mixed family?  (Something similar to "interracial family," "blended family,"mudbloods," etc.)

I've certainly never seen/heard any such term, but maybe someone else has ( Read more... )

But this is actually pretty funny.  (Thanks to Bridget at lingnews.net for the tip.)

Spotted a month or so ago at Overheard in New York (typos corrected 'cause they were bugging me):

Belligerent white woman: Could you get out of the way?
Black teen: I be trying!
Belligerent white woman: You should speak gramatically correctly!
Smartass: "I be trying ( Read more... )

Hey, all ( Read more... )

So, the first week of classes here in Chicagoland has ended; a second week has begun, and oh, my, am I already swamped. Yippee. :c)

My schedule, should you find yourself caring what my schedule is like:

Monday -

1:30 pm - Phonetics
3:00 pm - Pragmatics

Tuesday -

10:30 am - Syntax I

Wednesday -

1:30 pm - Phonetics
3:00 pm - Pragmatics

7:00 ( Read more... )

With the amount of interpreting I get suckered into doing, I find it worthwhile to point out from time to time that I am not, in fact, an interpreter.

That said, I was reminded today of the first time I agreed to interpret the Vagina Monologues. I was fresh-faced and enthusiastic, having just finished working at the National Center On Deafness ( Read more... )

[written in the summer after senior year of high school...]I was working in the library at the Center on Deafness when the two ASL students came in. They weren't classmates of mine, but I saw that they were in the same place in the same textbook as my class, and as I overheard their conversation, I learned that they were being taught by a highly- ( Read more... )

From Kacirk, Jeffrey, The Word Museum : The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten:
banting: Doing banting, reducing superfluous fat by living on meat diet and abstaining from farinaceous food and vegetables, according to the method adopted by William Banting [1796-1878], a London cabinet-maker, once a very fat man. The word was introduced ( Read more... )