Re: Opinions on English

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:

> <laugh>  I tutor writing at Cornell U. and some of these poor freshmen
> who come in...<shaking head>  It depends on the particular kid, OC.
Both of the fellows I roomed with in college are engineers, so I know
all about the writing skills of certain groups of people. Strangely
enough, you'd think that a school of Vanderbilt's (my alma mater)
caliber would have a decent (creative) writing department, but it
doesn't. Great Classics dep't, tho.

> And
> people who aren't expressive on, say, paper can be *very* expressive, if
> not textbook-grammatical, when you take away their paper, put it face
> down, and ask them to explain their ideas.  (OC some of them just
> flounder, but usually that's because their ideas/logic in the paper
> aren't well thought-through, not because their language skills are
> completely out of whack.)
This is me. I can't write a paper to save my life, but I can talk up a storm.

> Is literacy (reading/writing) necessarily the
> best gauge of English use?
It's *A* gague, but not *THE* gague. I'm the opposite. I'm relatively
eloquent when it comes to writing because I love big words that are
packed with meaning, but when speaking, I tend to struggle for the right words.

> Also, I think my favourite variety of English to listen to is Black
> English.
I adore an Irish brogue. Especially coming from the mouth of a beautiful
green-eyed redhead. ;) Scots English is pretty spiffy, too, but not
quite so nice to hear from the mouth of a pretty lady. While it's not a
dialect, I also love a Russian accent. Russian has those throaty
swallowed vowels (pharyngealized, I think, but I haven't heard a native
speaker in a while) that carry over into their English. Really
mysterious. :)

> YHL
--
Daniel Seriff
microtonal@sericap.com
http://members.tripod.com/microtonal

Si iterum insanum me appelles, oculum alterum tuum edem.