Ned Danison, unedited

There I was, idly reading a New York Times article about how American college freshmen are more stressed out than ever before (which is a laugh, really, when you know something about the life of college students in China or India). One thing led to another, and I thought: Hmm, what is the percentage of [...]

[Read more →]

I posted a comment on Language Log a few days ago, and it appears it’s been removed. That’s okay, I’ll just make the point here. One way or the other, it amounts to less than a germ on a flea on a dead cat in the middle of nowhere. I have said this several times [...]

[Read more →]

(this is the continuation from here) I promised at the beginning I was going to say something about Chinese culture, but so far I have rambled on about the Americanness of the interaction between the guy and me in the restroom. Well, now for the anticlimax: in general I’d have to say that what transpired [...]

[Read more →]

I’m in a mood right now to say that I find the “save the languages” sentiment irritating. For a person in a linguistics-related field (I teach ESL for a living, have a degree in applied linguistics, and am working on another degree in language education), this is not an acceptable mood. Here is a typical [...]

[Read more →]

(This is the continuation from here.) Back to Kristof’s evidence for the “paramount importance for our children” to learn Spanish: (2) As the United States increasingly integrates economically with Latin America, Spanish will become more crucial in our lives. More Americans will take vacations in Latin America, do business in Spanish, and eventually move south [...]

[Read more →]

Today I had a nice talk with my 87-year-old mother. As usual, I felt compelled to justify myself for having spent so much time and so much money this late in my life to get a PhD. Besides the exaggerated sense of self-importance, the tweed jacket, office with books, flatulence, and hifalutin language, what do [...]

[Read more →]

Getting in the game relatively late in life, I’ve had over 40 years of being pickled in the tacit notion that there’s something magical about PhDs (you don’t just get a PhD, you become a PhD). PhDs wear tweed jackets and stand in front of bookcases while being interviewed as experts on some CNN news [...]

[Read more →]

The highly educated people of this world are important to the world in many ways. I’m not going to elaborate on that right now. In short, I will say that academics are repositories and conduits of knowledge, particularly in their teaching and journaling functions, and they are, ideally, innovators and sources of new knowledge. Being [...]

[Read more →]