| Re: OT Interesting video
On Fri, 19 Jan 2007 10:17:04 +0100 (CET), "Bill Westphal"
<aioe@westphal.org> wrote:
>> A monolingual
>> person can get by without ever questioning form or sound and could be
>> imitating his closest peers.
>
>If he lives in a closet, or works at the factory by day and watches
>the idiot box by night. Or the Peter Principle has kicked in. OR he
>just doesn't give a ****. Some great (and ordinary) people just have
>a stunning gap somewhere. The trick is discerning whether the gap is
>from carelessness, or beyond the persons control. Some very smart
>people spendtheir lives fighting that gap, and lose. I think the key
>in this case is that it's just the one word, and has nothing to do
>with anything else.
And he could be better read than social - the common freshman issue of
coming out of high school with a vocabulary picked up from reading
with little feedback from peers on how to pronounce the words
properly. I can still revert to a horrible pronunciation of
'clandestine' without much encouragement.
I've seen my share of tech people that have more reading vocabulary
well into their adult lives than they use with any degree in
conversation. At least most don't intersperse "and, uh" throughout
their speech. If someone speaks in complete sentences, I'll cut them a
lot of slack. And correct them later clandestinely, clandestin, uh, in
private.
Curtis L. Russell
Odenton, MD (USA)
Just someone on two wheels...
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