Big little brains

Shakespeare could never

Learning languages is hard, especially if you're not getting the whole immersion experience. I feel your pain for those of us who have spent hours in a classroom trying desperately to understand what the teacher is saying in French or Spanish . Some lucky people have caught the language-learning bug, whether it be through traveling, Duolingo, or even growing up in a multilingual household, and I love that for them. As a former college student with a linguistics minor, I loved how linguistics as…

They're beautiful

It's pretty common knowledge that English is far from the most logical of languages. I can't imagine how difficult it is to make sense of words like “their”, “there,” and “they're." Spelling may not be quite as difficult as Gaelic or Welsh, but making sense of silent letters must be frustrating.

Punny

It's easy to write something and never go back to edit it. After all, there are only so many hours in a day to get things done, and in many jobs, if you throw something onto the page, often nobody will clock your errors. No matter your job, it's usually a good idea to know how to spell, and if you don't, it's a good idea to have someone who can spell-check your work. Our brains aren't necessarily wired to pick up on spelling errors immediately, especially when we're reading something quickly. L…

Need these in the US

😩

So many people think that if you're a programmer , you must have a purely analytical brain with no room for creativity. That is patently untrue because everyone who has programmed anything knows that there's one arena in the code that allows you to stretch your creative muscles fully. I'm talking, of course, about the comments. Comments allow you to fully justify and make up for whatever monstrosity you've coded thus far. They add a little brightness to your day when you return and find a frien…

Respect

Don't lose that streak

Language acquisition is not known to be quickly accomplishable or straightforward. Most of us spend four years in a high school classroom fruitlessly trying to learn French, Spanish, or German, to completely forget everything we've learned in the weeks after graduating. I even took three semesters of Russian language courses in college, which may or may not have been because my favorite comedian at the time was a fluent Russian-speaking drag queen. For monolingual divas like me, foreign languag…

Linguistic diversity is something that is not always praised in the workplace. Being bilingual is often seen as a boon for white-collar workers who know languages with reputations of being cosmopolitan or good to know for business. On the flip side, bilingual service workers tend to be perceived as being less intelligent when speaking in their native language.

Who knew?

They're descriptive, alright