Linguistic Best Quotes

Why' questions have little value, at best they get justifications or long explanations which do nothing to change the situation.

It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, were to be included, such an arrangement would be the only possible one. Yet it might be that some ancient languages had altered very little and had given rise to few new languages, whilst others had altered much owing to the spreading, isolation, and state of civilisation of the several co-descended races, and had thus given rise to many new dialects and languages. The various degrees of difference between the languages of the same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even the only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and recent, by the closest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue.

Words, as. it happens, sometimes survive the millennia better than material objects, and they do so best in areas in which the culture changed only very slowly - as in the far north, where the intense winter cold discouraged immigrants.

The best definition comes from the linguist Max Weinreich: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

More seriously-and this is probably why there has been a lot of garbage talked about a lost generation-it was easy to see, all over the landscape of contemporary fiction, the devastating effect of the Thatcher years. So many of these writers wrote without hope. They had lost all ambition, all desire to to wrestle with the world. Their books dealt with tiny patches of the world, tiny pieces of human experience-a council estate, a mother, a father, a lost job. Very few writers had the courage or even the energy to bite off a big chunk of the universe and chew it over. Very few showed any linguistic or formal innovation. Many were dulled and therefore dull. (And then, even worse, there were the Hooray Henries and Sloanes who evidently thought that the day of the yuppie novel, and the Bellini-drinking, okay-yah fiction had dawned. Dukedoms and country-house bulimics abounded. It was plain that too may books were being published; that too many writers had found their way into print without any justification for it at all; that too many publishers had adopted a kind of random, scattergun policy of publishing for turnover and just hoping that something would strike a cord. When the general picture is so disheartening, it is easy to miss the good stuff. I agreed to be a judge for "Best of Young British Novelists II" because I wanted to find out for myself if the good stuff really was there. In my view, it is...One of my old schoolmasters was fond of devising English versions of the epigrams of Martial. I remember only one, his version of Martial's message to a particularly backward-looking critic: "You only praise the good old days We young 'uns get no mention. I don't see why I have to die To gain your kind attention.

But we have at best a superficial knowledge of the historical and archaeological and linguistic background of any topic we work on, and as knowledge grows, a deeper understanding of each region and the specific questions associated with it will be needed to make progress. Over the next two decades, I expect that ancient DNA specialists will be hired into every serious department of anthropology and archaeology, even history

What makes a man a good cricketer? Practice. What makes a man a good artist, a good sculptor, a good musician? Practice. What makes a man a good linguist, a good stenographer? Practice. What makes a man a good man? Practice. Nothing else. There is nothing capricious about religion. We do not get the soul in different ways, under different laws, from those in which we get the body and the mind. If a man does not exercise his arm he develops no biceps muscle; and if a man does not exercise his soul, he acquires no muscle in his soul, no strength of character, no vigor of moral fibre, no beauty of spiritual growth. Love is not a thing of enthusiastic emotion. It is a rich, strong, manly, vigorous expression of the whole round Christian character—the Christlike nature in its fullest development. And the constituents of this great character are only to be built up by CEASELESS PRACTICE.

The surname Kennedy means ‘ugly-head’. [He topped a 2009 poll to be named the best-looking President in US history, but JFK’s surname is actually the Old Irish epithet ceannéidigh, derived from ceann, meaning ‘head’, and éidigh, meaning ‘ugly’.]

In 2016, Rachael Tatman, a research fellow in linguistics at the University of Washington, found that Google’s speech-recognition software was 70% more likely to accurately recognise male speech than female speech – and it’s currently the best on the market.

Outwitting and second-guessing an organism of approximately equal mental abilities with non-overlapping interests, at best, and malevolent intentions, at worst, makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition. And a cognitive arms race clearly could propel a linguistic one.

The point which we consider it our duty to note is, that outside of and beyond his faith, as it were, the Bishop possessed an excess of love. In was in that quarter, quia multum amavit,—because he loved much—that he was regarded as vulnerable by "serious men," "grave persons" and "reasonable people"; favorite locutions of our sad world where egotism takes its word of command from pedantry. What was this excess of love? It was a serene benevolence which overflowed men, as we have already pointed out, and which, on occasion, extended even to things. He lived without disdain. He was indulgent towards God's creation. Every man, even the best, has within him a thoughtless harshness which he reserves for animals. The Bishop of D—— had none of that harshness, which is peculiar to many priests, nevertheless. He did not go as far as the Brahmin, but he seemed to have weighed this saying of Ecclesiastes: "Who knoweth whither the soul of the animal goeth?" Hideousness of aspect, deformity of instinct, troubled him not, and did not arouse his indignation. He was touched, almost softened by them. It seemed as though he went thoughtfully away to seek beyond the bounds of life which is apparent, the cause, the explanation, or the excuse for them. He seemed at times to be asking God to commute these penalties. He examined without wrath, and with the eye of a linguist who is deciphering a palimpsest, that portion of chaos which still exists in nature. This revery sometimes caused him to utter odd sayings. One morning he was in his garden, and thought himself alone, but his sister was walking behind him, unseen by him: suddenly he paused and gazed at something on the ground; it was a large, black, hairy, frightful spider. His sister heard him say:—

The difficulty of learning the dead languages does not arise from any superior abstruseness in the languages themselves, but in their being dead, and the pronunciation entirely lost. It would be the same thing with any other language when it becomes dead. The best Greek linguist that now exists does not understand Greek so well as a Grecian plowman did, or a Grecian milkmaid; and the same for the Latin, compared with a plowman or a milkmaid of the Romans; and with respect to pronunciation and idiom, not so well as the cows that she milked. It would therefore be advantageous to the state of learning to abolish the study of the dead languages, and to make learning consist, as it originally did, in scientific knowledge.

In the area of linguistics, there are major language groups: Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, English, Portuguese, Greek, German, French, and so on. Most of us grow up learning the language of our parents and siblings, which becomes our primary or native tongue. Later, we may learn additional languages but usually with much more effort. These become our secondary languages. We speak and understand best our native language. We feel most comfortable speaking that language. The more we use a secondary language, the more comfortable we become conversing in it. If we speak only our primary language and encounter someone else who speaks only his or her primary language, which is different from ours, our communication will be limited. We must rely on pointing, grunting, drawing pictures, or acting out our ideas. We can communicate, but it is awkward. Language differences are part and parcel of human culture. If we are to communicate effectively across cultural lines, we must learn the language of those with whom we wish to communicate. In the area of love, it is similar. Your emotional love language and the language of your spouse may be as different as Chinese from English. No matter how hard you try to express love in English, if your spouse understands only Chinese, you will never understand how to love each other. My friend on the plane was speaking the language of “Affirming Words” to his third wife when he said, “I told her how beautiful she was. I told her I loved her. I told her how proud I was to be her husband.” He was speaking love, and he was sincere, but she did not understand his language. Perhaps she was looking for love in his behavior and didn’t see it. Being sincere is not enough. We must be willing to learn our spouse’s primary love language if we are to be effective communicators of love.

She had imagined her mind would be bare before his, naked under a scorching desert sun, with neither shelter nor refuge. Instead, it was like playing hide-and-seek in the light and shadow of a forest, discovering and inventing a new language of double meaning, subtlety, poetry, and image. As a linguist, she was captivated; as a lover, she was enraptured. Nothing could be said the same way twice.

There is also a reassuring modesty in more recent claims made for a ‘theory of translation.’ After Babel tries to show that there cannot, in any strict or responsible sense, be any such ‘theory.’ The cerebral proceedings which would have to underlie and explain it are simply inaccessible. At best, we have narratives of translational praxis." - George Steiner in the Preface to the third edition of 'After Babel'.

He was the youngest and newest member of a four-man team. Hence, low man on the totem pole. Except that calling a new guy the low man on the totem pole was completely ass-backward. Totem poles were what? Twenty, thirty feet high? Native Americans weren’t dumb. They put the most important guy at the bottom. At eye level. What important guy wanted to be twenty or thirty feet off the ground, where no one could see him? Like supermarkets. The eye-level shelf was reserved for the best stuff. The high-margin items. The big corporations hired experts to figure out stuff like that. Eye level was what it was all about. Thus the low man was really the high man, and the high man was really the low man. In a manner of speaking. A common misperception. A kind of linguistic inversion. Caleb Carter didn’t know how it had come about. Night watch was

A Cyclops on a unicycle juggling three giant eyeballs couldn’t compare to the balanced vision my writing presents. In fact, noted linguist and translation expert Dora J. Arod had these flattering words to say about my writing: “I wouldn’t read Jarod’s writing—not even if he paid me to read it. And he does pay me to read his writing, but that doesn’t mean I do.” Of course the quote continued on, but that was the only part that was praising.

Displaying the key elements of L1 and L2 acquisition, O’Neill, R. (1998) assesses that acquiring L2 as children acquire their L1 is a “wishful thinking and… based on a profound misconception about the nature of L2 learning - just as it is a misconception about how L1 acquisition occurs”. Hereinafter, O’Neill, R. (1998) maintains that “the best way to explore the differences between the two processes is to view them side-by-side – in parallel”.

You know, at Cambridge I suppose my friends from college would have been a few modern linguists, a couple of historians, four mathematicians, a couple of architects, an anthropologist, etc. You know, a total mix of people who all hung out together. I think that’s hugely beneficial. I think actually that’s the best thing to take from British universities; the rest of the teachings you can take or leave but the college system is really smart, you know, it’s a really, really good idea to bundle people together.

Sonnet of Languages Turkish is the language of love, Spanish is the language of revolution. Swedish is the language of resilience, English is the language of translation. Portuguese is the language of adventure, German is the language of discipline. French is the language of passion, Italian is the language of cuisine. With over 7000 languages in the world, Handful of tongues fall short in a sonnet. But you can rest assured of one thing, Every language does something the very best. Each language is profoundly unique in its own way. When they come together, they light the human way.

When he was twenty-three years old, he (George Fox) saw the inner light in a vision. For him it symbolized the spirit against the letter, silence against chatter, experience against dogma, and equality against all who build inequality on authority and power, be it of the state or religion. His mistrust of the official Anglican Church was immense. He spoke with disdain of the "towered houses" and was tormented by the ringing of church bells. He frequently interrupted preachers, standing in the church's doorway, a hat covering his head, and uttering threatening words toward the pulpit, causing great excitement in the gathered congregation. It often resulted in Fox being beaten up, banished, and, later on, jailed for years. What aroused his ire, above all, were the priests who, without ever having experienced or even looked for illumination, presented themselves as servants of God but, in truth, comprised a "society of cannibals." It is "not enough to have been educated in Oxford or Cambridge in order to become capable for and efficient in the service of Christ. To this day it is difficult for many Friends to speak of "Quaker theology." The Friends believe in Scripture - George Fox knew it by heart - but they also believe that the Spirit transcends Scripture and that the inner light is experienced by all human beings without human mediation. "The inner light," "the inward teacher" are names that the early Quakers gave to their experiences of the Spirit. They believe that everyone can meet the "Christ within," even though he has different names in different ages and places and is not tied to any form of religion. This light is open to everyone and, yet, it is not simply the natural light of reason. In a conversation that Fox had with Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, he vigorously resisted this rational interpretation. In every human being is "that of God," hidden, eclipsed, often forgotten. Linguistically a clumsy expression at best, "that of God in everyone" is the foundation of human dignity. In addition, it is the admonition to believe in it, to discover it in each and everyone and to respond to it. Fox said, "Walk joyfully on the earth and respond to that of God in every human being.

Every once in a while during the preparation of these lectures, I find myself asking — and others asking me — what's the relevance of all this musico-linguistics? Can it lead us to an answer of Charles Ives' Unanswered Question — whither music? — and even if it eventually can, does it matter? The world totters, governments crumble, and we are poring over musical phonology, and now syntax. Isn't it a flagrant case of elitism? Well, in a way it is; certainly not elitism of class — economic, social, or ethnic — but of curiosity, that special, inquiring quality of the intelligence. And it was ever thus. But these days, the search for meaning-through-beauty and vice versa becomes even more important as each day mediocrity and art-mongering increasingly uglify our lives; and the day when this search for John Keats' truth-beauty ideal becomes irrelevant, then we can all shut up and go back to our caves. Meanwhile, to use that unfortunate word again, it is thoroughly relevant; and I as a musician feel that there has to be a way of speaking about music with intelligent but nonprofessional music lovers who don't know a stretto from a diminished fifth; and the best way I have found so far is by setting up a working analogy with language, since language is something everyone shares and uses and knows about.

A striking example from the history of writing is the origin of the syllabary devised in Arkansas around 1820 by a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah, for writing the Cherokee language. Sequoyah observed that white people made marks on paper, and that they derived great advantage by using those marks to record and repeat lengthy speeches. However, the detailed operations of those marks remained a mystery to him, since (like most Cherokees before 1820) Sequoyah was illiterate and could neither speak nor read English. Because he was a blacksmith, Sequoyah began by devising an accounting system to help him keep track of his customers’ debts. He drew a picture of each customer; then he drew circles and lines of various sizes to represent the amount of money owed. Around 1810, Sequoyah decided to go on to design a system for writing the Cherokee language. He again began by drawing pictures, but gave them up as too complicated and too artistically demanding. He next started to invent separate signs for each word, and again became dissatisfied when he had coined thousands of signs and still needed more. Finally, Sequoyah realized that words were made up of modest numbers of different sound bites that recurred in many different words—what we would call syllables. He initially devised 200 syllabic signs and gradually reduced them to 85, most of them for combinations of one consonant and one vowel. As one source of the signs themselves, Sequoyah practiced copying the letters from an English spelling book given to him by a schoolteacher. About two dozen of his Cherokee syllabic signs were taken directly from those letters, though of course with completely changed meanings, since Sequoyah did not know the English meanings. For example, he chose the shapes D, R, b, h to represent the Cherokee syllables a, e, si, and ni, respectively, while the shape of the numeral 4 was borrowed for the syllable se. He coined other signs by modifying English letters, such as designing the signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively. Still other signs were entirely of his creation, such as , , and for ho, li, and nu, respectively. Sequoyah’s syllabary is widely admired by professional linguists for its good fit to Cherokee sounds, and for the ease with which it can be learned. Within a short time, the Cherokees achieved almost 100 percent literacy in the syllabary, bought a printing press, had Sequoyah’s signs cast as type, and began printing books and newspapers. Cherokee writing remains one of the best-attested examples of a script that arose through idea diffusion. We know that Sequoyah received paper and other writing materials, the idea of a writing system, the idea of using separate marks, and the forms of several dozen marks. Since, however, he could neither read nor write English, he acquired no details or even principles from the existing scripts around him. Surrounded by alphabets he could not understand, he instead independently reinvented a syllabary, unaware that the Minoans of Crete had already invented another syllabary 3,500 years previously.

Palo Mayombe is perhaps best known for its display of human skulls in iron cauldrons and accompanied by necromantic practices that contribute to its eerie reputation of being a cult of antinomian and hateful sorcerers. This murky reputation is from time to time reinforced by uninformed journalists and moviemakers who present Palo Mayombe in similar ways as Vodou has been presented through the glamour and horror of Hollywood. It is the age old fear of the unknown and of powers that threaten the established order that are spawned from the umbra of Palo Mayombe. The cult is marked by ambivalence replicating an intense spectre of tension between all possible contrasts, both spiritual and social. This is evident both in the history of Kongo inspired sorcery and practices as well as the tension between present day practitioners and the spiritual conclaves of the cult. Palo Mayombe can be seen either as a religion in its own right or a Kongo inspired cult. This distinction perhaps depends on the nature of ones munanso (temple) and rama (lineage). Personally, I see Palo Mayombe as a religious cult of Creole Sorcery developed in Cuba. The Kongolese heritage derives from several different and distinct regions in West Africa that over time saw a metamorphosis of land, cultures and religions giving Palo Mayombe a unique expression in its variety, but without losing its distinct nucleus. In the history of Palo Mayombe we find elite families of Kongolese aristocracy that contributed to shaping African history and myth, conflicts between the Kongolese and explorers, with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade being the blood red thread in its development. The name Palo Mayombe is a reference to the forest and nature of the Mayombe district in the upper parts of the deltas of the Kongo River, what used to be the Kingdom of Loango. For the European merchants, whether sent by the Church to convert the people or by a king greedy for land and natural resources, everything south of present day Nigeria to the beginning of the Kalahari was simply Kongo. This un-nuanced perception was caused by the linguistic similarities and of course the prejudice towards these ‘savages’ and their ‘primitive’ cultures. To write a book about Palo Mayombe is a delicate endeavor as such a presentation must be sensitive both to the social as well as the emotional memory inherited by the religion. I also consider it important to be true to the fundamental metaphysical principles of the faith if a truthful presentation of the nature of Palo Mayombe is to be given. The few attempts at presenting Palo Mayombe outside ethnographic and anthropological dissertations have not been very successful. They have been rather fragmented attempts demonstrating a lack of sensitivity not only towards the cult itself, but also its roots. Consequently a poor understanding of Palo Mayombe has been offered, often borrowing ideas and concepts from Santeria and Lucumi to explain what is a quite different spirituality. I am of the opinion that Palo Mayombe should not be explained on the basis of the theological principles of Santeria. Santeria is Yoruba inspired and not Kongo inspired and thus one will often risk imposing concepts on Palo Mayombe that distort a truthful understanding of the cult. To get down to the marrow; Santeria is a Christianized form of a Yoruba inspired faith – something that should make the great differences between Santeria and Palo Mayombe plain. Instead, Santeria is read into Palo Mayombe and the cult ends up being presented at best in a distorted form. I will accordingly refrain from this form of syncretism and rather present Palo Mayombe as a Kongo inspired cult of Creole Sorcery that is quite capable

Computers speak machine language," Hiro says. "It's written in ones and zeroes -- binary code. At the lowest level, all computers are programmed with strings of ones and zeroes. When you program in machine language, you are controlling the computer at its brainstem, the root of its existence. It's the tongue of Eden. But it's very difficult to work in machine language because you go crazy after a while, working at such a minute level. So a whole Babel of computer languages has been created for programmers: FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, LISP, Pascal, C, PROLOG, FORTH. You talk to the computer in one of these languages, and a piece of software called a compiler converts it into machine language. But you never can tell exactly what the compiler is doing. It doesn't always come out the way you want. Like a dusty pane or warped mirror. A really advanced hacker comes to understand the true inner workings of the machine -- he sees through the language he's working in and glimpses the secret functioning of the binary code -- becomes a Ba'al Shem of sorts." "Lagos believed that the legends about the tongue of Eden were exaggerated versions of true events," the Librarian says. "These legends reflected nostalgia for a time when people spoke Sumerian, a tongue that was superior to anything that came afterward." "Is Sumerian really that good?" "Not as far as modern-day linguists can tell," the Librarian says. "As I mentioned, it is largely impossible for us to grasp. Lagos suspected that words worked differently in those days. If one's native tongue influences the physical structure of the developing brain, then it is fair to say that the Sumerians -- who spoke a language radically different from anything in existence today -- had fundamentally different brains from yours. Lagos believed that for this reason, Sumerian was a language ideally suited to the creation and propagation of viruses. That a virus, once released into Sumer, would spread rapidly and virulently, until it had infected everyone." "Maybe Enki knew that also," Hiro says. "Maybe the nam-shub of Enki wasn't such a bad thing. Maybe Babel was the best thing that ever happened to us.

A famous British writer is revealed to be the author of an obscure mystery novel. An immigrant is granted asylum when authorities verify he wrote anonymous articles critical of his home country. And a man is convicted of murder when he’s connected to messages painted at the crime scene. The common element in these seemingly disparate cases is “forensic linguistics”—an investigative technique that helps experts determine authorship by identifying quirks in a writer’s style. Advances in computer technology can now parse text with ever-finer accuracy. Consider the recent outing of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling as the writer of The Cuckoo’s Calling , a crime novel she published under the pen name Robert Galbraith. England’s Sunday Times , responding to an anonymous tip that Rowling was the book’s real author, hired Duquesne University’s Patrick Juola to analyze the text of Cuckoo , using software that he had spent over a decade refining. One of Juola’s tests examined sequences of adjacent words, while another zoomed in on sequences of characters; a third test tallied the most common words, while a fourth examined the author’s preference for long or short words. Juola wound up with a linguistic fingerprint—hard data on the author’s stylistic quirks. He then ran the same tests on four other books: The Casual Vacancy , Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter novel, plus three stylistically similar crime novels by other female writers. Juola concluded that Rowling was the most likely author of The Cuckoo’s Calling , since she was the only one whose writing style showed up as the closest or second-closest match in each of the tests. After consulting an Oxford linguist and receiving a concurring opinion, the newspaper confronted Rowling, who confessed. Juola completed his analysis in about half an hour. By contrast, in the early 1960s, it had taken a team of two statisticians—using what was then a state-of-the-art, high-speed computer at MIT—three years to complete a project to reveal who wrote 12 unsigned Federalist Papers. Robert Leonard, who heads the forensic linguistics program at Hofstra University, has also made a career out of determining authorship. Certified to serve as an expert witness in 13 states, he has presented evidence in cases such as that of Christopher Coleman, who was arrested in 2009 for murdering his family in Waterloo, Illinois. Leonard testified that Coleman’s writing style matched threats spray-painted at his family’s home (photo, left). Coleman was convicted and is serving a life sentence. Since forensic linguists deal in probabilities, not certainties, it is all the more essential to further refine this field of study, experts say. “There have been cases where it was my impression that the evidence on which people were freed or convicted was iffy in one way or another,” says Edward Finegan, president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. Vanderbilt law professor Edward Cheng, an expert on the reliability of forensic evidence, says that linguistic analysis is best used when only a handful of people could have written a given text. As forensic linguistics continues to make headlines, criminals may realize the importance of choosing their words carefully. And some worry that software also can be used to obscure distinctive written styles. “Anything that you can identify to analyze,” says Juola, “I can identify and try to hide.

every day conversation. When this happens the meanings behind many words become lost and its original intent may never be positively identified. It is left to scholars and linguist to offer their best educated guess. Rarely is there one hundred percent agreement on every rendering, although a majority opinion can exist for many words and we can be relatively certain of their renderings. But for every such word there are words whose renderings are hotly debated among scholars. After Hebrew died, Aramaic became the common language of the people and was the common language spoken in Israel at the time of Christ. Jesus came from Galilee which was located in the Northern territory of Israel where they spoke a Northern or Old Galilean dialect of Hebrew which was more idiomatic and colloquial than the Southern dialect spoken in Judea where the Pharisees and other religious leaders lived. Up until just a few years ago it was believed that the Old Galilean Aramaic dialect was also a dead language until it was discovered

what of the Old Testament? This was written in Hebrew except for portions of the Book of Daniel and the Book of Ezra which were written in Aramaic. Hebrew, by the mere fact that it is a dead language, leaves us open to much debate as to proper modern English word to apply to an ancient word that has been dead for twenty five hundred years. When it comes to dealing with a dead language we are at the mercy of our linguist and various other scholars to guide us into tracing the origins and roots of an ancient dead language. A translator must not ignore the science of linguistics when translating the Word of God. Yet, any schooled linguist will tell you that the translations you finally arrive at are still just man’s best guess. The proof of this lies in the numerous modern English translations of the Bible that we have today. They are all good, even excellent and well documented translations, translated by skilled translators and yet they all have subtle differences because their final translations are still man’s best guess.

Lin­guists have a name for a state­ment with a seem­ingly inevitable des­ti­na­tion that ends up some­where else: a gar­den path sen­tence. It’s typ­i­cal in com­edy, as in a mil­lion Grou­cho Marx lines: “Out­side of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” This device is also called a “para­pros­dokian,” which means “con­trary to expec­ta­tion,” though there is some con­tro­versy over whether this is really a term from clas­si­cal rhetoric or a mod­ern neologism.

Split infinitive This, the saying or writing of to really think, to boldly go, etc., is the best known of the imaginary rules that petty linguistic tyrants seek to lay upon the English language. There is no grammatical reason whatever against splitting an infinitive and often the avoidance of one lands the writer in trouble, as in Fowler’s example: The men are declared strongly to favour a strike. Here, in the course of evading the suspect to strongly favour, the writer has left the reader in some doubt whether strongly applies to the declaring or the favouring. As Fowler remarks elsewhere in his article: It is of no avail merely to fling oneself desperately out of temptation; one must do it so that no traces of the struggle remain; that is, sentences must be thoroughly remodelled instead of having a word lifted from its original place and dumped elsewhere. A warning that every writer, at least, should take generally to heart. Towards the end of the piece, Fowler lays down his recommended policy: We will split infinitives rather than be barbarous or artificial; more than that, we will freely admit that sufficient recasting will get rid of any s[plit] i[nfinitive] without involving either of those faults, [and] yet reserve to ourselves the right of deciding in each case whether recasting is worth while. The whole Fowler notice deserves and repays perusal, all 1800-odd words of it. See MEU, pp. 558–561. That last sentence of his is as true as any such sentence can be. But although he was writing nearly seventy years ago, the ‘rule’ against split infinitives shows no signs of yielding to reason. This fact prompts some gloomy conclusions. One such is that anti-split-infinitive fanatics are beyond reason. Another is that, whatever anybody may say, split infinitives are still to be avoided in most circumstances. Consider: people with strong erroneous views about ‘correct’ English are just the sort of people who consider your application for a job, decide whether you are ‘educated’ or not, wonder about your general suitability for this and that (e.g. your inclusion in a reading list). Do you want to be right or do you want to get on? – sorry, to succeed. I personally think that to split an infinitive is perfectly legitimate, but I do my best never to split one in public and I would certainly not advise anybody else to do so, even today. Today we have reached a point at which some of our grammatical martinets have not actually been taught grammar, with the result that they are as hard as ever on the big SI without being at all clear what it is. Indeed, even their slightly better-educated predecessors were often shaky on the point, seeming to think that a phrase like ‘X is thought to be easily led’ contained an example. Any ungainly departure from natural word-order is likely to betray a fear that a splittable infinitive may be lurking somewhere in the reeds. When a correspondent, a self-declared Yorkshireman, demands of the editor of The Times, ‘Have you lost completely your sense of proportion?’ seasoned campaigners will sniff the air, in this case and others without result. But nobody is ever quite safe.

Research on comprehension-based approaches to second language acquisition shows that learners can make considerable progress if they have sustained exposure to language they understand. The evidence also suggests, however, that comprehension-based activities may best be seen as an excellent way to begin learning and as a supplement to other kinds of learning for more advanced learners. Comprehension of meaningful language is the foundation of language acquisition. Active listening and reading for meaning are valuable components of classroom teachers’ pedagogical practices. Nevertheless, considerable research and experience challenge the hypothesis that comprehensible input is enough. VanPatten’s research showed that forcing students to rely on specific linguistic features in order to interpret meaning increased the chances that they would be able to use these features in their own second language production. Another response to comprehension-based approaches is Merrill Swain’s (1985) comprehensible output hypothesis. She argues that it is when students have to produce language that they begin to see the limitations of their interlanguage (see Chapter 4). However, as we will see in the discussion of the ‘Let’s talk’ proposal, if learners are in situations where their teachers and classmates understand them without difficulty, they may need additional help in overcoming those limitations.

The first eye-opener came in the 1970s, when DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, organized the first large-scale speech recognition project. To everyone’s surprise, a simple sequential learner of the type Chomsky derided handily beat a sophisticated knowledge-based system. Learners like it are now used in just about every speech recognizer, including Siri. Fred Jelinek, head of the speech group at IBM, famously quipped that “every time I fire a linguist, the recognizer’s performance goes up.” Stuck in the knowledge-engineering mire, computational linguistics had a near-death experience in the late 1980s. Since then, learning-based methods have swept the field, to the point where it’s hard to find a paper devoid of learning in a computational linguistics conference. Statistical parsers analyze language with accuracy close to that of humans, where hand-coded ones lagged far behind. Machine translation, spelling correction, part-of-speech tagging, word sense disambiguation, question answering, dialogue, summarization: the best systems in these areas all use learning. Watson, the Jeopardy! computer champion, would not have been possible without it.

for facts to be assiduously distinguished from opinions in a way apparently striking and bizarre to a speaker of, say, Arabic, Swedish or Polish. ‘I think’, ‘to the best of my knowledge’, ‘as far as I can tell’: such formulae are apt to bemuse speakers of these and many other languages. The notion of ‘hard facts’ is peculiar to English, and so, it seems, are many of our elaborate linguistic mechanisms for avoiding telling people what to do – our modes of inviting and offering and suggesting, which so strenuously avoid impinging on the autonomy of those we are addressing, and which can seem archaic or just plain weird to foreigners.30

Correlations made by big data are likely to reinforce negative bias. Because big data often relies on historical data or at least the status quo, it can easily reproduce discrimination against disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities. The propensity models used in many algorithms can bake in a bias against someone who lived in the zip code of a low-income neighborhood at any point in his or her life. If an algorithm used by human resources companies queries your social graph and positively weighs candidates with the most existing connections to a workforce, it makes it more difficult to break in in the first place. In effect, these algorithms can hide bias behind a curtain of code. Big data is, by its nature, soulless and uncreative. It nudges us this way and that for reasons we are not meant to understand. It strips us of our privacy and puts our mistakes, secrets, and scandals on public display. It reinforces stereotypes and historical bias. And it is largely unregulated because we need it for economic growth and because efforts to try to regulate it have tended not to work; the technologies are too far-reaching and are not built to recognize the national boundaries of our world’s 196 sovereign nation-states. Yet would it be best to try to shut down these technologies entirely if we could? No. Big data simultaneously helps solve global challenges while creating an entirely new set of challenges. It’s our best chance at feeding 9 billion people, and it will help solve the problem of linguistic division that is so old its explanation dates back to the Old Testament and the Tower of Babel. Big data technologies will enable us to discover cancerous cells at 1 percent the size of what can be detected using today’s technologies, saving tens of millions of lives. The best approach to big data might be one put forward by the Obama campaign’s chief technology officer, Michael Slaby, who said, “There’s going to be a constant mix between your qualitative experience and your quantitative experience. And at times, they’re going to be at odds with each other, and at times they’re going to be in line. And I think it’s all about the blend. It’s kind of like you have a mixing board, and you have to turn one up sometimes, and turn down the other. And you never want to be just one or the other, because if it’s just one, then you lose some of the soul.” Slaby has made an impressive career out of developing big data tools, but even he recognizes that these tools work best when governed by human judgment. The choices we make about how we manage data will be as important as the decisions about managing land during the agricultural age and managing industry during the industrial age. We have a short window of time—just a few years, I think—before a set of norms set in that will be nearly impossible to reverse. Let’s hope humans accept the responsibility for making these decisions and don’t leave it to the machines.

think it’s best for Raj to do as he suggested, continue getting the database populated with at least the Great Gallery stones, and then if we haven’t found the key yet, maybe those in the inner passageways, and possibly the chambers. But the Great Gallery is intriguing. It’s another anomaly. No other pyramid that I know of has one. I think it’s another attention-getter.” “You could be right, but what about the language?” “I already said it. We need a linguist. Let’s talk to Mark, see if he knows anyone.

hypothesis was influenced by cognitive theory, but more recent work has been motivated by sociocultural theory. Using the term collaborative dialogue, Swain and Lapkin and their colleagues have carried out a series of studies to determine how second language learners co-construct linguistic knowledge while engaging in production tasks (i.e. speaking and writing) that simultaneously draw their attention to form and meaning. As shown in Communication task B in Chapter 5, learners were testing hypotheses about the correct forms to use, discussing them together and deciding what forms were best to express their meaning.

So, what every parent would want their college kids to know: Look for patterns, they are always there. Challenge all my assumptions. Change, Jim, can be good. Use all my senses, even the ones I am not aware of. Understand the world from another’s perspective, not mine. Listen more, talk less; if I do talk, ask questions. Everyone is doing the best job they can given the limitations of their beliefs. My job is to get people to use the best of themselves to get better, to improve. Everyone has a chance; if something didn’t work, it’s because of my limitations, not the other person’s. I am ultimately accountable for and own the outcomes of my choices. All of them.

Deutsch: Absolutely. Yes. Programs built in Python and Java—once you get past a certain fairly small scale—have all the same problems except for storage corruption that you have in C or C++. The essence of the problem is that there is no linguistic mechanism for understanding or stating or controlling or reasoning about patterns of information sharing and information access in the system. Passing a pointer and storing a pointer are localized operations, but their consequences are to implicitly create this graph. I'm not even going to talk about multithreaded applications—even in single-threaded applications you have data that's flowing between different parts of the program. You have references that are being propagated to different parts of the program. And even in the best-designed programs, you have these two or three or four different complex patterns of things that are going on and no way to describe or reason about or characterize large units in a way that actually constrains what happens in the small. People have taken runs at this problem. But I don't think there have been any breakthroughs and I don't think there have been any sort of widely accepted or widely used solutions.

Prosperous non-white nations such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea would be very desirable destinations for Third-World immigrants, and if those countries opened their borders, they would quickly be filled with foreigners. They keep their borders closed because they know they cannot have the same Japan or Taiwan with different people. Israel, likewise, is determined to remain a Jewish state because Israelis know they cannot have the same Israel with different people. In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved tough measures to deport illegal immigrants, calling them a “threat to the character of the country.” Linguistically, culturally, and racially, Japan is homogeneous. This means Japanese never even think about a host of problems that torment Americans. Since Japan has only one race, no one worries about racism. There was no civil rights movement, no integration struggle, and no court-ordered busing. There is no bilingual education, and no affirmative action. There is no tyranny of “political correctness,” and no one is clamoring for a “multi-cultural curriculum.” When a company needs to hire someone, it doesn’t give a thought to “ethnic balance;” it just hires the best person. No Japanese are sent to reeducation seminars because of “insensitivity.” Japan has no Civil Rights Commission or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It has no Equal Housing Act or Voting Rights Act. No one worries about drawing up voting districts to make sure minorities are elected. There are no noisy ethnic groups trying to influence foreign policy. Japanese do not know what a “hate crime” would be. And they know that an American-style immigration policy would change everything. They want Japan to remain Japanese. This is a universal view among non-whites. Those countries that send the largest numbers of emigrants to the United States—Mexico, India, China—permit essentially no immigration at all. For them, their nations are exclusive homelands for their own people. Most people refuse to share their homelands. Robert Pape, a leading expert on suicide bombing, explains that its motive is almost always nationalism, not religious fanaticism. Whether in Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Chechnya, Kashmir, the West Bank, Iraq, or Afghanistan, its main objective is to drive out occupying aliens. It is only Western nations—and only within the last few decades—that have ever voluntarily accepted large-scale immigration that could reduce the inhabitants to a racial minority. What the United States and other European-derived nations are doing is without historical precedent.

What do you get if you cross a chicken with a cement mixer? A brick-layer. **** Who invented fractions? Henry the 1/8th. **** How does Jack Frost get to work? By icicle. **** What do you call two robbers? A pair of knickers. **** There is a story that the noted linguist JL Austin was giving a lecture in which he stated: "Two negatives can make a positive but two positives can never make a negative." A voice from the lecture hall goes: "Yeah, yeah." **** Where does Santa work out? Down the gymney. **** Two planets meet. The first asks: "So, how are you?" The second answers: "Well, I'm sick, I've got Homo Sapiens." The first replies: "Oh, I know that one. No worries, it'll pass." ****

In linguistics, a hyponym is a word that is a more specific subset of a larger, more general word. The more general word is called a hypernym. Tequila is a hyponym of mezcal. Mezcal is the hypernym of tequila.8 In the abstract, that relationship reads like: All Xs are Ys; not all Ys are Xs. What it means here is that all tequilas are mezcal, but not all mezcals are tequila. HOPE YOU’RE NOT IN A RUSH Now, it’s true that many wines are aged for a number of years, and many of the best whiskies can be aged anywhere from six to twenty years before they’re released.

While Dixieland men may have struggled with a language inferiority complex, the opposite is true of Southern women. We’ve always known our accent is an asset, a special trait that makes us stand out from our Northern peers in all the best ways. For one thing, men can’t resist it. Our slow, musical speech drips with charm, and with the implied delights of a long, slow afternoon sipping home-brewed tea on the back porch. In educated circles, Southern speech is considered aristocratic, and for good reason: it is far closer linguistically to the Queen’s English than any other American accent. Scottish, Irish, and rural English formed the basis of our language years ago, and the accent has held strong ever since. In the poor hill country there haven’t been many other linguistic influences, and in Charleston you’d be hard pressed to tell a British tourist from a native. In the Delta of Mississippi and Louisiana, the mixture of French, West Indian, and Southern formed two dialects--Cajun and Creole--that in some places are far more like French than English.

The tagline “thanks for listening,” which has been so copied and admired, derived from the successful 1976 senatorial campaign of S. I. Hayakawa. Hayakawa was a professor of linguistics at San Francisco State University (before he became university president). He knew how to use the English language. The calm manner of his radio commercials, his thanking the listener for staying tuned, really impressed me and, six years later, provided the chassis and the closer for Trader Joe’s commercials. We used the commercials to keep us in front of the public between editions of the Fearless Flyer. We didn’t do both at the same time, or else the stores would have been overwhelmed with business. In short, the radio commercials were and are extremely effective. In the course of this, my voice became one of the best known in California.

The historical record is unequivocal. The United States is ham-handed and brutal in conceiving and executing clandestine operations, and it is simply no good at espionage; its operatives never have enough linguistic and cultural knowledge of target countries to recruit spies effectively. The CIA also appears to be one of the most easily penetrated espionage organizations on the planet. From the beginning, it has repeatedly lost its assets to double agents.

Even for onomatopoeic words, however, there is a large measure of arbitrariness: cuckoos are called ‘cuckoos’ only in English, and to return to our canine example above, there is a remarkable divergence cross-linguistically even in the way barking is represented in print: English dogs go woof! woof! while French ones go ouah! ouah! and Russian ones gav! gav! in spite of the fact that there are no linguistic differences (to the best of our knowledge) between dogs of different nationalities.

The best use of language is the one that helps you surpass language.

What we have at present in Scotland is a linguistic continuum between Scots-English - the cumulative result of the attempts of several generations of Scots to speak English - and what is left of our own language, now largely confined to those who have not been deracinated by the influwnce of educational policy. Nevertheless, the Scots language still survives, incipient and fragmented, in the speech of the people and in a substantial body of recorded literature, although what is left of spoken Scots is coming under increasing pressure from English as a result of the influence of British radio and television. The problem for those who are interested in the survival and further evolution of Scots, is not how best to doctor it so that is can masquerade as English, but how to distinguish it clearly from English in writing, as a language which has a character and rules of its own.

Rex Stout, creator of orchid-loving detective Nero Wolfe, achieved a new wave of popularity on this amusing series. Axis shortwave broadcasts were monitored by a staff of linguists at the CBS listening station; what were considered the most outrageous lies were then typed into a weekly log of about 30,000 words. Stout would read this, select up to 150 items he found most interesting, and give them to Sue Taylor White (who had given up a job writing soap operas to do war work) for researching. The most entertaining lies, as well as those lending themselves to what Time called Stout’s “lunch-counter sarcasm,” were used on the air. The lies were read rapid-fire by an announcer, often in mock German or Japanese accents, and were just as quickly countered by Stout. When it was claimed that all the best American baseball players were German, Stout’s reply was typical: “They’ve got the facts, no getting away from it. Take the six leading batters in the major leagues—Williams, Gordon, Wright, Reiser, Lombardi, Medwick. Some bunch of Germans. Also the great German prizefighter, Joe Louis.

How to account for [Eastern Europe's] wondrous and mystifying melange [of peoples]? Stempowski's answer had to do with nations and states. In the West, he wrote, the equation between ethnic and linguistic belonging and political allegiance began very early. Beginning in the Middle Ages, priests and prelates imposed their particular strands of Christianity on the populations, executing heretics and unbelievers. Meanwhile kings expelled their Jews and confiscated their property. If a realm contained Muslims, they were likewise forced to convert or were banished. By the nineteenth century, national belonging replaced religion as the dominant template to be imposed on society. Little armies of bureaucrats and educators fanned out into the countryside, making sure that all the people there spoke the same language. Across the territory conquered by the French kings, peasants were *made* into French people, and if the Scots didn't concurrently become English, they certainly adopted the English language. Virtually everywhere, the machinery of the state worked like a giant steamroller, ironing out differences wherever they could be found. In all these regards, Eastern Europe was different. There, empires tended to accentuate difference rather than suppress it. In the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire offered many Christians and Jews a wide measure of autonomy, allowing them to manage their own affairs. The Russian Empire, Stempowki's birthplace, afforded religious minorities an even greater degree of freedom. The Habsburg empire did its best to impose Catholicism on its various peoples, especially the rebellious Czechs, but even so, it remained home to numerous Orthodox Christians and Jews. More importantly, the Habsburgs made hardly any effort to turn their various constituent peoples (around 1900 the empire was home to eleven official nationalities) into Germans. These empires took a laissez-faire approach to governing, They taxed and counted their subjects, but they did not intervene too deeply in the inner structure of their communities

In fact, some research studies have proved that people with brain damage resulting in not being able to experience emotions fully have reduced capacity to make good decisions. Even

For generations, linguists had very little idea what to make of this kind of variation. On the whole, most linguists were inclined to consider the speech of educated people as the primary object of description and investigation, while the vernacular speech of uneducated people was usually dismissed as being of no consequence – except in dialectology, in which the speech of elderly, uneducated, rural speakers was commonly considered to be the most suitable for investigation. Since earlier linguists were overwhelmingly male, there was perhaps also a comparable tendency to treat men’s speech as the norm, while women’s speech, where it differed, was often disregarded as inconsequential. Otherwise, however, the very high degree of variation within a single community was, for the most part, simply ignored: at best it was considered to be a peripheral and insignificant aspect of language, no more than erratic and even random departures from the norms, while at worst it was regarded as a considerable nuisance, as a collection of tiresome details getting in the way of good descriptions.

I’m going to say that over and over again. This is because through the years, I’ve gotten people to believe the best thing about the past is that it’s over. When they look at it, they may be angry about how silly they have acted and about the beliefs they had—how they learned them and who taught them—but this is still not going to help them to go into the future. What helps you go into the future is to leave the past behind and to create such strong desires that you want to move toward them.

Once they have a choice, people always make the best choice. The trouble is that people don’t think they have one.

Over the years, I’ve eliminated fears, phobias, and anxieties of many kinds. The exercises that we’re laying out for you here show you different ways to deal with fear and anxiety. Now, if you go through each of these and you do it this way and do it that way and do it a third way, you’ll be able to find the best and quickest way to get rid of your own fears.

I know that I’m fond of saying this repeatedly, but the best thing about the past is that it’s over and when it’s not over something is amiss in your mind. It’s not the original event or perpetrator that’s making you remember—it’s you, inside your own mind, holding on to terrible memories. None of us are exempt from this.

Another thing to do is to freeze frame the memory. I know that sounds crazy at first, but the best thing to do then is to jump to the end, freeze-frame it and literally grab a whiteness knob in your mind and turn it very quickly so that it goes blank-out white, phhhhhp. Very quickly, so the whiteness literally replaces the memory so you can’t see it.

The best thing about the future is that it’s in front of you. The best thing about the past is that it lies behind.

When we apply motivated reasoning to assessments about ourselves, we produce that positive picture of a world in which we are all above average. If we’re better at grammar than arithmetic, we give linguistic knowledge more weight in our view of what is important, whereas if we are good at adding but bad at grammar, we think language skills just aren’t that crucial. If we are ambitious, determined, and persistent, we believe that goal-oriented people make the most effective leaders; if we see ourselves as approachable, friendly, and extroverted, we feel that the best leaders are people-oriented. We even recruit our memories to brighten our picture of ourselves.

Perhaps the most famous and dramatic example of intellectual development in prison is that of Malcolm X.21 Malcolm Little (as he was born) entered prison immersed in drugs, sex, and petty crime. In prison he met a polymath named John Elton Bembry who was steeped in culture and history, able to hold forth on a wide variety of fascinating topics. On his advice Malcolm began to read—first the dictionary, then books on etymology and linguistics. He studied elementary Latin and German. He converted to Islam, a faith introduced to him by his brothers. In the following years he read the Bible and the Qur’an, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, and Kant, as well as works of Asian philosophy. He pored over an especially loved book of the archaeological wonders of the East and the West. He learned the history of colonialism, of slavery, and of African peoples. He felt his old ways of thinking disappear “like snow off of a roof.”22 He filled his letters with verse, writing to his brother: “I’m a real bug for poetry. When you think back over all of our past lives, only poetry could best fit into the vast emptiness created by men.

The best use of language is to surpass the language.

Admittedly, a number of the translations of my life, of what went on in Ivy Lodge, are loose at best, warranting multiple-choice answers, never ideal in the scientifically based world of translation. You're supposed to go from the source language (the language being translated) to the target language (the language being translated into). A translation is only good when the translator knows--or can surmise--the intention of the person being translated, understands with a fair amount of confidence the exact meaning of that source language. Maybe that's one problem with my attempts to translate my family. Maybe my parents remained unclear in their own minds what they wanted to say, what their words and behavior meant, what their underlying motivation was. In that case, it makes translation doubly difficult if the source of the words and events to be translated is lost in a sea of linguistic confusion. Translators need patterns to make sense out of foreign words, or it all becomes a hodgepodge of meaningless sounds and symbols. Chaos (256).

master the flute?” Shay mastered instruments the way linguists mastered languages. “I’m not sure what’s next. Maybe the sax?” Shay glanced toward the ceiling thoughtfully as she spoke. “Unless I got some snakes to accompany me.” “I think you’ll need some new sheet music for that. You don’t see serpents swaying to the classical beat. And I’m sure your mom would just love having a cobra take up residence in your room.” Shay gave Raj a blank stare. “Mom’s not afraid of snakes.” Shay Baxter had been Raj’s best

Concerning the validity of knowledge, we may have to resort to a pragmatic conception in order to retain some sort of significance, in the short span of our lives, of truth or at least invent or refine linguistic expressions. A thing is called true if it works in explaining what is at hand, a given thing’s truthfulness consists in its efficacy at explaining, that is, that is most true which works best at explaining the situation at hand. Let us not forget: [1.2] if we look at things long enough, everything becomes insignificant. This is what our “truth” teaches us, and it is not without value.

Always there was the word. Always there was that four-letter ugly sound that men in uniform have expanded into the single substance of the linguistic world. It was a handle, a hyphen, a hyperbole; verb, noun, modifier; yes, even conjunction. It described food, fatigue, metaphysics. It stood for everything and meant nothing; an insulting word, it was never used to insult; crudely descriptive of the sexual act, it was never used to describe it; base, it meant the best; ugly, it modified beauty; it was the name and the nomenclature of the voice of emptiness, but one heard it from chaplains and captains, from Pfc.’s and Ph.D.’s — until, finally, one could only surmise that if a visitor unacquainted with English were to overhear our conversations he would, in the way of the Higher Criticism, demonstrate by measurement and numerical incidence that this little word must assuredly be the thing for which we were fighting.

It is superficial and misleading to claim that pragmatism came to an end with the arrival of analytic philosophy. On the contrary, after the linguistic turn, philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, and Davidson were able to refine and advance themes that were anticipated by the classical pragmatists. The most original and creative thinking of the best analytic philosophers advances the cause of pragmatism and helps to bring about the sea change that the classical pragmatists initiated.

Ah. But you say that because you’re a linguist, and you can’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to wallow in the sheer beauty of language.” Szpindel harrumphed with mock pomposity. “Now me, I’m a biologist, so it makes perfect sense.” “Really. Then explain it to me, oh wise and powerful mutilator of frogs.” “Simple. Bloodsucker’s a transient, not a resident.” “What are— Oh, those are killer whales, right? Whistle dialects.” “I said forget the language. Think about the lifestyle. Residents are fish-eaters, eh? They hang out in big groups, don’t move around much, talk all the time.” I heard a whisper of motion, imagined Szpindel leaning in and laying a hand on Michelle’s arm. I imagined the sensors in his gloves telling him what she felt like. “Transients, now—they eat mammals. Seals, sea lions, smart prey. Smart enough to take cover when they hear a fluke slap or a click train. So transients are sneaky, eh? Hunt in small groups, range all over the place, keep their mouths shut so nobody hears ’em coming.” “And Jukka’s a transient.” “Man’s instincts tell him to keep quiet around prey. Every time he opens his mouth, every time he lets us see him, he’s fighting his own brain stem. Maybe we shouldn’t be too harsh on the ol’ guy just because he’s not the world’s best motivational speaker, eh?