ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Opinion category.

At Lewis and Clark

The Lewis and Clark interpretive centre is built to commemorate the spot where the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark departed on the orders of President Jefferson to discover what lay in the piece of land by then just recently purchased from France. It was called the Louisiana Purchase and it contained what is now must of the Midwest United States reaching to Arkansas, Minnesota and North Dakota. (A most fascinating look-back to those times would wonder what kind of country we would be living in now if the land hadn’t been sold and the land – as it was then – consisted of English speaking people on the east, Native Americans and some French speaking people in the middle and Spanish speaking people on the West.)

Here are some of the pictures I took on a visit to the state historic site a few miles away from here. The old houses there are replicas of the camps that must have been built by the expedition party before they set off on the Mississippi river trying to discover the flora and fauna of the wild west. The models, according to information, were rebuilt from the notes and diaries of Lewis and Clark.

Books Everywhere

As soon as school closed last week, professors emptied their shelves onto a table in our building. Old and new books, from fiction to plays and journals, poetry collections and textbooks lay spread there competing for attention. They were free to be taken away. By evening everyday, the best of the books would be gone. But by the next morning, there would be another load, and the process continued. I made a few selections every day of the week, including The Book of Yeat’s Poems by Hazard Adams and Exploring Language edited by Gary Goshgarian among many others.

Just last month, a colleague gracefully handed me a box filled with books of African writing published in the 70s. He had cleaned out his shelf and thought that I might be interested in the collection. I was. It is times like this that I wish that I was rich enough to pay for shipping costs to send tonnes of books no longer useful to their owners to small-town libraries and bookstores in Ibadan where young literary minds can get access to them. When I’m done with these, I’ll have to hand them to someone else who might find them useful. It’s hard to think that in a few years, the concept of books itself will have eventually become archaic, especially in these parts.

America Tonight (visuals)

As a guest of the S.P.E.A.C (Students/Professors Exploring All Cultures) club at SIUE last month, I read a couple of (in-progress as well as already published) works to a small but diverse audience in the Willows Room. Here’s me reading America Tonight and sharing a little background story.

The poem itself was first blogged here, and later published here. Enjoy

How to Become a Language Snob

Inspired by Clarissa’s list of “20 Ways to Become Known as a Male Chauvinist“, I am compiling my own top ten list of How to be Known As a Language Snob, along with extra points.

___________________________

1. Whenever you meet someone from a different country tell them “I like your accent. You don’t speak like other _____________ (fill in country name) that I have met.”

2. After meeting someone for the first time, let your idea of a compliment to them be “Oh you speak good English.” For extra points, ask them where they learnt to speak it so well.

3. Whenever someone says to you “I like your accent too”, look insulted and ask in a high voice, “I have an accent? What do you mean I have an accent?” For extra points, be actually insulted by that.

4. Be disgusted by people speaking their local language around you. For extra point, go to them (whether you know them or not) and ask them to speak English instead. After all, they are in America.

5. If you come from a multilingual society, pretend that English is the only language worthy of learning by your children. Punish them if they speak the mother tongue. Don’t speak it to them. For extra points, justify this by saying that “In today’s world, English is the only language worth learning.”

6. Wonder aloud many times why anyone speaks any other language at all no matter where they live. Ask “Why can’t they all learn English?”

7. Fail students who write “spelled” as spelt, learned as learnt, “labor” as labour and “neighbor” as “neighbour”. For extra points, tell them that they have spent enough time in the USA to know how those words should be spelt.

8. When someone tells you that their course of study is linguistics, ask them what the importance of that course of study is. When they tell you, ask them why they didn’t study business instead.

9. When someone tells you that their course of study is Teaching English as a Second Language, tell them without prompting that it is a good idea because they would finally be able to return to their home countries to teach the people there how to speak English.

10. Complain that the reason you did poorly in a class was because the accent of the teacher was too thick for you to understand/process. For extra points, wonder why the university didn’t employ a full-blooded American for the position instead of foreigners.

Polysemy in Politics

Perhaps we all spoke too fast. Certainly not. The man who ran his mouth for several weeks demanding proof when there seemed to have been many available everywhere that a half-black man was born in the US finally got a certain “respite” when the document was released. After all, he played a role in it. And then, a few days later, he got some good bashing from the man he had spent the previous weeks maligning. Like a few other commentators (including Baratunde who made a personal video on youtube decrying the humiliation the “white privileged businessman” brought on the “first black president” by being forced to comply), I also thought it was racist. His further demanding the president’s college transcripts rather than asking more sensible questions about the economy or the direction of the country made it even worse. The whole “birther” escapade reeked of something more than just partisan politics.

A few days ago, former President Bush declined an invitation to go with President Obama to the site of the World Trade Centres where terrorists had knocked down two prominent buildings killing thousands of people. He was, according to reports, keeping up with his desire to stay out of the spotlight. He had lived up to this promise many times by refusing to comment on current topical/political issues in order to keep the focus on the president rather than on himself – obviously aware of the star power of his ex-presidency. Some other reports however saw it as a snub. The current president had refused to give enough credit to the former one for investigation procedures that led to this victory, and thus, he could as well go it all alone.

Last week,, I turned in a final semester paper in my Discourse Analysis class titled “Polysemy in All-Male and All-Female Speech” using evidence from elicited conversations to make judgements about how humans use ambiguous statements and expressions to achieve desired goals, and particularly how innocent and sometimes unintended speech acts are sometimes construed to very specific purposes by hearers and listeners. I guess it is only fitting that all of this news events are happening at this moment when the paper is sufficiently turned in. Yet it left an excess of active brain cells making perhaps needless connections to current affairs in the name of discourse analysis. Sometimes, a speech – or an act – is just what it is, without any underlying intentions.

Photo from http://bit.ly/kR4lyE

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