Caring for the words
This is a book we were given for the Educational classes. I like it, I read it as if it was a novel: could not leave it from my hand. It's called "You are COOL (in English) even if you speak correctly" and it aims to show the young people the most frequent mistakes in the media and in our daily communication. It's the result of years of monitoring TV and radio stations.
It deals with pronunciation, morphology, stylistics, semantics, punctuation, subtle yet very common mistakes, when you get to take notice of them. It's very concise, funny and clear, has lots of examples, very short explanations and lots of exercises, too.
And the last cover says: if you are interested in many things, how about being cool not for having a laptop or great skates, how about being cool for the things you know? Accessories are not everything. How about being cool to your friends for speaking correctly?
This is another way of helping the language survive, of caring for its health and well-being.
Oh, I must admit I learned I was making a mistake...
4 comments:
Sometimes, among young people, being careless with words is just a mark of difference, a way to show you are different. The same way clothes, jewels, shoes are worn in a different way. It's the barrier young people build to create a clan.
I like it, the power of human brain to generate new ways of communication. Language is and must be elastic. Even those who know things, who read talk in a special young way. It's the freshness of language.
The problem is not the way our teenagers talk, the problem is when they don't have anything to say. It makes me sad!
It's not about flexibility or being original,it's about using the words in the wrong way, distorting them and the beauty of a language until it looks stupid and ugly. Like a bad mirror. Using the wrong adverbs, the wrong prepositions, using a feminine noun with a masculine adjective form, the wrong accents,ignoring the origin of words etc. I've always liked grammar, and I think its rules are necessary. But, of course, I am no expert.
It's amazing how "unfurnished" some young heads can be, despite all the stimuli around them. That makes the other ones, the ones who have things to say, even more valuable. By the way: Oli visited us today.
Have you ever thought that our languages: Spanish, Romanian were born from the Latin low classes talk?.
So, they are just damaged Latin forms.
The beauty in them is that we have been able to convey meaning.
I know it was vulgar Latin. But we have many other influences: Dacian, Slavonic, Turkish, Bulgarian. How about Spanish?
I would like to study how languages were formed, it should be very interesting.
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