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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here each week.Joe Carillo
It’s not a joke anymore if you’re falling at 35,000 feet
When you’re the butt end of a joke, you just have to grin and bear it.
But how does the brain react when a joke tries to tickle it, and why does it find some jokes funny but is left cold by others? In an article in the February 1, 2010 issue of The New Scientist, London-based freelance journalist Daniel Elkan explains that it’s now well accepted among theorists what’s essential for a joke to deliver—some kind of incongruity between two elements within the joke, and one that can be resolved in a playful or unexpected way. But for that to happen, humor requires the brain to expend tremendous brain power. “Getting a joke would seem—on the surface—to be a very trivial, intuitive process,” says Andrea Samson, humor investigator at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, “but brain imaging is showing us that there is more going on than we might think.”
Read Daniel Elkan’s “The comedy circuit: When your brain gets the joke” in The New Scientist now!
But then it’s no longer a joke—not even a bad dream—when on an early flight at 35,000 feet, you suddenly find your aircraft cabin gone and you have become a falling object on a 6-mile plummet back to earth. The odds of your survival may be extraordinarily slim, says writer Dan Koeppel in the February 2010 issue of Popular Mechanics, but you’ve got nothing to lose by fully understanding your situation. Allowing for wind speed and terminal velocity, you have about 15 seconds to figure out how to manage the fall, survive the ordeal, and live to tell the experience. All in all, though, Koeppel gives this wry advice: “No matter the surface, definitely don’t land on your head.”
Read Dan Koeppel’s “How to Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive” in Popular Mechanics now!
