Good diction is now fiction
By Barbara Worrall, The Sydney Morning Herald

If there is one thing that raises my hackles it is sloppy diction. “Ee-NUN-see-ate,”' my speech teacher would bellow when I was at school.

If speech and diction are not part of the Australian school curriculum today, they should be. They are as important as reading, writing and arithmetic.

You can have a brain like Bill Gates but if you cannot communicate your ideas verbally, how do you get your point across? I’m beginning to think verbal communication is becoming a dying art. Speaking clearly has been replaced by texting, sms-ing, emailing or grunting into one’s iPhone.

The other day I must have spent more than an hour trying to decipher some unintelligible phone messages. Some people simply do not speak clearly. It sounds as though they are not even moving their lips. They seem to mumble into their chests or jam all their words together.

One of these messages was a long-awaited call from a woman at my bank. Or at least I think she was. Do you think she bothered to ee-NUN-see-ate her name so I could call her back? Did she clearly leave her telephone number? I played the message over and over and finally gave up.

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“Equation,” “gingerly,” and other linguistic pet peeves
By Geoff Nunberg, NPR.org

My friend Scott is always sending me indignant e-mails with examples of people using the word “equation” to mean just a situation with a lot of factors, when nothing is actually being equated — as in, “Family members are a critical part of the doctor-patient equation.” I tell him I think of this as just routine journalistic bloat, and not even he thinks it’s a threat to the republic. But he enjoys grousing about it, all the more because it doesn't seem to annoy anybody else that much. It makes for a fine pet peeve.

I have peeves of my own. When I hear people say “oversimplistic,” I suspect they don’t know that “simplistic” means that all by itself. I wish somebody would drive “arguably” and “quite possibly” into the sea. And it seems to me it's almost always a bad idea to begin a sentence with “I pride myself on.”

A pet peeve should be like a pet theory or a pet story — a tic or fancy that you nurture in your bosom and make your own. You can have a pet peeve about people who mispronounce “mascarpone.” But it’s odd to use the phrase for off-the-rack gripes that everybody shares. Saying that you have a pet peeve about “thinking outside the box” or “Your call is important to us” is like saying you have a pet theory that you should feed a cold and starve a fever.

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Senior focus: Keep an a-g-i-l-e mind
By Kathleen Gest, local columnist, Record-Eagle

Do you remember how much fun spelling bees were when you were a child? Well, maybe not. Either way, spelling bees are not just for children anymore; senior and adult spelling competitions now are widespread.

If you are 50 years or older you can enter this year’s Senior Spelling Bee, May 7 at the Gilbert Lodge on North Long Lake Road. The Senior Spelling Bee in the Traverse City area was initiated in 2005.

Spelling bees are thought to have originated in the United States around 1825. A major motivation for the contests was Noah Webster’s spelling books. First published in 1786 and known typically as “The Blue-backed Speller,” it is still available today.

Webster also was responsible for attempting to make English a more phonetic language. To name just a few of his changes, he dropped the “u” from words such as “humour” and “colour,” dropped the “k” from words such as “publick” and “musick,” changed “hypnotise” to “hypnotize,” “centre” to “center” and changed “ce” in words like “defence” to “se.”

Thank goodness he didn’t succeed in changing “women” to “wimmen.”

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What language experts don’t care about
By Erin McKean, The Boston Globe

If you care about how to use language—and if you’re reading this column, it’s a safe bet that you do—then you care about language rules. There are basic rules that everyone agrees with—for example, that the word moon has exactly two o’s, no more and no less—and then there are slightly more arcane rules (such as when to use “such as” and when to use “like”) that are subtle signals to other literate people that you, too, know your way around what’s “right.”

But the deeper you go, the more you come to understand that language rules—well, they aren’t exactly the rules of physics. At best, they’re guidelines, and at worst, they’re superstitions, like not walking under a ladder or putting a hat on the bed.

This poses a problem for language mavens. On the one hand, anyone who makes a professional study of the English language understands that quite a few of these rules are bunk, cruft, leftover prejudices from other ages.

But on the other hand, nobody likes to be thought wrong. So for language experts, this results in a bit of triage: You choose a few rules to follow to signal your up-to-date membership in the Thoughtful Language Maven Club. And you leave some others, less well-known, by the wayside.

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A Moroccan touch in the English-language literary universe
By Aziz Rami, Morocco Post

With a vast linguistic knowledge, a diversified education and broad imagination, Laila Lalami has managed over the years to cleave a safe path through the demanding world of English-language literature. After only a few years, Lalami was able to ensure an honorable place in this fascinating, seductive yet non-complacent world of literature.

Having made her first steps into the world of writing through her experience as a journalist in a French daily in Morocco, Lalami decided to change course  to venture into the English-speaking world, fascinated, then absorbed, by the  language that she perfectly commands.

Back from London, where she had earned a Master’s degree in linguistics, she has worked for Al Bayan. “But shortly afterwards it became increasingly difficult to go back home and write in French (…) and so I turned to English, because I had anyway to prepare my PhD dissertation in English, and there began my story with the language of Shakespeare,” she says in an interview with MAP.

The only Moroccan English-language fiction writer, Lalami has attracted the attention of major U.S. and U.K. newspapers. Latest example, The Independent wrote last week about the two novels of the young writer, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Secret Son, from which she made readings in the Lecture Theatre One in London in presence of a large number of students, journalists and writers.

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In a nutshell: The language is living, but literacy is another story

It sometimes seems that, almost for as long as I (ahem) have been literate, I have been reading stories about other poor souls who, although not really different from me in intelligence or social circumstance, are only, at best, semi-literate.

The authors of their misfortunes are varied but share one common denominator -- they are all connected with the skill of communication which, one would think, would require some semblance of literacy.

It is one of the unfortunate virtues of the English language, however, that one can spout almost any sort of gibberish and someone else will understand it, so brilliantly flexible is the language. In a more rigid vernacular, one would have a hard time getting a taxi to travel from South St. Vital to Inkster Park, should you be so unfortunate as to have to make such a trip.

Spoken English isn't really literate, but then it doesn't really have to be. It just needs to be a means of communication. Some people can puff it up into a powerful tool that can move millions when they speak publicly, although you can search through Canadian politics until your eyeballs are empty and blind without finding one today, but most of us get along just by mumbling and stumbling our way through life.

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