Ask the experts: Robert Beard on language

LEWISBURG, Pennsylvania—Welcome again to “Ask the Experts,” a regular web feature that highlights the expertise of various Bucknellians in a range of topics related to current news events and other timely subjects.

This week, we asked Robert Beard, a professor emeritus who taught Russian and linguistics at Bucknell for 35 years, about his recent book, The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English, and our ever-changing language.

Q: How did The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English come about?

A: On my alphadictionary.com website, I do a word of the day — The Good Word — which has about 22,000 e-mail subscribers. I noticed that I would get more mail from my subscribers for certain words than others and they began falling into categories.

The first thing people always write in about is funny words — words like “fartlek,” which isn’t at all what it seems to be in English. It’s an exercise method introduced by a Swede. If you think about it, “filibuster” is a funny word because it originally meant a pirate, and it still seems like debate piracy in the Senate. So, my first book was The 100 Funniest Words in English.

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How English erased its roots to become the 21st century’s global tongue
By Robert Crum, The Observer

Globalisation is a word that first slipped into its current usage during the 1960s; and the globalisation of English, and English literature, law, money and values, is the cultural revolution of my generation. Combined with the biggest IT innovations since Gutenberg, it continues to inspire the most comprehensive transformation of our society in 500, even 1,000, years.

This is a story I have followed, and contributed to, in a modest way, ever since I wrote the BBC and PBS television series The Story of English, with William Cran and Robert MacNeil, in the early 1980s. When Bill Gates was still an obscure Seattle software nerd, and the latest cool invention to transform international telephone lines was the fax, we believed we were providing a snapshot of the English language at the peak of its power and influence, a reflection of the Anglo-American hegemony. Naturally, we saw our efforts as ephemeral. Language and culture, we knew, are in flux. Any attempts to pin them down would be antiquarianism at best, doomed at worst.

Besides, some of the experts we talked to believed that English, like Latin before it, was already showing signs of breaking up into mutually unintelligible variants. The Story of English might turn out to be a last hurrah.

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A campus where unlearning is first
By Michael Slackman, The New York Times

CAIRO—When Rafik Gindy graduated from high school, he knew he wanted to become an engineer. So he enrolled at the American University in Cairo and prepared to immerse himself in math and science.

But the university had a different idea.

Mr. Gindy knew what he wanted to be, but did not exactly know who he was. That was what the university wanted him to think about, in a class called “The Human Quest: Exploring the Big Questions.”

“I thought identity was just your name, your culture, but now I know it’s really complex,” said Mr. Gindy, a slender freshman who shook his head at that revelation.

Who am I?

What does it mean to be human?

These are the kinds of questions posed to undergraduate students entering this 90-year-old university during what the president, David D. Arnold, called a first year of “disorientation.”

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Watch the English language!
By Bubbles Sabharwal, MyDigitalfc.com

The English language is full of traps for those who do not speak it regularly and have not grown up with it. I remember hearing a music teacher tell his pupil, “I want you to play better, not badder.” It may not be our mother tongue, but if it is used, then it must be used in the correct sense. Just as grooming, posture, courtesy, manners are all the hallmarks of a well-rounded person, so is a pleasant voice and correct speech. Honestly, a pleasant voice, a deep voice can be as attractive as a six-pack, for some at least!

Have we not heard ‘lonjeray’ for lingerie, ‘bokay’ for bouquet, ‘ketch’ for catch, ‘yesserda’ for yesterday, ‘jenyouwine’ for genuine. (this one is a howler…) and ‘sassiety’ for society. Another one that always gets my facial muscles twitching is ‘chawklut’ for chocolate?

Face it, we all judge people by their appearances. If what we see is interesting, we try to get to know the person better. If you get an attractively wrapped gift, you feel its contents are valuable, just as a well-groomed and a well-spoken person suggests that he or she has inner qualities of worth.

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Vote for an education president
By Isagani Cruz, The Philippine Star

Again and again, we have been told that the coming elections are crucial to the survival of our country. That may very well be true for the economy, for governance, for human rights, and for all the other issues that we voters have to worry about when we go to the polls to elect the new national and local officials.

Fortunately for education, the coming elections are not that crucial. Presidents have come and gone, but Philippine education has shown remarkable resilience. Sad to say, of course, that is negative rather than positive. Despite all the efforts of all the past presidents, we still lag behind practically every other country in the world in various international rankings of educational systems (TIMSS, THES, ISI, and so on).

It is not just embarrassing, but outright disgraceful, that we have scored, at best, fifth from the bottom in TIMSS exams and once even landed rock bottom. Our best universities barely make it to any list of internationally-rated institutions; that only a handful out of more than 2,000 tertiary-level schools are respected outside the country is clearly cause for desperation.

Can the next President really make a difference when it comes to our educational system?

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