I read Tom’s post, and I hadn’t noticed the forward until afterwards. It makes the piece slightly more interesting. But I’d rather read more of the forward than more of Duras.

John-that is insane. But super.

This reminds me. I once had a part-time job scoring MCAT essays. Yep. The medical futures of brilliant young men and women were funneled through me. And since these essays were written longhand, I often based my score more on the characteristics of the handwriting than anything else — the reasoning of the author, the complexity of their argument, etc.. Which of course is wrong. But I was among the most accurate scorers.

Nice Grey’s Anatomy quote, btw.

I don’t know that it’s fair to say you deserved this per se, but this writing turned the cliché “big fish in a little pond” into something different. You made it relevant and funny and not tired like clichés usually sound in writing. I liked it.

Actually, babies babble in ways that closely resemble their mother language. They make seemingly-nonsensical noises, but they follow the prosody (what you can hear in the womb — rhythm, tone, stress) and, after some acclimation time to learn the sounds, can distinguish and reproduce the syllables of whatever the people around them speak. Research has shown that babies can tell who speaks their language. If in a room with an English speaker and a Russian speaker, an English baby look towards the English speaker and the Russian baby to the Russian (of course, this is when the prosody between the languages is different). New research published this year has shown that babies learn the details of a second language in as little as five hours, reproducing the patterns and sounds of this new language in their own way of babbling.

I don’t know why I thought of writing that, I just thought you’d find it interesting. I took a class called “Language and Childhood”, so I know all about this junk. Nice post!