Bubbles!

Whenever you go to an ethnically foreign place, such as a restaurant or a market, you'll notice how the environment that surrounds you is contained within a very finite area - a bubble. The moment you walk in through a door, smells, sounds, sights, and all your senses are struck with the ruminated cultures of centuries of history, often from thousands of miles away. Specifically, the way people speak, the manner in which people address each other, the language that permeates the bubble, is subtly yet vastly different. What I mean is, unlike the very apparent "role playing, side-step, shilly-shally, and vagueness and innuendo" in the English language, my Chinese speaking family is one that does not partake in such mannerisms. English is peculiar distinct distinctive idiosyncratic particular personal special specific unique in that there are hundreds of substitutes or complimentary words that mean basically the same thing. Chinese, on the other hand is more direct, requiring, on average, less characters to deliver the same meaning. Now I am not advocating for a totalitarian society and the implementation of Newspeak from Orwell's 1984, reducing language to its bare bones, but to expand upon Pinker's analysis of how society is founded upon "indirect" language, I have to disagree because not every society in the world is like this. For me I enter this "bubble" every day I come home from school.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2vC_YAEvFM

Comments

  1. Rima LahdhiriMarch 18, 2018 at 10:57 AM

    Marvin I love how you described such settings as "bubbles," it's so accurate! It was interesting to read some of the differences between Chinese and American language, and I agree that Pinker kind of over generalized a bit. Nice work!

    ReplyDelete
  2. EricMarch 18, 2018 at 11:11 AM

    I actually really like the English language for that sole fact. I feel (in comparison to Portuguese), that there are many more words that can be used, each conveying a more specific idea. I like that

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownMarch 18, 2018 at 2:45 PM

    Great point you present! I think that the piece is more geared toward English language rather than other languages. Gods job!

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownMarch 18, 2018 at 6:17 PM

    I 100% agree, in Tamil there aren't as many way to say something compared to English. I also enjoyed the "bubble" settings. Great post!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Really Confident Girl

Image
The Fearless Girl is a powerful embodiment of the feminist movement. The young brave girl is a stark representation of the courage it takes to stand up for equal rights. However, the sole purpose of the girl was to serve as a counterpart to the Charging Bull, which is an "aggressive threat to women and girls - a symbol of patriarchal oppression”. If Di Modica really wanted to move his expensive masterpiece away from the attention-drawing girl, Fearless Girl would then become “really confident girl” as one author notices. But honestly, what’s wrong with that? Feminists have had to consistently prove themselves over and over throughout history. Wave after wave of feminists with slightly different agendas have had to take tiny yet monumental steps for women in order to be taken seriously. Now, in the 21st century, the role of feminism is already well established and very widespread. Feminists are making real change happen. So why do they feel the need to prove that they are bra
Read more

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Call it what you want - totting, skipping, skip diving, skip salvage, curb shopping, trash picking or street scavenging - dumpster diving is just one of the names in that trash pile of labels. It’s not only a means of survival, but also a “way of life.” The show Extreme Cheapskates on TLC highlights some of the most frugal people in the world, who stop at nothing to save money. Sometimes these people aren’t even poor; they are just very tight penny-pinchers. Creating reusuable toilet paper, reusing dental floss, finding gifts in garbage cans, washing clothes while showering, flushing the toilet only once a week, making their own toothpaste, not spending money on telephones, television or new clothes for their kids is just some of the ludicrous extents people go to to conserve their bank accounts. So I ask you. At what point does extreme frugality become near-dumpster-diving conditions? Just because you don’t throw something away and reuse it, for example toilet paper, is it still consi
Read more