Language as an evolving tool
Ever since my stint teaching English in Brazil, I’ve been of the school that language is a tool, nothing less or more. The reason that we learn it is to use it to get our needs met. When we stop needing it to do that, it starts to go away. Adults can acquire language just as children do when necessary. People who spoke one language for the first twenty or more years of life can find that they have more or less lost it after many years of operating in another. It’s a tool, and if you don’t use it your mind will lose it to make room for something else.
A couple articles today have me thinking about this. First off, there’s the study that just came out in Nature that offers a formula predicting how long it will take irregular verbs in the English language to become regular. Ie, the past tense of the verb “help” use to be “holp,” but now we say “helped.” They found, through extensive analysis of texts from old through modern English, that language “regularizes them at a rate that is inversely proportional to the square root of their usage frequency.” Meaning, the less common verbs will change first, and the most common will probably never change. But the fact is that with usage, language changes.
The same goes for vehicles of language, such as our favorite, the book. Over in the Guardian books section, I found this piece about booksellers’ perceptions of where the industry is headed. They feel confident that the book may be around, but not so sure about the physical space of the bookstore. In light of my enthusiasm for language as a down and dirty, supremely functional tool, I’d like to think about this as one more way that usage of language changes it over time and not one more way that my chosen profession is likely to find itself out of work. There are more ways to get books and non-book forms of information–that’s exciting, and useful. Onwards to thinking about where libraries might fit into that kind of de-centered model of info production & use.
Librarian, poet, blogger
Much like meeting Steve Kronen, reading this interview poet Jess Mynes (conducted by Kate Greenstreet, one of the poets I’m reading this semester in workshop) has made me feel proud to be working toward becoming a librarian, and, I hope, a poet. In the meantime, I’ll just keep blogging, using what Mynes perfectly describes as the librarian’s instinct to say “‘This is out there. Check this out. Do you know about this? Have a look at this.’” Exactly.
Ta-da
The title of the final Harry Potter book is…. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The Guardian reports that JK Rowling announced it today.
Now, I have a longstanding bet with my best British friend that Harry will die in the final book. If he does, she owes me a ticket to visit my beloved Devon. If he doesn’t…. I guess SK will then get to visit sunny Florida. So, scanning this title over, I only have one question: what does “hallows” mean? Rhymes with gallows, which is good for my end of the bet, but let’s see what it technically means. Google define:hallows… wow, this sent a major chill up my spine. Hallows is ” name used by some traditions for Samhain, or Halloween” and more elaborately “November Eve, the Celtic Samhain (“sow-en”); the beginning of the Celtic winter, and of the Celtic year; the beginning of the Witches’ Year, when the Veil Between the Worlds grows thin and the spirits of the dead may return to Earth; the Descent of the Goddess to the Underworld; the final Harvest festival.”
The Guardian reports that the release date for the book will be set in early 2007, so at least we only have a couple of months to wait before finding out definitely how long we have to wait.
