This is extraordinary.

Listen to the story about a woman who taught a 27 year old Nicaraguan man how to understand language for the first time. “Something about his eyes caught her attention.” She uses sign to communicate, and he echoes everything she signs – right back at her. “Visual echolalia.” She could see intelligence in his eyes, but realised that he had no language; he didn’t even know he was deaf.

“What have you been doing for 27 years?” she wonders.

Listen for the moment when everything changes. It brings tears to my eyes when i hear what happened.

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via Words – Radiolab.

From the people at Radiolab. These 2 men make radio that seems to flow in a kind of liquid conversational story. The narrative is so beautifully woven from multiple voices, without signalling when the voice changes.

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Here at the Grandview, we’ve just joined a very wonderful food co-op. Exciting times for foodlovers.

i deliberately used some bad English in an email.
(i mean grammatically non-standard English.)

My housemate was appalled.

So i took it all too far, with a genuine LoLcats poster from icanhazcheeseburger.

i’m fascinated by the way new language evolves in a new environment. LoLcats has become one of the latest new English dialects. If i put on my linguist hat for a minute, it’s easy to find a quote from David Crystal (one of the world’s most amazing academic linguist people), in an article at the BBC.

Word play
For English speakers there are cult websites devoted to cult dialects – “LOLcat” – a phonetic and deliberately grammatically incorrect caption that accompanies a picture of a cat, and “Leetspeak” in which some letters are replaced by numbers which stem from programming code.

“There are about a dozen of these games cooked up by a crowd of geeks who, like anybody, play language games,” said Professor Crystal.

“They might not be reading Shakespeare and Dickens but they are reading and cooking up these amazing little games – and showing that they are very creative. I’m quite impressed with these movements.”

Okay that really belongs on my work blog, but hey, everyone loves the LoLcats, don’t they?