weinraub’s words

Today, Becca and I were playing with a broken hula hoop and making letters with them.

“Wow, so many letters we can make. I guess I am the Letterman”, I observed.

“I want to be Letterman”, Becca replied.

“You’re a girl. So, you could be Lettergirl”, I corrected.

To which Becca replied, “I’ll be Letterperson.”

That’s my girl!

Becca doesn’t quite have all her verb conjugation and helper words down yet. In fact, sometimes, she just bails on conjugation altogether. Pretty understandable, as Thai language has no verb conjugation by subject and only very simple and consistent conjugation by past/future, the equivalent of adding “-ed” for the past tense and “will -” for the future tense.

As an example, this morning Becca commented that she had scraped her arm yesterday playing at a neighbor’s house. Wanting to convey how brave she was, Becca added: “I not cry, I not.”

Very cute.

Thanks to countless hours of private tutoring by Dora the Explorer, Becca can now count to ten in Spanish. She also knows “gracias”, “de nada”, “estrella”, and a few others.

On a similar topic, Benjamin (2y9m) astounded me yesterday by counting to ten in English.

Way to go, children!

Looking through some old mail and found a link I had sent around. It was a NY Times Op-Ed piece about the troubling use of illegal as a noun.

Every last bit of the article is right on, and despite being nearly two years old, it’s is still just as relevant today. For example:

Since the word modifies not the crime but the whole person, it goes too far. It spreads, like a stain that cannot wash out. It leaves its target diminished as a human, a lifetime member of a presumptive criminal class. People are often surprised to learn that illegal immigrants have rights. Really? Constitutional rights? But aren’t they illegal? Of course they have rights: they have the presumption of innocence and the civil liberties that the Constitution wisely bestows on all people, not just citizens.

Right on.

Read the whole article.

A NY Times piece today on the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal contained a usage of “reticence” where “reluctance” would have better.

After tense, months-long negotiations, the deal was derailed, in part by Mr. Yang’s reticence,…

They would no doubt justify it by pointing to the entry, in their query.nytimes.com service which seems to use the American Heritage Dictionary.

But it still pisses me off. I’m much more in agreement with traditional purists on this point: Reticence is a subset of reluctance referring only to speech.

Sigh…