Language

The ground under our feet used to be dependable. "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever," the Preacher assured us. Then we discovered that the earth is a set of tectonic plates, perpetually on the move.Those of us in school when schools still troubled themselves with English grammar and usage feel the same way about the language. We learned rules presented to us as eternal: Educated people spoke and wrote English thus, and there could be no two opinions about it. Then dictionaries turned descriptive, telling us how all manner of people used the language rather than how it ought to be used.

Hannah Myers learned Spanish very quickly last semester as a Howard Community College student. When you are living in the home of a family in Cuernavaca, Mexico, as part of a semester-long exchange program, she said, "You don't have another option." This is the second year for HCC's exchange program, and participants are enthusiastic. Few community colleges offer opportunities to live and study language intensively in other countries. Myers, 19, and Bryan Steel, 22, recently returned to HCC after three months at the Universidad Internacional in Mexico.

In Ulpan Hebrew class at the Oakland Mills Interfaith Center, laughter and camaraderie fill the classroom as students learn to speak conversational Hebrew. "The class [is] enjoyable, non- threatening and fun," said David Zolet, a Columbia resident and member of Temple Isaiah, who first took the course on a whim after his son brought home a flier. Years later, Zolet is attending Ulpan as an advanced student, attesting to the attraction of this unique method for learning Hebrew. Unlike conventional Hebrew courses, which emphasize learning the alphabet and decoding the written language, the Ulpan method focuses on a living, conversational approach to Hebrew.

As a journalist, I gravitate toward the lurid. That's just how we roll. If some post-adolescent crank tries to set up a "white student union" at Towson University, he is guaranteed ink. If some crackpot explains that George W. Bush was behind the September 11 attacks, he will get air time somewhere. If Orly Taitz does to court to claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, she will get attention from the press as well as from irritated judges. The loonier they are, the more easily we reassure ourselves that we are sane.

OAKLAND, Calif. -- There was intense criticism from around the country and skepticism at home when Oakland school officials decided in 1996 to teach classes using ebonics, a speech pattern that the school board deemed a second language for many black students.Today, ebonics -- also known as black English -- is still used as a teaching tool in the classroom, and Oakland school officials say that the strategy, meant to help children move from the language they hear on the street to the standard English they'll use in school, works.

If you are of delicate sensibilities, you do not want to be in the newsroom of a daily newspaper on deadline, because the swearing then and there is heartfelt, vocal, and repetitious.* But journalists have a complicated relationship with bad words, decorum requiring us in text to resort to "the f-word," "the n-word," initial letters with hyphens or dashes or asterisks, "[expletive deleted]," or the vague but ominous "a racial slur. " But journalists' complicated relationship with taboo words mirrors a larger cultural phenomenon, which Melissa Mohr describes thorooughly and thoughtfully in Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (Oxford University Press, 336 pages, $24.95)

Fifty years ago, people in the United States had very real fears of the possibility of nuclear annihilation in an exchange of nuclear missiles with the Soviet Union. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 brought that fear very close. But the year before, Americans had endured a potentially graver threat, not to their physical security, but to their culture. That threat, to the demise of American culture and perhaps to language itself, came from a book. And the book was a dictionary. David Skinner, writing in The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published  (Harper, 349 pages, $26.99)

BABY TALK-- How babble patterns can help baby's language development. (Discovery Health, Tuesday, 6 a.m.)

If you read about language, grammar, and usage, you're as likely to come across rubbish and codswallop as anything else. Thus there is joy at the arrival of a new voice of sense and informed judgment. Stan Carey of Sentence First heralded the arrival last week of Caxton , a new blog on language. Today's post at Caxton includes a reminder about the rules of language that rule-mongers would do well to keep in mind. And it is not novel information, coming from the pen of John Colet, humanist of the English Renaissance and dean of St. Paul's (d. 1519)

If you are a native speaker of English, you have English grammar in your head, and it has been there since you were a very small child. Unfortunately, the process of translating that grammar into terms for discussion of writing has not gone well. Traditional schoolroom grammar borrowed terms from Latin that were not always a good fit with English, and it codified English grammar into a rigid set of rules (some of them bogus) that oversimplified the language for pedagogical purposes.