English

Dear Ms. Laura Clark, Your article, while raising a few interesting and worrying points, completely missed the mark. Instead of blasting ‘text speak’ and saying that “ Youngsters are also in danger of growing up with limited vocabularies because they spend so much of their free time on sites such as Twitter…”, perhaps you should look to the parents and authority figures who should be teaching the children about the English language before blaming technology. As a ‘youngster’ myself, I feel that you shift the blame on to text speak too much, and give it unfair credit. It is also rather insulting to observe the generation raising us, cast their responsibility on to inanimate devices, that they themselves gave us. The fact is, is that both teachers and parents share a certain responsibility to teach children to do the right thing. Perhaps the staff should have made a better effort in making sure that the children knew to differentiate their writing styles for different contexts and ...

Note: This interview is set in modern day             Pink Floyd’s albums, “Dark Side of the Moon”, “Wish You Were Here”, “Animals”, and “The Wall”, all contain references to social issues. While perhaps most known for their unique and psychedelic instrumental aspects of their songs, Pink Floyd was never a band that shied away from social issues, mainly referencing aspects of the human condition that we’d rather forget, such as greed/income inequality, war (only present in some of their songs/albums), and insanity/mental health issues. Their 1977 album, “Animals” is the most overtly political album in their collection, with lyricist Roger Waters painting a picture of a dark and dystopian society; inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian novel “Animal Farm”. Overall, Pink Floyd’s most often detailed social issue seems to be greed/inequality. One of their most famous songs, “Money”, is about greed/the relentless pursuit of money (here’s a link to the ly...

Language, while an important aspect of our identity, does not shape who we are. Language is a form of expressing who we are. We use language to communicate our ideas to one another. A person has the same personality regardless of what language they speak. In the various texts relating to the concept of mother tongue or bilingualism, the people were not shaped by their knowledge of a different language, but rather, their experiences due to their use of their languages. At best, language can only indirectly influence or define who we are. In “Mother Tongue”, by Amy Tan, Tan’s mother is often treated differently or worse than her daughter, due to the way she speaks. The way her mother spoke also defined her teenage years, with her being ashamed of or thinking less of her mother due to the way she spoke. Her studies of language also suffered in comparison to her studies of science and math, possibly due to the different style of English her mother spoke at home as well. While this may ...