Language and . . . Everything!

Today I had my language and identity and language and thought classes. They are both located in a basement classroom. The ceiling is high, the walls are gray, and the desks look very institutional. The hallway leading to the classroom is even depressing---it is wide, vacuous, and totally uninspiring. Funny that it's in an art building.

Anyway, the language and identity class turned out to be not so interesting, at least at first. We were discussing "identity" and the various ways language is used in constructing identity. A student from Greece brought up the point that the Latin root of the word "identity" refers to a being or essence, not something constructed, but something that is. I thought that might have led to an interesting subject if people had wanted to discuss the Creator/creation distinction, but instead the instructors said, oh, that's a very good critique and other people have tried to come up with different terms to define "identity" blah blah blah. At that point I wanted to pull a Bertie Wooster "Right, ho!" and beetle right out of the classroom. Instead I remained constrained to my seat by potential guilt. By the end of the class, we were listening to an interview recording and analyzing the way the interviewee's word choice and elocution reflected possible thought patterns. Anything with analysis is pretty fun for me.

Language and thought, I think will be more interesting. We're looking at such questions as, do people who speak different languages think differently? does language structure the way we think? (it does, but how and to what extent, etc.) are there things that are unthinkable in some languages? can language and thought be defined apart from each other? fun stuff like that.

In other news, I'm trying not to spend hours a day looking for bridesmaids dresses. I don't think I ever imagined it would be this difficult to find something I liked. Maybe I can just tell them to all wear their favorite dresses. I think that would be fun. And they would be comfortable and happy, so I would, too. The only problem would be making sure the flowers matched everything. Maybe I can just have them hold one of those balls. Remember when those flower-balls on a ribbon were in fashion? I could do the balls on a ribbon, but make them with pine cones instead. It is an October wedding.