Today we're talking about Arrival! There's a plot summary, a discussion of the linguistic theory that drives the plot, and a fun other effect langauage has on us. Background music is taken from the film. 

Sources/Fun Reads:

- Arrival (2016)

- "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang

- Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive (TedTalk by Phuc Tran)

- “Reasoning Counterfactually in Chinese: Picking up the Pieces” by Yeh and Gentner

- “Linguistic Relativity” by Lera Boroditsky

- “How Do Infants Become Experts at Native-Speech Perception” by Werker, Yeung, and Yoshida

Have a wonderful night! <3

song! choice! explanations!

just vibes tonight, my friends!

For more info on smith college's series of lectures on translation that are free and open to the public via zoom, contact the prof running the course at [email protected]. Today's quote is about witnessing strangers and feeling a kinship to them coupled with the knowledge that you don't know their lives at all. I hope we all can people watch in a cafe sometime soon. Have a good night!

song choice explanations, but feel free to make up your own

We're back to Jenny Slate! Today's quote is: “On the way home to the United States, a man on the plane spilled his coffee on his seat. He got up and showed it to the flight attendant, and he pointed at the spill with a smile that was shy but also had a little light in it like he was thinking of a funny memory but knew it would make no sense to anyone else if he were to laugh into the air of the place. She wasn’t mad at him and understood that he didn’t want to sit in the coffee puddle, and they figured out how to deal with it. Across from me, a girl with a silver sparkly scrunchie was looking at pictures, and even though I was far away and I couldn’t make out the face in the pictures, I could tell that it was her in the pictures because the person in the pictures also had a silver scrunchie. I really liked her for looking at pictures of herself.”

As ever, for more info on Smith's series of lectures on translations, contact the prof running the course at [email protected]. Today's quote is about the equivalence (good or bad) of being clean and being good, and feeling like a child again. I hope you have a good night!

song choices!!

Today's quote isn't from Jenny Slate's book! I know! I'm sorry! But it's from another great great book: "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong. It goes: "... [I] saw his chin moving to work the act into what it was, what is always has been: a kind of mercy. To be clean again. To be good again." It's going to be a sad hour!