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Pastimes : SI Grammar and Spelling Lab -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (2900)	6/11/1999 3:31:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4711

Pretentious? <scratches beard> Dang. It's SO hard to do "soaring, ethereal, ever onward" and "come on down&visit!" at the same time. :-D I am training my focus on your earlier observation of the way things are changing within our language. There's been talk of how English is a living language - how it's always mutating and some mutations thrive and others die on the spot. So the "biological observatory" or "evolution watch" metaphor fascinates me. What is proving supremely difficult is somehow capsularizing this awe of the dynamic nature of our subject with the search for a brief, snappy and inviting thread title. The semantics of "lab" both help and hurt. I remember "language labs" - dreary cubicles with ranked tape recorders full of French lessons. The student has the singular displeasure of hearing his voice through a microphone - like a long-distance telephone echo - and it makes it so hard to deal with the task at hand. I wonder how many others have this negative association with the concatenation of "language" with "lab". And yet - a laboratory is a place of research and analysis, a place where the old is standardized and the new is fully characterized. It is a place equipped to Understand Newness. So I don't know how to better that word or idea without going totally tangential. So I'm gonna admit I'm fresh out of ideas for now. But guys - keep slinging them out for me to lurk upon! I'm enjoying the thread header topic as an example of Evolution in Action. Cheers, Lather