| Adele: |
Um, I thought
that last call was very interesting. Plain language doesn't necessarily imply
unsuccessful speech acts. I took linguistics a few years ago, and I was working
on my certification for teaching of English as a Second Language, and I was one
of the older people in the class--I was mid-forties--there were younger people
who hadn't studied grammar. So the instructor put a sentence on the board: The
minister is ready to eat. And there were people in the class who actually
didn't get the sense that there might be more than one way to get that. So it
was diagrammed out to show that a minister is not a commodity that we can eat
when we choose something. But I've seen this happen as a text reviser in
government, where a lot of big words are used as a power trip, and then when
you strip the document of the big words, you find that they don't know what
they're saying. |
| DS: |
All right,
Adele I've gotta hold you there because we're out of time, but thank you for
your call. And Michelle, thank you for coming in. It's been a most interesting
hour. |
