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In response to recent family tragedies over the past year, I would like to dedicate this page to my grandmother, grandfather, great-grandmother, and great-grandfather, as they always remain in the hearts of my family!
Top Story-Current Events-Tounge Tied!-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expressed this ongoing struggle with vocabulary when asked at a Sept. 20 news conference to name words that describe the kind of conflict the nation is entering.
"What I do know is the standard words jangle in my head when I hear them, and then I put them onto the subject they're relating to … and I think to myself, 'Gee, that isn't really as good a word as we ought to be able to find,'" Rumsfeld said.
Confused? So are leaders. And linguist and diplomacy experts say that's OK. In fact, the greatest danger, they argue, is brashly assigning words to a conflict that, so far, has little precedent — and so few available descriptions. Instead, they argue, the process to describe events must be a gradual and careful one.
Once ‘Linguistically Lazy’
"We have been linguistically lazy about describing terrorist attacks because they weren't, for the most part, happening to us," said Wayne Fields, a professor of politics and rhetoric at Washington University in St. Louis and author of Union of Words: A History of Presidential Eloquence. "Now the challenge is to reinvigorate our language."
Part of the problem is that during recent peaceful times, casual use of many words has eroded their meanings. As Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford University linguist and usage editor of the American Heritage Dictionary and author of the book The Way We Talk Now, points out, crying "bloody murder" if the newspaper is late or calling a botched cake-baking attempt a culinary tragedy has a gradual, trivializing effect on meaning. But now, he says, that may be changing.
"All of these words — survivor, tragedy, terrorism, hero — their original resonance have started to become evident again," said Nunberg. "And now the loose usage starts to feel odd."
Math Problem of the Week: If the hypotenuse of a right triangle is 2cm more than one leg, and the other leg is 8cm, what are the lengths of each side? Answer will be listed next week!
Social Studies Topic of the Week: Pythagoras.... Theory of Numbers....
Among the extensive mathematical investigations carried on by the Pythagoreans were their studies of odd and even numbers and of prime and square numbers (see Number Theory). From this arithmetical standpoint they cultivated the concept of number, which became for them the ultimate principle of all proportion, order, and harmony in the universe. Through such studies they established a scientific foundation for mathematics. In geometry the great discovery of the school was the hypotenuse theorem, or Pythagorean theorem, which states that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.
Spanish Words of the Week: la amenaza: threat. A mí con amenazas me preguntaban. They would question me with threats.
Science Term of the Week: Anthrax, contagious disease of warm-blooded animals, including humans, caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis. One of the oldest known diseases, it was once epidemic and still appears in many world areas, but only sporadically in the western and southern United States.
English Suggested Reading: "The Stars, Like Dust" By: Issac Asimov
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