[18 Aug 2003|03:11pm] Idiotic assholes of the world, listen up: If you are right now in the presence of an infant, and you feel somehow compelled to speak to it, fucking speak normally. Infants learn to speak a language by hearing it spoken normally. It takes them many months, maybe even years, to learn to shape their tongues correctly to speak normally. The sounds they make during these months or years are a result of linguistic adaptation. Do not -- I repeat, do FUCKING not -- stand around imitating the damned baby's sounds. If it were old enough, it'd be insulted by your mockery. Since the babies of the world are not old enough to be so insulted, I stand insulted in their place. I stand even more insulted by the people who tell me that "babies react to high-pitched sounds." Yes, doctors have proven that babies react to high-pitched sounds, however, it is only a reaction. What kind of reaction is it? We can tell that animals react to being stroked. We can also tell that they react to BB-gun pellets. I stand before you, idiotic assholes, as someone who is smarter than you. And I say: your baby is learning more English from the fucking television you never turn off than from your assholic babbling. I now back this statement up: As one who has studied linguistics and even taught conversational English to past-their-linguistic-prime salarymen in a country as lingually disabled as Japan, I have become enlightened. See, in Japan, the misinformed company I taught for -- managed by a whole load of baby-patronizers, I imagine -- had a rule whereby all students were supposed to learn English by speaking to one another, with only the barest hints from the teacher. This accounts for the close-to-zero level of progress of all students enlisted at that school. Through witnessing these people making fuzzier linguistic copies of fuzzy linguistic copies, I have come into the posession of a nice little bit of practical knowledge. I know, if nothing else, this: People learn to speak by imitating you, not by imitating you imitating them. Save an establishing IQ: stop being an ignorant asshole. Thank you in advance. With all hope, the generation after this one won't drop out of high school to sell narcotic cough medicine to kids in gas station parking lots. 17 comments|post comment

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