Martha Barnette

Nobody had any idea what I was saying.

But I'm telling you that your listeners in the South are going to know the word tump.

Oh, yeah.

Well, that must have been a really enriching experience, though.

I mean, every day you're probably learning new words and phrases, right?

Well, exactly.

And they say of England and America that, you know, they're two countries separated by a common language.

But I like to think of languages as this great, diverse, just wealth of different ways of speaking and different ways of speaking.

of pronouncing things i mean if you look in dictionaries you'll see both of those pronunciations vase and vase and vase as well you know i mean some people put a z sound in there so um you know language is really personal but it's it's really important to

if you're going to correct somebody's grammar, to make sure that you're right, because some of those rules that you were taught as a kid aren't really valid rules when it comes to linguistics.

You know, some of those so-called rules of grammar, even that my English teacher mother taught me, are just...

arbitrary things that were imposed by 17th and 18th century grammarians who were trying to fit the swollen foot of English into the too tight shoes of Latin grammar.

So you are perfectly justified in splitting an infinitive.

William Shatner was perfectly justified in saying to boldly go because in Latin you can't split an infinitive.

In Latin,

The infinitive is one word, so it's just silly to say that you can't do that in English.

And the same thing, I should say, with ending a sentence with a preposition.

If anybody tells you otherwise, just tell them that's nonsense up with which you will not put.

Well, the term algorithm is really interesting.

It is a very modern word, of course, but it goes all the way back to the ninth century when Baghdad was this international center of learning for scholars.