Every comma I added, split infinitive I repaired, hung preposition I cushioned in noun phrases was proof that I was articulate. Articulate was the last few marks on my English assignments, the judge’s feedback from the debates I won, the glowing words printed on my report card. To be articulate was to be intelligent. To be worth listening to.
Author: Nicola Brayan
These disadvantages are linguistic, cultural, and invisible to those who make up a cultural hegemony. Without tearing down these barriers, our justice system cannot serve true justice.
The sound of your voice is shaped by the geography of your mouth, the length of your vocal folds, the exact way you place your tongue. The way you pronounce words is a lineage of the accents and affectations you grew up hearing.
A, E, I, O, U… and sometimes Y. How can it be that the relatively exclusive set of vowels has…
When I’m cooking dinner, I’ll hop outside to trim some leaves off my plants, taking care not to thin out the foliage too much, taking from the top, not the bottom. Rinse your herbs well before consuming them. Savour their flavour. The love I cook into my dishes tastes like home-grown basil.
Surnames connect us to people with our same names millennia before us and they set us apart as modern, global, and freed.
I feel a sense of shame associated with admitting how disorganised my room is. When I have people over, I apologise for the state of my room reflexively, even when I’ve spent ages cleaning it. I’m not so sure, however, that messiness is the flaw we treat it as. I think messy rooms are worth defending.
We build meaning with words and the definitions we understand them to have. It’s also hard to have a conversation with a limited set of words — if you want to express something but you don’t have a word for it, your explanation tends to be less precise, less streamlined.
Role reversal is an inefficient form of showcasing empathy.
For hundreds of years, we have engaged in unimportant chit-chat.
