From OCramer@ColoradoCollege.edu Fri Jun 1 05:58:52 2001 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.04) with ESMTP id f51Cwo080296 for ; Fri, 1 Jun 2001 05:58:50 -0700 Received: from exchange2.ColoradoCollege.edu (exchange2web.ColoradoCollege.edu [205.170.0.14]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.04) with ESMTP id f51CwoK30344 for ; Fri, 1 Jun 2001 05:58:50 -0700 Received: by exchange2.ColoradoCollege.edu with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) id <2TJHXSBJ>; Fri, 1 Jun 2001 06:58:46 -0600 Message-ID: <5E5B5397B92DA849874262D1AF191C2C011D6D27@exchange2.ColoradoCollege.edu> From: Owen Cramer To: "'classics@u.washington.edu'" Subject: RE: student bloopers Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 06:58:41 -0600 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain Is it time for typology? I've never been interested in just collecting these, but in the Age of Aliteracy I'm thinking that they tell us some interesting things: * The end of the Mother Tongue: since the Romantic period we've had a theory that the mother's voice gave children language. Our current students' early waking-hours linguistic experience was probably dominated by voices of peers and of daycare workers. This is a new source of the general unfamiliarity with words and usage. * Images instead of texts. The old type of metaphorical reworking of unclear terms based on more or less conscious images (I got "Darius assended the thrown" on an exam as early as 1967) is now very generally used instead of more traditional lexical interpretation. * Audio-books replace silent reading: the opposite sort of lexical change to traditional /maizld/ pronunciation for "misled": now homophones are spelled the same: lead for led, it's for its, etc. * New forms of history and myth. Children used to be taught how long ago certain things had happened, and since the Romantic period they were told stories in organized corpora (Grimm, Bullfinch). History as "usable past" deemphasizes chronology and myth-as-fantastic pulls the stories apart from their relation to each other. Odd recombinations necessarily occur. Owen Cramer Classics/Comp. Lit. Colorado College 14 E. Cache La Poudre Colorado Springs, CO 80903 719/389-6443, fax 719/389-6179 OCramer@ColoradoCollege.edu .