Category Archives: language

The Tower Of Blather

July 31, 2023 – 2:49 am

I speak several languages with varying degree of expertise. All of them with a Boston accent. Linguists estimate that there are over 6700 languages spoken on the planet Earth with English acting as the prime lingua franca or most popular bridge language at present. Unfortunately silence is not a language. This morning at the Academy […]

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Dtik Ang – Stuttering in Thai

December 20, 2021 – 7:25 am

My speech problems were many in my youth across the harbor from Portland, Maine. A stutter coupled with a lisp and stammer forced the school authorities of Falmouth Foresides to test my mental competence. The teachers were surprised to discover through a battery of intelligence exams that I was the smartest child within the school […]

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Illiterati of the Modern Age # 1

November 9, 2021 – 12:20 pm

Back in the early 1960s I attended a good Catholic grammar school on the South Shore of Boston. Dyslexia was considered a sign of the Devil by the Nuns of Our Lady of the Foothills along with writing with the left or sinister hand. The inability to decode words has been declared incurable by various […]

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The Last Words On A Landline Phone

July 26, 2021 – 12:44 pm

Some eleven years after the end of the American Civil War, Alexander Graham Bell uttered the first words over a telephone in 1876 to his assistant. “Mr. Watson – come here – I want to see you.” Since then millions of trillions of words have been spoke over landlines, however since the advent of cellular […]

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More Is Not Necessarily More

March 2, 2018 – 11:13 am

A friend recently castigated my writing with the criticism that I was a sloppy writer. He was speaking the truth and I said, “My father always thought that I was sloppy too.” “You end up writing too much.” Dannett was editor for a famed newspaper’s obit section. “Sometimes more is more.” “I wish that you […]

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