So often here and elsewhere I’ve recounted the hilarious presentation at ACTFL, not meant to be hilarious, on the preterit and imperfect in Spanish. The (Continue Reading)
Pat’s Polemics
My new Web site
Linguistics and current politics
12/24/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentMy new orders just came. Amazon’s delivery system is amazing. I got Max Boot’s The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right and Steve (Continue Reading)
president or President?
12/24/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentMax Boot had trouble spelling President with a capital P when Trump hit the scene. It made me think why I defer to the President….. (Continue Reading)
How history class dumbs us down
10/21/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentLies My Teacher Told Me is filled with eye-opening vignettes of how textbooks for high school students distort the history of our country. Faced with (Continue Reading)
Whither jazz without the church?
10/08/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentNPR played a nice piece on currents in jazz, the dropping of the boundary between different approaches to jazz. They played a piece by an (Continue Reading)
How to establish facts
08/30/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentOver and over again, I’ve stumbled over the resistance to the Right to facts. How do we show people who not committed ideologues (or just (Continue Reading)
Euro-American Alliance
08/18/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentIn The Wise Men I am just reading about McCloy’s efforts to bring Europe together right after WW II. His success in this endeavor was (Continue Reading)
I’m struggling with something
08/06/2018 Pat Barrett 2 CommentsI’ve started reading Lies My Teacher Told Me. I’ve experienced a perspective shift. Others, according to the preface to the book, experienced the same sort (Continue Reading)
Harry Potter and the Great Whale
07/07/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentSomewhere I broached this topic but I can’t find it on my blog so here I go. Literary critics take a novelist’s work and assume (Continue Reading)
Lots of new books and lots of old
03/18/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentI have inundated myself with books to read and am loving every minute of it. I found the second and third volume of Taylor Branch’s (Continue Reading)
The seeds of our divisions
12/29/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentThe other night I was chatting with a young man and the issue of the cultural divisions in the country came up. He mentioned he (Continue Reading)
What a bit of decency can accomplish: a new world order
07/13/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentWhen the Democrats lost the November election in 1946 and Truman, blamed for the loss, returned to Washington, only ONE PERSON was on the platform (Continue Reading)
Some new turns in my reading as I come out of recovery
05/13/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentThings are settling in. Some anticipated but new for now turns have been taken (see today’s Music of the African Diaspora and Personal Language Learning). (Continue Reading)
No political/linguistic alignment
04/11/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentMackridge in Language and National Identity in Greece 1766-1976 notes that there was little to no alignment between cultural and political views and views on (Continue Reading)
My drive for synthesis reaches new heights
04/11/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentFriends say I am good at synthesizing disparate elements. I am better at that than at analyzing, but before synthesizing must come analysis. At times, (Continue Reading)
Three fat books
03/16/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentAs I prepare for a lengthy rehabilitation period after bilateral knee surgery, I have 3 nice, fat books to read. One, The Wise Men, the (Continue Reading)
Hooked on books
02/25/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentHooked again. Every whipstitch I stumble onto a book I just can’t get enough of. Oddly enough, they are often on my own bookshelf. One (Continue Reading)
The inviting looseness of African music
01/11/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentI’m starting a new book, Highway 61 Revisited, about the influence of jazz on American music. My musical interests have tended toward African music but (Continue Reading)
A couple I’ve started on plus the NYT
12/07/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentCarol Ross Stacey put me on to my favorite linguist’s book, The Language Hoax, and I’m reading it. Just think it through, seems to be (Continue Reading)
Different perspectives on a small town of the 50s
11/15/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentI got a call from my cousin. He read the book, Our Kids, and we shared our impressions of it. All in all, we agree (Continue Reading)
Update to current reading
08/25/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentFirst written 8/13/16 Time to recalibrate on my reading. I just restarted Susan Pinker’s The Village Effect. It reviews the work on face-to-face contact. In (Continue Reading)
Intimate touch and sci-fi culture wars
08/21/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentThis book, The Village Effect, is getting interestinger and interestinger. My environment as a new born and infant was good, I would say. Yet I (Continue Reading)
Turn books in, check books out, then go to the Reading Ladder
04/03/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentI have several books checked out of the ASU library and am finishing the last two; I should be done no later than Friday and (Continue Reading)