From Foreign Affairs magazine, May-June 2018, Malaysian Prime Minister speaking in 1992 said, “Authoritarian stability has enabled prosperity whereas democracy has brought chaos and increased (Continue Reading)
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
What gets tested and why in foreign language classes
08/15/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentIf I am speaking English as a second language or foreign language and I say, “My car breaked down, can you help me,” no English (Continue Reading)
What do balls refer to?
04/13/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentWhen Trump supporters declare, “Finally, someone with balls!” what do they mean? This is closely tied to the Right’s notion of political correctness. They mean (Continue Reading)
Hate and Special Status
02/27/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentLast year a friend related to me how people in an activist group he’s in wanted to deal with hate. Big order. Hate comes from (Continue Reading)
What Trump supporters hate about Liberals
02/24/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentI was just watching for the second time the interview of Chris Hayes by Heather McGee of Demos regarding his book A Colony in a (Continue Reading)
chinese food
02/23/2018 Pat Barrett Add CommentA big point in selling fl classes to students and their parents is the way culture ties into language and vice versa. However, detailed examples (Continue Reading)
How they did it….. and now they complain?
02/11/2018 Pat Barrett 3 CommentsNo one likes to be type cast, to lumped in with everyone else. Any time you paint a whole people with a broad brush you (Continue Reading)
Who’s telling the truth?
11/29/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentWhen prominent conservatives get accused of bad behavior like sexual harassment, the reporters and witnesses as well as the accusers are labeled liars by conservatives, (Continue Reading)
Fun with old language
11/03/2017 Pat Barrett Add CommentEspecially when you read poetry, editors frequently have to explain usages as archaic, regional, dialectal, poetic, idiosyncratic, jargon or just plain odd. When I read (Continue Reading)
Response to MovieRead – New Idea
11/08/2016 Pat Barrett 3 CommentsI read Kyle’s response to Lance’s admonition. If Kyle is indeed giving students reading that is at i and not i+1, then there should be (Continue Reading)
Annotating our culture
07/30/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentAnnotated literature draws me. I love reading it, esp in another language, where notes accompany the text to explain references. There are those who insist (Continue Reading)
employee is to employer as volunteer is to voluntee
06/01/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentGrowing up I heard the word employer and employee. I took French and realized employee was the past participle of the Fr. verb employer, to (Continue Reading)
National Identity & National Consciousness
05/07/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentMy book on Greek diglossia just came and I’ve been reading it. Interestingly, Greek national identity came from religion rather than common descent or language, (Continue Reading)
Where to start with the Magnum Opus (cum magno opere)
05/07/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentNot being real bright, I posted the first segment of the Magnum Opus first, forgetting that in the string of segments, it would appear last. (Continue Reading)
Need for checklist
04/20/2016 Pat Barrett 1 CommentI know you directed this post to Terry, Lance, but your concerns are what prompted Brian Barabe to post routinely to the listserv the basics (Continue Reading)
Back to the good old gerundive
04/17/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentDavid Lightfoot in The Development of Language, on p. 213 uses the participle and the gerundive in an interesting way, unusual in this day of (Continue Reading)
Advanced tprs reading?
03/06/2016 Pat Barrett 2 CommentsTerry has written that at the advanced level, i.e. once basic structures have been acquired, internalized, then continued input builds vocabulary, collocations, etc. What I (Continue Reading)
A blog entry from the Diane Ravitch blog
02/23/2016 Pat Barrett Add CommentChris Tienkin, a professor at Seton Hall University, analyzed the data from the PISA international tests and concludes that they say more about American society (Continue Reading)
Please excuse the mess!
01/21/2016 Head Geek Add CommentUntil very recently, Pat’s Polemics was running on very old software. It was good when it started, but no one ever maintained it and finally (Continue Reading)
Autistic vocabulary
12/07/2014 Pat Barrett Add CommentMy almost ten-year-old grandson, with a birthday the 9th of Dec., was talking to his Mema, my wife, and she said to him, teasing, Well, (Continue Reading)
Do words from games transfer to conversation?
06/07/2013 Pat Barrett Add CommentMy eight year old grandson gave me a running commentary of about 2 hours on a computer game called Mindcraft. What I noticed was the (Continue Reading)
Routine lessons on Feb. 19
02/19/2013 Pat Barrett Add CommentIt’s hard to believe I only have a few more weeks to do this. Today is a good day to blog on b/c the activities (Continue Reading)
Latin class
01/24/2013 Pat Barrett Add CommentLast week I broke the first book down (we are starting the third book) into 12 themes with accompanying words fitting the theme e.g. Metella (Continue Reading)