Pat’s Polemics

Hooked 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)

Carol 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)

I 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)

First 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)

This 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)

I 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)

A friend of mine would tell me about the book club he was in at a local independent bookstore. A book in Spanish was selected (Continue Reading)

I just started John McWhorter’s new book, Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars, Oxford, 2007. Just a few pages in, I (Continue Reading)