The unifying theme for Week 7’s readings in the Main Session is Language and Culture. To start us off, I’ve distilled some themes and questions that crop up in the essays for this week into a document under Content > Week 7. Please review them before you start working on this discussion topic. I hope that helps you see patterns and themes within the readings and across them.
Please think of an example of language as a popular culture artifact and write a paragraph where you—
(a) discuss this language-related popular culture example and
(b) connect it to a language-related theme or idea in the essay you will be writing about in the Main Session (the essay provided). For ideas about themes in the readings for this week, please review the document linked above.
IMPORTANT: To select your language-related popular culture artifact, I would like to encourage you to think quite broadly about your experiences of language. You can pick ONE of the following two options:
Option A: Be our language guide:
If you speak or are familiar with a language other than English, please be our language guide and introduce us to a popular linguistic artifact from your language that is meaningful to its speakers. This linguistic artifact can be a special term, or a popular saying, or a phrase that people use when greeting each other or saying goodbye, and so on. Take any approach to talking about your chosen language artifact that makes most sense to you. Whatever route you choose to take, please introduce us to the actual words and phrases as you talk about them. If your language has a different script, please see if you can introduce us to the script as well as that would be truly precious.
For example, one of the words that I personally find most fascinating in Bengali (my mother tongue) is abhimana, “pride.” This is what the word looks like in the Bengali script: অভিমান The reason why this word fascinates me is that even though one meaning of abhimana is “pride,” it has so many other meanings—some of which I cannot even translate into English, so every time I think of this word, I think about how our experience of langauge is tied up with a specific culture and place.
Option B: Be a language detective
For those who would like to write about English as a popular culture artifact, I want to encourage you to play language detective. Think about phrases, sayings, or special terms that are common in your experience of English as a language (from school, from your communities, from work, etc.) and tell us about them. Where did those words come from, what do you think made them so popular or widely-used? For example, you could talk about the words that people use to say that something is really awesome, or conversely, to say that something is really awful. Or, here’s another example: If you like gaming, are there specific word or phrases are particularly common and representative of the language that gamers use? What does that say about our use of language to express ourselves, to talk to others in our community? These are just some ideas that you can use to approach this topic. You can take any approach that is most meaningful for you.
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