There are amazing cool women in the world and
this one is in China now:
If you're watching track and field events in the coming Olympics, keep an eye out for British runner Christine Ohuruogu, competing in the women's 400m race (she's currently the World Champion in the event). In 2005, Ohuruogu graduated with a degree in linguistics from University College London, and her thesis was all about taboo vocabulary, a popular topic on Language Log.
As you might imagine from the quote, this comes from
Language Log-a linguistics blog I cannot recommend highly enough. They not only share my disdain for obsession over grammar rules, they generally use etymology to prove those who engage in such pastimes ignorant. Language is a very deep well and I love that they give me the opportunity to occasionally dip my toe in it. This is especially true when such learning is accompanied by
never suffering fools gladly:
It is insane to whinge about the whole educational system going to the dogs just because one young person didn't know [a] single idiom. Everyone is ignorant of at least some of the abundantly many idiomatic phrases in English. And apart from that one phrase, Jacobson's complaints about education rest entirely on two things: a teacher named Phil Beadle used the transitive verb lay to mean "lie" ("be recumbent") in a TV program (see my disastrously unhelpful guidance on Language Log about this supposed shibboleth), and practise (rather than the commoner practice) was used as a verb in the program's closing credits (there's nothing wrong with it: dictionaries list it as a variant spelling, but Jacobson is too stupid or too over-confident to look at dictionaries). What a pathetic basis for apocalyptic claims about modern education. Read this linguistically ignorant blithering windbag at your peril.
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