Mike Ball

As long as I can remember I have been fascinated by languages, both natural and artificial. The book Biting The Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, by Elizabeth Little, was written by a young lady with a similar interest. It’s a little full of oddities for the sake of oddities, but it does a good job of expressing the fascination and delights of languages. I recommend it to anyone. If it piques your interest, and you want to learn more, check out The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, by John McWhorter. He also did a good lecture series for The Teaching Company, Story of Human Language

One thing bothers me about these books. The love of language leads the authors to a conservationist’s view of rare languages. Odd tribal languages must be preserved at all costs, and the only way to do that is to teach them to the children and insist that they use them. To me, this is converting the tribe into a museum exhibit, and deliberately making it more difficult for them to communicate with the world at large. Elders may support this as a way to keep the children down on the farm, but I doubt that the children would agree. Given the choice, I suspect that most of the children would choose a more common and widely used language. To be fair, this attitude is not as strong in Little’s book as in McWhorter’s, and I may be making false assumptions about her attitude.

Who would have thought that retirement would be so busy? I somehow thought that I’d have lots of time and would be looking for new projects. The trouble is; I’ve been saving up things to do and things to read, and there just always seems to be more to do. Reading in particular is taking a lot of time. With the “ripening” cataracts, reading had gotten downright painful. Now one eye is fixed, and the other isn’t really so bad, so I can read again. I’m picking up all of the books that I didn’t finish and working my way through them. And that doesn’t mention the stack of journals and papers sitting by my desk.

But back to Ashland. One thing we are doing is looking for a place to enjoy our retirement, and Silicon Valley is not it. The Valley is a great place for work, partly because it’s full of smart, active, people. Note that “full of people”. Though there’s a lot going on here, getting to where it’s happening is almost always a long and difficult journey. I don’t want to travel to Berkeley to see a play! So we’ve decided that Ashland is a good compromise, having enough smart, active people to be interesting, but not enough to cause problems. This last week we took a trip there to look for a house and check out the winter weather.
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Just a quick note.

We are in Ashland this week, checking out the weather and looking at real estate. The internet connection I have is painfully slow, so I’ll write about it when I get back.

In the last post there was a line “A lot of people I didn’t like”. This was the exact opposite of my intent. The “didn’t” was an edit error from the next sentence. It crept in when I was inserting the sentence in question.

My sincere apologies to anyone who read this before I fixed it.

As of tomorrow, I have retired from Microsoft. I haven’t changed jobs, I’ve retired. For at least the next couple of months I plan to do very little. I’ve been catching up on my reading, we are planning a trip to Ashland in the next couple of weeks to see what it’s like in the winter, and I am expecting to visit Florida in February for Mama’s birthday party.
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