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.

I’ve often argued that terrorism is a poor tactic because it doesn’t achieve its political ends. My son Kevin, one of the smartest people I know, argued that terrorists really weren’t trying to achieve political ends, but were trying for glory within their group. After we talked about it for a while, we decided that both statements were true, but only covered small pieces of the phenomenon. Now Louise Richardson has written a book that covers both and much more in What Terrorists Want. Her thesis is that terrorist groups have primary political aims, but individual terrorists are motivated by what she calls the three R’s, Revenge, Renown, and Reaction. To these individual, the primary aim is mainly used for self justification. I’m oversimplifying, of course, but it makes a lot of sense. She also offers solutions. I think they make sense, and perhaps we will someday try them. In the meantime, read this book. It’s worth it.