"An incredible trick" The starting point for this piece is an observation that Simon Kirby made a long time ago in the introduction to a BBC Horizon programme Why do we talk? , a documentary that I have used for nearly 20 years in my language acquisition classes at Konan. It is a scene-setting observation, one which seems self-evident and innocuous, and to which I paid next to no attention until a few months ago. I can walk up to someone I don’t know, and I can make a sequence of noises…that I’ve never made before…by pushing air through my mouth. I will take a thought in my head…and make it go into their head . That’s an incredible trick. It would be incredible, if that was what happens. Yet a moment's reflection - or perhaps twenty-plus years of rumination, I'm not sure which - tells me that this is completely wrong. We do not take our thoughts and cause them to go into other's heads. That would be amazing. Instead, whatever is involved in verbal communication i
Random and considered thoughts