Primrose Road

1615: "Nay, before the Conquest by Bastard William that the French came in, our English tongue was most perfect, able to expresse any Hebruisme, which is the tryall of perfection in Languages." -- J.G., A Refutation of the Apology for Actors. 2008: "Here's an example of two-letter roots taking on a stronger prefix letter to offer three similar words that go up the piano scale of intensity. BL, Bet-Lamed means intertwined, balled up like the words of the world being BaLaL (confused) since Babel. Loosely folding over two strands makes a braid or pleat called a GaBHeL. Five letters up is Het, and a HeBHeL is a string. The intertwining got tighter and stronger. Going up from letter #8 to #20 is KHaf. The strands are so strongly intertwined that KHaBHeL means CABLE. Yes, CABLE does come from KheBHeL." -- Edenics, or intelligent design in language. If you read the full Edenics article, note how similar the author's "methods" are to those of the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, who explains to his children how the word 'kimono' derives from Greek.

An article called "The Shakespeared Brain: A Theatre of Simultaneous Possibilities" describes an experiment that tests the effects of reading certain Shakespearean turns of phrase on the brain. My linguistics and educational psychology buddies will appreciate this one. Philip Davis and colleagues used an electroencephalogram (EEC) to look at what happens when we read "functional shifts" in Shakespeare's plays. (A functional shift occurs when one part of speech serves as another, i.e. verbing a noun.) Davis sees each Shakespearean functional shift as "a small instance of inner drama." Because, it turns out, functional shifts do have a profound effect on the brain, Davis goes on to label the functional shift one of Shakespeare's "dramatic tools." Okay, but this experiment only looked at what happens when we read these functional shifts. Since Shakespeare wrote for the stage (though there are debates about the degree to which he was concerned with print publication), it might be interesting to also explore what happens when we hear functional shifts.