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Don’t tangle with Thomas
Thomas Lukaszuk, Alberta’s new minister of education, knows a prank, especially when he’s the intended victim. On November 14, while driving along St. Albert Trail, the minister was tailed by a car with flashing lights. Assuming it was an unmarked police cruiser, the law-abiding Lukaszuk pulled over. It soon became apparent that something was amiss when Lukaszuk noticed that the car’s inhabitants were a little too young to be police officers. The suspicious vehicle pulled away and Lukaszuk gave chase, eventually blocking the bogus police vehicle’s escape from a parking lot that was a dead end. The minister called police, who say they may lay charges against the 18-year-old driver and his 15-year-old passenger.
To text or not to text …
Modern language “is being eroded” by “a world of truncated sentences, sound bites and Twitter,” warns Ralph Fiennes. Speaking at the British Film Institute London Film Festival awards, in London, the English Patient actor observed, “Our expressiveness and our ease with some words are being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us.” Fiennes was particularly concerned about the influence of social networking on drama students. “I hear it, too, from people at drama schools, who say the younger intake find the density of a Shakespeare text a challenge in a way that, perhaps, [students] a few generations ago … wouldn’t have.” Fiennes, who does not use Twitter, isn’t alone in his belief. J.P. Davidson, linguistic expert and author of Planet Word, recently expressed concern that text-message abbreviations will kill off longer words.
