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“I notice therefore I learn”
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“I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.” — E.B. White (The Points of My Compass)
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“The act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules.”
- James Gleick (1987)
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“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
— Niels Bohr -
The upper regions of the brain’s temporal lobe are important both for hearing and for comprehending spoken language. We have discovered that these regions can be activated by sign language in congenitally deaf subjects, even though the temporal lobe normally functions as an auditory area. This finding indicates that, in deaf people, the brain region usually reserved for hearing may be activated by other sensory modalities, providing striking evidence of neural plasticity.
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“The conviction persists, though history shows it to be a hallucination, that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact, intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume, an abandonment that results from the decreasing vitalism and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them, we get over them.”
– John Dewey -
“To be blunt we do not really understand one of our most commonplace experiences. We know how to use a word to mean something and to refer to something. …Yet we do not know how we know how to do this, nor what we are doing when we do.”– Terrence Deacon
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“My experiences provided objective evidence for something I’d subjectively known for years. Most of the Spanish I speak was learned from drunks in bars. In fact, drunks are the world’s most underrated language teaching resource. The stereotypic drunk speaker slurs his speech to the point of unintelligibility, but in real life this happens only in the final, immediate-pre-collapse phase of drunkenness. Prior to that, drunks speak slowly and with exaggerated care, because they know they are drunk but don’t want other people to know. Moreover, since they’re already too drunk to remember what they just said, they repeat themselves over and over, and don’t mind if you do the same. If you’re gregarious and a drinker, it’s by far the easiest way to learn a new language.”
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What is it that makes humor difficult to understand and appreciate in a second language (L2)? Despite advances in research in both L2 pragmatics and humor studies, scholars have as yet had little to say on this topic.
Researchers Nancy Bell and Salvatore Attardo set out to answer these questions. Humor is a funny thing. Despite the seeming universality of its character, human beings throughout the world and the language they speak inflect and refract it, like a infinite kaleidoscopic of jokes, irony, teasing, parody, rhyme and banter, that it seems to me that some of the first to discover the cultural quirkiness of humor are foreign language learners.
In this language note, I’d like to delve into the humor of culture and the culture of humor when language learners encounter it out there “in the wild.”
Big Idea # 1: Failed Humor? Why’s that funny?
The authors write, “Examinations of non-native-speaker experiences with humor demonstrate that even L2 users who are highly competent in most types of interactions regularly find L2 humor difficult to perceive, understand, and appreciate.”
What kind of interactional failures might arise with humor in intercultural communication?
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“From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere!”
