Each semester, while I was teaching, I found I had to spend some time within the first few classes on the problem of Engfish. The first assignments always came back in a sort of half-language carefully constructed to reveal nothing, commit to nothing, and generally avoid saying anything dangerous or objectionable.
Reading Maureen Dowd’s piece in [...]
Posts Tagged ‘palin’
The Engfish Lesson: for Ms. Palin
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged election, engfish, palin, politics, teaching on October 5, 2008 | 8 Comments »
Demeaning the Mind: The Language of Politics in America
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged clinton, elitism, hegemony, language, mccain, ngugi, palin, politics, postcolonial on September 19, 2008 | 1 Comment »
In 1981, Kenyan author and theorist Ngugi wa Thiong’o formally renounced English as his artistic medium. The English language, he claims, is too bound up with colonialism, exploitation, and hegemony to be useful as a means of fighting those forces through literature. Language and politics, for him, are too entwined, too married to one another, [...]
