LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

  I have always held that if the first 50 pages of a novel are tough going, toss it into the wastepaper basket or give it away to a friend you do not care much for. I have often heard it said that "the first 50 pages of this thriller are very complicated to read, but after that, the novel is wonderful, the best."  And who has the grit, endurance, and resilience to put up with fifty boring pages of a book, hoping that the best is yet to come. Once a bore, always a bore, I say. All this comes because my daughter, Laura Lynn, has gifted me with Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead. So far, I have read 20 pages of the autobiography of a boy in Appalachia, Demon, who is "a voice for the ages - akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield," according to Beth Macy, author of Dopesick . Having read both masterpieces years ago, I see no reason to tackle a new youngster's ravings and commonplaces about his childhood and hard times. Also, having read Tobacco Road  when it wa...

In my opinion, a word that sometimes describes Spaniards linguistically is hubris : excessive confidence in one’s own abilities. Why do I say this? Because it is not uncommon to hear claims of “perfect English” that do not quite withstand scrutiny. Many people will say, in all seriousness, that they speak flawless English—or that their children do—based on rather limited experience. One hears statements such as: “My daughter speaks perfect English; she spent a month in London washing dishes,” or that someone’s command of the language is impeccable because he works as a translator at a certain firm. Yet, when the chips are down, this supposed perfection often proves less solid than advertised. The gap between confidence and actual performance can be striking. This is not to say that Spaniards are uniquely guilty of such overconfidence, but there does seem to be a tendency, at times, to equate familiarity with mastery. In that sense, “hubris” may not be entirely misplaced. Spaniards spea...

  Homophones are the terror of poor spellers: words that have the same pronunciation but different meanings and spellings. ‘David is rite when he says Peter is rich’ sounds the same as ‘David is write when he says Peter is rich,’ but our sight tells us that the correct form is ‘David is right when he says…’. The sounds are identical, but the meanings and spellings are different. Here/hear; hair/hare; week/weak; pair/pare/pear… and many more. In Spanish, examples include hecho/echo; hola/ola; vello/bello; haber/a ver… and, for those who do not pronounce the Castilian /θ/ sound, caza/casa; cocer/coser. This is not a trivial matter of grammar or spelling; it signals to others that we belong to the intellectually below-the-salt type of people. 

  Rhyming phraseology occurs in both English and Spanish, as in “una y no más, Santo Tomás” or “date el piro, vampiro,” expressions that are distinctly colloquial and largely ornamental. English likewise abounds in rhyming pairs such as “itsy-bitsy,” “okey-dokey,” “hanky-panky,” and “super-duper,” among many others. As these forms are part of the language, their use cannot be prescribed; however, they are best confined to informal contexts rather than formal speech, and still less to formal writing.

  While reading the article “The people at the center of the war” by Parin Behrooz in The New York Times (April 10), I came across a sentence that contains two very small slips—of the sort that occasionally appear in even the best-edited publications. The sentence reads: “That war began with explicit encouragement for Iranians to rise up and ended with U.S. threats to bomb the country back to the ‘Stone Ages’ has not been lost on the people living through it.” Two details may be noted in passing. First, the familiar English expression is “the Stone Age,” not “the Stone Ages.” Second, the grammatical subject of the sentence is the compound statement introduced by that (“that war began … and ended …”), which would normally take a plural verb: have not been lost rather than has not been lost. These are, of course, minor points that do not affect the sense of the passage. They simply remind us how demanding careful copy-editing can be. Readers of a certain generation may recall a...

  Nature has laws we cannot escape. Life is a struggle for survival among living beings driven to thrive and reproduce. In that struggle, we fall prey to countless enemies, many microscopic. What we call disease consists of tiny organisms that do not intend to harm us, yet must use our bodies to thrive. If we overcome them, they lose; if they prevail, we die. That is neither good nor bad—simply a fact. I have fought my share of such battles and, so far, prevailed: ear infections, measles, chickenpox, kidney stones, two severe bouts of flu, endless colds, gastritis, headaches, a heart attack, cancer. The usual fare, if one lives long enough. Add to this the wear and tear of time on body and mind. I am 87 and still pushing on. Time allows no pause. Despite everything, I have lived a largely healthy, active, and mostly pain-free life. I was born before penicillin came into common use, which says something about the stamina of my body. I am, by any measure, a survivor—fortunate, and ...