Another rather horrid day filled with house business and starting to get our things together for when we go and visit our daughter Ali and family.
11:00 Simon, an estate agent, comes to value our house, and it takes much longer than I imagine because of his extended sales pitch after he's given us the valuation. But he's a nice guy and he's in his mid-fifties so he's got plenty of experience of the housing market, which he shares with us.
Apparently houses in this area have gone up 12% in the last 12 months, partly because of the pandemic and working-from-home, because people are looking for quality of life and a pleasant place to live rather than somewhere near their workplace : Cheltenham is seen as a great place to live, and has been among the "best places to live in the UK if you're raising a family" three years running - my god !!!!
What madness!!!
When Simon arrives, he asks if we'd like him to wear a mask, and we say "Yes please", and we check that he's been taking frequent lateral flow COVID tests, which he has. We have lots of windows open in the house, and we leave him to look round the house and garden on his own while we sit strategically placed in the window of our front room, which serves as our dining-room and office.
When he's finished, he comes into the front room to see us with some questions and his evaluation - and he stays about 8 feet away from us (2.5m), which feels nice'n'safe !!!
12:30 We send Simon's valuation in a whatsapp text to Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, in case Sarah and Francis and their 8-year-old twins Lily and Jessica, decide to move back to the UK, and maybe even buy our house.
When we next see our daughter, Alison, and her family, we'll have to work through any inheritance tax issues etc, and probably we ought to get a solicitor to give us advice.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
13:30 We speak to Sarah on a WhatsApp phone call, and she's her usual sweet-natured self. All the pain of the morning is suddenly forgotten in an instant!
What a sweet daughter she is! Sarah was born in the Queen's Silver Jubilee year - 1977. And now it's the Queen's Platinum Jubilee - how time flies haha !!!!
19:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her great-niece Molly's yoga class on zoom, followed by her sect's weekly Bible Seminar also on zoom.
I settle down on the couch and listen to the radio, this week's programme in the series "Word of Mouth", which concentrates on language issues.
This week, series presenter Michael Rosen is talking to linguistics professor John McWhorter of Columbia University.
McWhorter describes himself as a "language nerd".
He says he first became fascinated by language at the age of 5, when he heard one of his schoolfriends talking Hebrew with her parents. At that time, growing up in Philadelphia, he wasn't aware that there were any languages in the world other than English. And immediately he wanted to learn Hebrew words, i.e. to "learn the code". He didn't want to find out about the culture of the "Hebrews", he just wanted to learn some of the words.
At last - I find that there's someone in the world just like me haha!
McWhorter has recently written a book about America's "Black English", and he describes some of its features. For instance you can leave out the word "is" by saying "He my brother", but you can't leave out the word "am" and say "I his brother ".
"She be walking like that" means she habitually walks like that, not that she's walking like that at this particular moment.
McWhorter says there are about 50 or so rules like that to learn, and those syntax rules are far more important to master than learning all the black slang words that exist. Slang changes every 20 years or so anyway, and all cultures have slang.
He's right, you know!
Where does this Black English come from? McWhorter says it originated from slaves, as adults, being exposed to a mixture of 18th century English as spoken by English people coming from South West England, including Cornwall, and from North East England including Yorkshire, and other varieties from the British Isles, including Irish.
Then if you add to that a dollop of native African rhythm and cadence, then "Bob's your uncle" - what you have is Black English.
See? Simples!!
It's a language that would never have emerged, McWhorter says, without the barbarity of the slave trade.
Black people in the US may speak this dialect but also speak a more standard English if they sense subconsciously that the circumstances call for it, or maybe a hybrid form of the two. This switching is all done subconsciously, McWhorter says.
Fascinating stuff!
21:00 Lois emerges from her multiple zoom sessions.
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!
No comments:
Post a Comment