Pip Pip Hurray!

I have always been a language geek, all thanks to my mom. She was a journalism major in college, and so she always instilled in me the importance of using proper grammar. I find that I can hear incorrect grammar a lot easier than I can see it, and so I have to read things aloud often as I edit them. I thought it would be really fun to watch the different Ted Talk videos about language because of the little tips and tricks I might be able to learn. My favorite of the videos was "Where do new words come from?" by Marcel Danesi. I guess I had never considered how new words came to be, but it was fascinating to me! I have always wanted to come up with a new word, and I felt think this video sort of taught me how! Here are some notes that I took while I watched the video: there are over 170,000 words in the English language (wow!!) words can come from a multitude of different origins  I always thought people just came up with random words and some committee approved of them...

Because I am planning on entering the health field, I thought it would be interesting to focus Wednesday's notes on "How Sickness Entered the World." Although I really enjoyed all of the readings from the Tejas unit, this one stuck out to me. I am doing a normal, classic note-taking strategy since I tried a new strategy for Tuesday's notes. The style I usually stick to is bullet points of important sentences and topics, that way I can look back and easily remember what is going on. How Sickness Entered the World: two young Indians killed a messenger from the Great Spirit before this happened, there was no sickness and people lived very long lives a very old, wise man was dying  the Great Spirit wanted to teach the man how to leave his wisdom with his tribe he was going to send a messenger (remember above^^) to tell him how to do this  because the old man was so sick and dying, he needed people to go to meet the messenger for him.  he sent two young Ind...

I chose to read the Tejas Legends for week 10 readings. I was excited about this because these stories were originally from east Texas. I've spent some time in east Texas, and so I thought it would be really cool to be able to read stories when I could actually picture the place in which they were written. My favorite of the stories was "Why the woodpecker pecks," and so I decided to base my reading notes off of this. I chose to focus on the beauty of how this story was written and pick out some of my favorite sentences from this story. "a Tap! Tap! Tap! sounding in the top of a dead tree..." I love how they used onomatopoeia in the very first sentence so that readers could immediately picture and hear the sound that a woodpecker makes.  "looking just like a little man in a black coat and a red hat." This allows readers to visually picture how the woodpecker looks after hearing its noise in the first sentence.  I love the way the author uses sound...