I recently linked to this video on a different post (after getting corrected by the language police). I enjoyed the video so very much, I'm also linking to it here:
Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language from Matthew Rogers on Vimeo.
This may not be the perfect forum for a review, but the film "3 Idiots" is about education versus training, science versus engineering, fear versus hubris (and the happy medium), life and death, love and despair, laughter and tears. And it has colorful Bollywood dance numbers, too!
I rented it on a whim, as it was billed as a movie about too-smart engineering students versus the educational system. I was puzzled when it began with English subtitles during the (Indian accented) English dialog. I remembered a 1990's PBS/BBC series on the English language, when some of the impenetrable-to-me accents of the U.K. had no subtitles, but the perfectly intelligible-to-me Cajun and Ebonic dialects did. But as the blend of Hindi and English became apparent, I saw the need.
I loved this movie. Once one gets into the esthetic swing of Bollywood productions, it makes perfect sense when serious issues become silly dance numbers, and all characters are played as borderline caricatures. One can observe the essential cultural differences between our familiar American dilute-Christian one-life-to-live and anyone-can-become-president attitude and the Indian institutionalized attitude that reincarnation is the only way to improve your lot except through extraordinary means.
Why I think this is appropriate to this forum is the take on education. The protagonist has a scientific mindset that is often at odds with engineering philosophy and even more with institutionalized education. The system of teaching to the test is questioned, as is the principle of square pegs hammered into round holes. Vocation versus avocation is central to this, and expounded toward the end.
The 3 Idiots - Official Trailer has embedding disabled, but preview is fun even without subtitles. You get the idea of how English and Hindi have merged in their culture.
I defy you to watch it and not have the songs "All izz well" and/or "Zoobi Doobi" stuck in your heads.
I had long assumed that there was no rhyme for the word "orange." One of my daughters told me that there was no rhyme for "silver" either. That inspired us to turn to Wikipedia for a detailed list of words for which there are no rhymes. I had assumed that there were only a smattering of short English words that had no rhyme, but I was seriously wrong.
As I worked to write a long email on my iPhone, I found myself skipping some apostrophes because the reader certainly would understand what I was trying to communicate. This made me wonder why we users of English don't organize and officially eliminate apostrophes in many contractions. How about writing "dont" instead of "don't"? How about "cant" instead of "can't" (no one will confuse it with the obscure noun or little-used noun, verb and adjective versions of "cant." Even without an apostrophe, we would instantly know what "doesnt" and "wasnt" mean. Arguments can even be made to eliminate apostrophes in possessives (we've actually done that in pronoun possessives (his, her, their, its). The apostrophe, as used in contractions, was originally implemented to warn us that something is missing. If it's already apparent what's missing, though, the apostrophe (at least in many cases) seems redundant. I checked to see whether anyone else has proposed to do away with many of our apostrophes and I found this article by Richard Nordquist, who offers many resources, including a link to the aptly named Apostrophe Protection Society. I know that what I propose will never happen. That is the power of path dependency. But perhaps it is already happening unofficially, due to the way many of us are taking shortcuts on our smartphones. I know that Im not the only one who doesnt like digging out those little apostrophes and I wont be inclined to change my ways.
I never gave it much thought, but there is such a thing as a double-contraction in English. There are many of them.