TUBBY TALKING POINTS

sometimes, this often mundane, strange or unusual blog is sparked by some utterance of the comfortable, bourgeois able seaman bill o'reilly (tubby)....

now tubby has it that we should all learn a bunch of words from a thesaurus like 'perspicacity'.... for someone like tubby and his ilk.... knowledge comes from an american university or university in partnership with an american university..... so american university standards of teaching and learning are the only one or the best one, in their minds

however, american universities are very poor on foreign languages, i myself, who now speak spanish, my parents' tongue, with tremendous fluency and mastery and near perfection -- with failings that no longer even bother me.... learnt slowly that a great many words in english, like perspicacity, are convertible to spanish (perspicaz) due to the shared latin/roman history/language

now i know a great many people have vested interest in a 'classical education' - knowledge of latin and greek and some history of rome and greece.... while recently i have finally taken up an old copy of plutarch's 'alexander' which i found a great read and a real light-shiner on possibly one of the world's most noble serial killers -- in fact, plutarch even suggests brazenly, as no doubt in his own time such a thing would not have been thought of as rare, that alexander was divinely born (like krishna, jesus, lao-tze and many others were reported to be) of a virgin, conceived by God or some divine agent..... now how is is possible a man-of-war like alexander could have been divinely conceived? would such a thing be possible? or would only men of peace and philosophy be divinely conceived.....

in general, i don't like thinking about such topics much, although i believe they really occur (divinely conceived babies), as i find myself much too imperfect and sinful and generally an angry and rotten monster..... so i try not to think about such things doctrinely or philosophically.......

returning to education....... in fact, without 'echando flores' as the spanish say, the reality is that i have a much bigger vocabulary than most of the educated classes in america and australia and england, due to the fact that i know words in spanish (a great many of them), french (very many), bulgarian and chinese (yet more)......... so people who only speak one language, and have done some lily-gilding of their knowledge at some fancy american university should realize that their vocabularies are much much smaller than even a bilingual person..... generally bilingual, trilingual and multilingual people do not go about boasting of their talents........

in america, the standard is to rote-learn/comprehension-learn a long and sophisticated list of vocabulary apart from and separate to general book knowledge and reading... and then be tested on the knowledge of these words.... however this does not necessarily make for greater linguistic mastery or better repartee.... some people argue that the testing systems used by high schools and universities in america are biases against minorities in the way they are structured and presented......... the reality is that a great many 'down-and-out' looking african americans and african americans in general are surprisingly knowledgeable in various intricacies of the english language (like fancy big latin words) despite not holding any university degree and generally being more likely to end up in prison