Collapsing bridges and crusading linguists
Back in September, we said our wedding vows before our parents and siblings. And yesterday, we officially got married at the courthouse before celebrating with friends over dim sum. So it was a big week.
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➔ This week the National Transportation Safety Board concluded its investigation into the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse in Pittsburgh, which resulted in injuries back in January 2022. The NTSB's 8-minute summary video calmly, clearly explains what happened (or more importantly, what didn't happen) in the years leading up to the collapse. It's a marvel of bureaucratic and investigatory communication.
➔ I came across a 13-minute interview of French linguist Julie Neveux on infotainment program Quotidien last year. She does an incredible job of explaining how French should be treated as an ever-evolving language and as a means to communicate, not as a series of rules to master. We do ourselves a disservice, she argues, when we treat language as a series of traps that make us insecure about whether or not we are "correct" instead of as a flexible tool to understand and be understood.
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Have a great week.
