Fieldnotes on Humanity

Mistranslation can sometimes be catastrophic, but other time can be amusing. This store, which is in Gaithersburg, Maryland, has a funny and confusing banner. In caps, it says "Engine House Hobbies," but the second line says "A Releasing Your Creativity Application." What does it mean? It may need a professional translator to explain what the last line means. I am not sure if the owner is an English speaker. I speculated that it was translated from one of foreign languages.  On August 10, Katherine and Joe who became dear friends to me this summer took me to the Montgomery Country Agricultural Fare . On our way to the fare, we were in the car when we passed by this store. Everyone of us read it's sign but no one got it. For a second, I doubted my intelligence, so I hesitantly asked Katherine and Joe if they understood the sign. They both said, they read it at least three times, but still confused. We laughed but confusingly, because we didn't under...

I recently began to read Perry Gilmore’s book,  Kisisi (Our Language): The Story of Colin and Sadiki . It is a kind of autoethnography, a linguistic case study, and a memoir. In the prologue, she tells the story of his son Colin and his playmate Sadiki, a Samburu boy in Kenya, and how their unique and prosperous relationship led them to create their own private language, which was called Swahili pidgin. She says that her book is an ethnographic exploration of young children’s ability and creativity in creating their own language. In chapter three (I skipped the first two chapters, which I might return to later), Gilmore discusses the role of play in her son Colin and Sadiki’s creative ways of communication. On page 37, she claims that the “play served as a space and a resource for the inventive verbal activities that generated their shared language." Gilmore goes into detail about how Colin and Sadiki created a lexicon for scatological artifacts, which, to some degree, was i...