Take your mind off the lack of notifications...

[Triple Tall Cappuccino]

So, in a futile attempt to get my mind off of the fact that I have not heard from ANY OTHER SCHOOL, I decided to start this topic. Feel free to chime in!

What has been the NERDIEST linguistic moment you've caught yourself in?

I would have to say that a top one for me is when I was teaching my 9th/10th graders grammar (English lit teacher), and one student asked whether the word "apple" in "apple pie" would be considered an adjective... to which I went off on a syntactic rant and drew trees all over the classroom! LOL

That, or when I began transcribing different words and explaining phonetics to prove to my honors students that "the thought" is NOT alliteration.

That, and having discussions with every friend that has a baby (wow, your baby is HOW OLD and is already producing interdentals?), or correcting my friends that complain about Spanglish being "bad Spanish"... yeah.

I'm curious to hear yours!

[Unamuno]

"That, and having discussions with every friend that has a baby (wow, your baby is HOW OLD and is already producing interdentals?), "

Love the baby with the interdentals! I would say my nerdiest linguistics moment was in an Elementary Spanish course when I attempted to teach students stem-changing verbs by illustrating the logic behind their historical development, as well as parallel developments in French. I'm pretty sure it went way over their heads, but I enjoyed myself!

[Reddawg50]

mine was probably when I was teaching Arabic prosody to my high school juniors, lol-- we were doing a unit on poetry and it came up that in fact the poetic traditions hinge up rules that are intimately related to the prosody of the language itself, which led to an overly enthusisatic lecture on my part. but we do it all the time in my classes, just this week with my sophomores who are learning about the extensive system of root and pattern in Arabic, they realized for the first time that the word for "week" has the same trilateral root as the word for "seven" and the entire class went "OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

fun stuff