Word: english
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...small, clever (and usually battery-powered) computer- toys has arrived in full beep. But beeps are not the extent of the commotion; in a couple of astonishing cases, the new gadgets will play games with their owners while announcing the moves and commenting on the play in understandable spoken English, or in one of several other languages that the purchaser may choose. Some of the toys are musical, and some are rolling, programmable robot vehicles...
...Little, Brown; 184 pages; $17.50), Richard Humble, an English military historian, goes further than most of his fraternity to get it all in. Some of his vignettes of battle scenes-half-crazed English soldiers fighting naked at Agincourt, defeated German troops stumbling drunkenly from the First Marne-are as telling as his descriptions of the pettifoggery, vanity and incompetence of commanders and politicians. Together with an introductory section recapitulating ancient wars and a final chapter previewing the next (and last), Humble incisively analyzes 18 great victories from the day of the longbow to the era of the missile. The book...
...commonly confused with a subcategory, "twin speech," a private collection of distorted words and idioms used by 40% of twins because they feel lonely or playful or both. Twins usually give it up at age three. But Gracie and Ginny were discovered at six, still unable to speak English. They had an apparent vocabulary of hundreds of exotic words stuck together in Rube Goldberg sentence structures and salted with strange half-English and half-German phrases. The preposition out became an active verb: "I out the pudatoo-ta" (I throw out the potato salad). Potato could be said...
Romain and Speech Pathologist Anne Koeneke, who was assigned to Ginny, meanwhile began to use "play situations" to build up the twins' limited English. The girls could not easily arrange syllables into understandable words. They spewed out what English words they had with a machine gunlike rapidity. Given modeling clay (which they pretended was potato salad), kitchen implements, dolls and dollhouses, the twins would play and the speech pathologists would ask questions. Where should the doll go? "Inhouse," Gracie might answer. "Oh, in the house," Romain would reply slowly. Single words were expanded to phrases, phrases to sentences. Romain...
After moving to California, Ginny and Gracie were left to themselves or entrusted to then- maternal grandmother, Paula Kunert, 76, a stern disciplinarian who spoke no English. They became frightened of strangers and dogs and stayed inside day after day, playing by themselves while then" parents slept or sought work. The parents did notice something they considered "childish gibberish." Playing in the corner, Gracie, the dominant twin, would hold up an object and seem to give it a name. Ginny would respond. High-speed dialogue followed. "They could say simple words," Tom Kennedy remembers, "mostly like Indians would talk...