Word: polyglot
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sketch, the characters stood on a darkened stage and told jokes, turning on flashlights whenever they spoke. In another, a character named XY (Rachel Marie Douglas ’09) explained her ambitions to become “the lightweight polyglot champion of the world...
Fresh from a country with two official languages: a new Canadian study suggests that being bilingual will, on average, postpone the onset of dementia by 4.1 years. Even after adjusting for schooling and immigration status, the results were unequivocal: being a polyglot (or at least a biglot) fights brain rot. What's not clear is why. Researchers speculate the ability to operate in two languages could - like exercise or stimulating leisure and social activity - help the brain continue normal functions even as it decays physically. Just don't expect great things from your French refresher course. The study, appearing...
...Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy prize; the Las Vegas handicappers had established Dreamgirls at prohibitive one-to-10 odds. That will put it among the five Oscar nominees for Best Picture with The Queen and The Departed. Other possibilities are the indie fave Little Miss Sunshine and the polyglot Babel, which was a surprise winner of the top Globe prize: Best Motion Picture - Drama. But Babel, whose story spans four countries and five languages, was as apt a choice by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which votes for the Globes, as the actor-laden, L.A.-set Crash...
Less hyperbolic opponents point out that granting special official status to English is simply unnecessary: America has been accepting foreign-language-speaking immigrants forever--Brooklyn is so polyglot it is a veritable Babel--and yet we've done just fine. What's the great worry about Spanish...
...worry is this. Polyglot is fine. When immigrants, like those in Brooklyn, are members of a myriad of linguistic communities, each tiny and discrete, there is no threat to the common culture. No immigrant presumes to make the demand that the state grant special status to his language. He may speak it in the street and proudly teach it to his children, but he knows that his future and certainly theirs lie inevitably in learning English as the gateway to American life...