Why Is This a Question? Quotes

“Xenoglossophobia, or foreign-language anxiety, is a growing field of psychological study that routinely finds factors such as test apprehension, nervousness in a classroom setting and a fear of making mistakes can have hugely detrimental effects on the learning experiences. By adapting teaching methods accordingly, new languages could be opened up to anyone, regardless of any innate skill.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Why Is This a Question?: Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask

“Recent studies of second-language learners, for instance, have found people are better able to retain new words when they’re encouraged to memorise them alongside an accompanying gesture.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Why Is This a Question?: Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask

“gesturing might in fact aid our brain’s processing and visualisation of spatial information itself, allowing us to talk more fluently about it.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Why Is This a Question?: Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask

“When we really need people to listen, it seems, our brains instinctively redouble our gesturing efforts”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Why Is This a Question?: Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask

“Proving just how innate these gestures truly are, even people who have been blind their entire lives will still gesture to one another when they talk.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Why Is This a Question?: Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask

“Research has also suggested that bilingual and multilingual people experience the tip-of-the-tongue sensation more frequently than monolinguals and will often end up exchanging a word from one language for one they find they cannot access in another (as in, I’m going to take a bain). This has been taken to suggest that our brain does not store lexical information from separate languages discretely, and is not able to ‘switch off ’ a language in which a person is fluent, even in monolingual situations.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Why Is This a Question?: Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask

“This ability to access the overall concept of the word we’re blanking on is what sometimes causes us to come out with ludicrously long-winded synonyms, out of sheer desperation. Case in point, I once blanked on the word pen, and called it an ‘ink pencil’. Case in another point, a friend of mine once referred to Starbucks as ‘the coffee pub’.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Why Is This a Question?: Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask

“our eyes are fundamentally drawn to the shapes and angles that things form, rather than the things themselves, and it’s through the unique combination of those shapes that we perceive things for what they are. And it’s precisely this process of recognition that we have hijacked in order to learn how to read.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Why Is This a Question?: Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask

“Good prose is the selection of the best words; poetry is the best words in the best order; and journalese is any old words in any old order.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Why Is This a Question?: Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask

“one person’s strange is just another person’s normal. One person’s difficult or extraordinary is another person’s easy and everyday.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Why Is This a Question?: Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask

“adults may in many ways make better learners than children, as they are able to use tried-and-tested memorisation techniques, call on a lifetime of knowledge and experience, and approach the learning process more critically.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Why Is This a Question?: Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask

“the tiny town of Ixonia in Wisconsin was named in 1846 by randomly drawing letters out of a bag.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Why Is This a Question?: Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask

“In 1996, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed the gossip-and-grooming theory, claiming that as humans came to live in ever larger groups, they would have replaced the communal grooming sessions of their primate ancestors with a less time-consuming ‘vocal grooming’ – using speech, rather than touch, as a means of consolidating social bonds.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Why Is This a Question?: Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask