Language

On a recent Friday morning, a classroom of teenagers at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School broke up into small groups and spent an hour not answering questions about Albert Camus's "The Plague. " It wasn't that the students were shy, or bored, or that they hadn't done the reading. They were following instructions: Ask as many questions as they could, and answer none of them. The kids wrote in rapid fire on sheets of butcher paper. "Why is everyone acting normal when people are dropping dead?"

Nuance Communications Inc. , a Burlington company known for its Dragon voice-recognition software, said Friday that its voice technology has been is incorporated into a PlaySay language learning app designed for Apple Inc.'s iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices. "PlaySay is an interactive social gaming app that connects Spanish and English language learners so they can learn useful phrases, practice with a real partner, and improve pronunciation," Nuance said in a press release . "With Nuance's Dragon voice recognition and text-to-speech technologies,...

PRICES WERE out of control at the end of third-century Rome, and the Emperor Diocletian was determined to rein them in. In AD 301 he issued his famous Edict on Prices , a complex piece of legislation that banned speculation and established price ceilings for a wide range of goods and services. But the ambitious law failed. Though violators could be punished with death, inflation and speculation persisted. Goods were hoarded, or sold on the black market. The economic crisis worsened.

Spanish-language television anchor and producer Frank Cairo faces grand theft charges after police in South Florida say he stole a patio chairs and carpet from a neighbor. Doral Police Chief Rick Gómez told The Miami Herald ( http://hrld.us/M0TpNG) that 48-year-old Cairo "admitted" to the theft. But he says he took the items because he thought the apartment had been abandoned. Police say apartment owner Roberto Xacur lives in Mexico. Surveillance video shows Cairo — whose real name is Ivan Valdes — and 47-year-old Jorge Acuña Arias during the April 29 theft.

Polls show that frustration with Washington has never been higher — and who could argue? Most Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. Most lawmakers openly concede that nothing will get done before the November elections. The leaders of both parties are already trading threats over the possibility of a national debt default next year. Barack Obama got elected by promising to change the tone in Washington, but clearly he's failed, as George W. Bush did before him. That should be a clue that the partisan animosity consuming the political system doesn't originate in the White House.

NEWTON - Dan Kennedy will graduate from Boston College on Monday, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and the recipient of the school's most prestigious prize, the Edward H. Finnegan Award. Winners of the Finnegan, given to the student who best exemplifies the BC motto, "ever to excel," tend to go big - top grad schools, Wall Street, overseas fellowships. Kennedy is planning to give away his computer, recycle his Blackberry, and move to a modest communal house in St. Paul, Minn.

Bro has been used as a colloquial abbreviation of the word "brother" for hundreds of years--the OED has a citation from about 1660, "I accompanyd my Eldest Bro (who then quitted Oxford) into the Country. " In recent years, however, as a standalone word (sometimes facetiously pronounced "brah"), it has come to mean something much more specific: bro as in frat bro, a casual, popped-collar term of endearment for a fellow beer-drinking, sports-loving, vaguely collegiate, masculine dude.

I WRITE in regard to the letter to the editor from Marjorie Generazzo ("Language barrier," Sept. 20), which advocates that the United States require immigrants to speak English before coming here. I wonder where she and millions of others would be had that been the US policy 100 years ago. My grandparents came from Italy knowing no English; my father learned to speak it when he attended public school. He went on to be valedictorian of his college class and a distinguished professor of economics.

( Oblivion; By David Foster Wallace; Little, Brown, 329 pp.; $25.95 ) David Foster Wallace is not a big fan of contemporary American culture. In books like "Infinite Jest" and "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men," he revs up his pet peeves and sends them soaring on gusts of ironic bloviation. "Oblivion" continues this tradition with eight satirically weird stories that poke fun at the media, America's obsession with health, our lurid fascination with children, and the falseness of advertising.

Patrice Bergeron had just arrived in Boston in 2003, a French-Canadian rookie with big expectations and little English. He would sit in meetings, lost and confused, a shy teenager trying to learn hockey while barely understanding his coaches. The demands pressed on him - stick work, goal scoring, speed, English. He's not alone, then or now. Nine languages are spoken in the Bruins locker room: English, French, German, Slovak, Czech, Serbian, Russian, Finnish, and Swedish. And that doesn't even count the Italian that defenseman Zdeno Chara - who can speak six languages - is learning for fun...

More than a decade after the state urged that students start learning a foreign language in the early grades, many local elementary schools are losing ground. Immersion programs, in which children study all of their subjects in the second language, are thriving in a few communities. But traditional foreign language classes, often for a few hours a week, have disappeared from elementary schools in Arlington, Bellingham, Franklin, Littleton, Marlborough, Needham, Newton, Norfolk, and Shrewsbury.

Motorists who admit there's enough evidence to convict them of drunken driving but aren't technically convicted are not subject to certain increased penalties under a law designed to stiffen punishment for repeat drunken drivers, the state's highest court ruled Thursday. The Supreme Judicial Court said the state Legislature didn't change the legal definition of what constitutes a "conviction" when it passed Melanie's Law in 2005. The definition includes people who plead guilty or no contest or those who are found guilty.

I've got several things to catch you up on today, dear readers, so let's start with some further thoughts about last Monday's question about the use of "take a stab. " First of all, I'm not sure I can endorse my own advice anymore. Last week, I said   Avoid sexual, religious, and I would now add "violent" metaphors in the workplace as much as possible, unless those idioms are already embedded in the workplace culture.  That still sounds like typical "good etiquette advice," but a little part of me dies inside every...

(Stefanie Le for boston.com) By Stefanie Le, Globe Correspondent The South End Branch of the Boston Public Library wasn't its usual quiet, browsing atmosphere on a recent day. The place was filled with toddlers, ages 1 to 6, stomping, dancing, and singing at the top of their lungs. But they weren't causing a disturbance — they were learning Spanish. Jouveth Shortell led a group of approximately 30 to 40 toddlers in singing and and marching to original songs written by Shortell herself.

English is emerging as the common tongue of the global economy, and companies that fail to adopt an English-only policy could face a competitive disadvantage. So argues Harvard Business School professor Tsedal Neeley in the May issue of the Harvard Business Review . In her article, Neeley notes that such companies as Airbus, Daimler-Chrysler, Fast Retailing, Nokia, Renault, Samsung, and SAP have "mandated" English as their corporate lingua franca. "If you want to surpass your rivals, it's no...

Patrice Bergeron had just arrived in Boston in 2003, a French-Canadian rookie with big expectations and little English. He would sit in meetings, lost and confused, a shy teenager trying to learn hockey while barely understanding his coaches. The demands pressed on him - stick work, goal scoring, speed, English. He's not alone, then or now. Nine languages are spoken in the Bruins locker room: English, French, German, Slovak, Czech, Serbian, Russian, Finnish, and Swedish. And that doesn't even count the Italian that defenseman Zdeno Chara - who can speak six languages - is...

As we move on (fingers crossed) into the cleanup-and-restoration stage of the BP oil well disaster, maybe it’s time to cap off a few of the usage debates that bubbled up along with the gusher of crude. I’m not talking about the truly arcane drilling lingo — “junk shot,” “top hat,” “static kill” — that has come and gone in the past several months. These terms range from obvious to mysterious, but so far, none seem to be seeping into our everyday vocabulary. (The “static” in “static kill,” by the way, refers to achieving stasis, or equilibrium, between the pressure of the oil and the weight of the...

The following was submitted by Beverly/Addison Gilbert Hospital: The Speech-Language Therapy Department at Beverly Hospital will sponsor free pediatric speech/language screenings at Beverly and Addison Gilbert hospitals from May 1 - May 31 for children 11 months - 18 years Screeings will be conducted by a member of the Speech-Language Therapy Department which will take approximately 20-30 minutes to identify if a child is developmentally appropriate...

April 1 is a good day to test that the sugar in your sugar bowl is really sugar, to check carefully before opening any unexpected packages, and to be more than ordinarily suspicious of any news involving advances in cryptozoology (that is, don't believe any headline involving Bigfoot). But it's also important, on this day dedicated to jokes, pranks, tricks, and hoaxes, to differentiate among them. Suspending a bucket of water above a door, to dump on an unwary victim, is a practical joke.