Very young languages offer an opportunity to see how languages emerge and evolve — and therefore what the origin of all languages might have been like. But some linguists have wondered how pure these circumstances really are. They worry that studying one of these sign languages — which may have only a handful of users — introduces an outside influence that could alter its development.
So De Vos was sitting on her hands — deliberately not using signs from other languages — when she was in Bengkala. If there was any chance that she had changed the course of Kata Kolok, her research would be less valid, and its relevance to learning about the natural evolution of languages diminished. The only problem is that shielding a language like Kata Kolok for scientific benefit might not actually be in the best interests of the community that uses it.
I didn’t take me long to see it, what the discard pile was. It was only the skirts, only the dresses, only the flowers and lace and sparkles. It was everything I’d bought hoping that some colleague might say: Isn’t that cute?
I burst into tears, shame filling me entirely, and then I laughed about the fact that this book had made me cry, this silly, stupid cleaning book.
But the real problem with meal kit companies’ business models, Cohen argued, is that the kits serve as “training wheels” of sorts for newbie cooks; once subscribers grow more confident in their abilities to saute and figure out which ingredients complement one another, they inevitably cancel. Discussions in the r/BlueApron Reddit forum seem to support that theory: “I think of it more as a cooking lesson, and save the recipe cards,” one user wrote. Another former subscriber who cancelled after a few months said, “What it taught me was that I needed to spend an hour or so a week meal planning and looking for fun recipes, and I needed to set aside an hour to shop. I did really enjoy learning to cook new things.”
Hadley writes with the appearance of consummate ease, the result, I would guess, partly of an instinctive natural talent, partly of hard practice and the refinement of her method. She gives the impression of knowing her limits, knowing what she can do and what is not for her, just as surely as Jane Austen and Henry James knew theirs. She has an awareness of the shades of feeling, and she recognises how in marriage or a close relationship, one partner may come to find that he or she has surrendered to the other too much of what matters. She has another admirable quality: she knows when to let silence speak, and she has the rare gift of writing dialogue which both rings true and hints at what had been left unsaid but is keenly and sometimes painfully felt.
Though romance sparks and infidelity combusts on these pages, this is a very grownup novel, its focus firmly on platonic familial bonds that, as Beckerman shows, can have infinitely more devastating effects than anything Cupid might tie.