LINGUIST List 26.2161
Thu Apr 23 2015
Featured Linguist: Monica Macaulay
Editor for this issue: Ashley Parker <ashleylinguistlist.org>
Date: 23-Apr-2015
From: LINGUIST List <linguist
linguistlist.org>
Subject: Featured Linguist: Monica Macaulay
E-mail this message to a friend Dear LINGUIST List Readers,
We are pleased to present you our featured linguist Monica Macaulay for Fund Drive 2015.
Please support the LINGUIST List editors and activities with a donation:
http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/ ----------------------------------------------
So, you know how most kids want to be firefighters, or doctors, or scientists when they grow up? When I was a kid I wanted to be a librarian. Yes, I was the biggest nerd in the world. It was just that I loved to read and I loved
to organize things, so organizing books sounded really good. I also played Scrabble with my mom, and we would look words up in her immense “Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,” which we regarded as the authority on all matters
language-related.
When I was 15 we moved to Santiago, Chile. My mother was thrilled because her children were going to learn to speak a second language. So, being 15, I decided I wasn’t going to learn it. Unfortunately, I did, despite my best
efforts. So I spent about six months hiding it from my parents until it just got too hard to pretend. We were there for a year and a half. By the end of our time there my Spanish was so good I could fool people into thinking I was Chilea. It’s been downhill ever since.
I graduated in Chile from Santiago College – that was my high school – a girl’s school with the motto “for finer womanhood.” I was 16 and it made perfect sense to me that since I had graduated from high school I was an adult. So I took off overland with my boyfriend and spent three months traveling through South America. My parents, of course, were absolutely horrified. It was quite an adventure and I did live to tell about it. Then the boyfriend and I moved to Prescott, AZ, where we attended a hippy college for a while. Next up, San Francisco, where I went to art school. (Of course.) We lived on a houseboat in Sausalito. I finally dumped art school (no talent, just a love of art supplies) and the BF, and moved to Berkeley.
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Read more:
http://blog.linguistlist.org/uncategorized/featured-linguist-monica-macaulay/
Page Updated: 23-Apr-2015