Obscure Languages Are Important, Too

The National Enquirer published an article called "Unspeakable Tax Waste" (August 6, 1985) that complained that the Department of Education was wasting U. S. tax dollars providing colleges and universities with funding to teach students "obscure foreign languages" such as "Dinka, which is spoken in the Sudan" and "Telugu, a language of southern India."

To me, this attitude is shortsighted as well as downright ignorant. It might even be called racist.

Language is the gateway to understanding and appreciating other cultures. And since the United States has diplomatic as well as other ties to countries around the world, it makes sense to train people to speak a variety of languages, no matter how obscure. Certainly the people who speak these "obscure languages" don't think of them as unimportant.

The newspaper amNew York (now called amMetro New York) cited in a  November 24, 2014 article the work of Ellen Bialystok, a neuroscientist, on the benefits of bilingual education. She "found that people who are bilingual tend to maintain better cognitive functioning with age and, " continued the newspaper, "are even believed to have delayed onset in Alzheimer's symptoms after diagnosis."

Also the "obscure languages" that the National Enquirer writer disparaged could very well be the source of new words, useful words in English, a language that has adopted many words from other languages.

The Man Who Coined The Word "Gig"

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of people nationwide were laid off their jobs and had to apply for unemployment benefits from the state and federal governments, there was talk of including people who were part of the gig economy. These individuals, called gig workers, ordinarily didn't qualify for unemployment, because they were not on anyone's payroll. They were freelancers, independent contractors. Due to the unusual circumstances brought on by the pandemic, they got to collect unemployment checks.

That brings me to the origin of the word "gig." While reading a book called Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way by Caseen Gaines (Sourcebooks, 2021), I learned where the word came from. It's "a term," writes Gaines, an award-winning New Jersey-based author and journalist, "[African-American band leader James Reese] Europe coined [in the late nineteen-teens] to describe a one-night performance, which quickly caught on in the jazz community."

Now we know who should receive credit for creating "gig," a word that has become applicable to people both inside and outside of show business.