Blog 2

Today I will be sharing with you one of my favorite YouTube channels called mental floss. It is also a magazine that is filled with fun facts but there are also many YouTube channels dedicated to mental floss.

Anyways, in this video with John Green (author of #1 New York Times best seller The Fault in our Stars as well as many other teen novels) you will get to learn

  48 Names for Things You Didn't Know Had Names. 

I picked this Video because it has a lot to do with language. We don't realize that the common things we do/see/feel actually have names for them. I also picked this video because John Green is fantastic and so funny and nerdy. This Video tells us some names of things we didn't know and where the names came from. We also learn names of certain types of words which I find most interesting. It's also incredible that there are words in the English language for so many things but we don't need to use them in everyday conversation so we just don't learn those words. 

I feel like this video is telling us that there is a lot that we don't know about the language that we speak everyday. I agree with this because he proves this to us in the video. 

This video opened my eyes and made me realize that I still have a lot to learn about language and that it can be fun to learn about it!

The fact that our language is so vast affects the world because to non-English speaking people this language can be difficult! I don't realize how lucky I am that English was my first language. We can see that language really is limitless.

Blog 1 Jan 20th, 2014

The First link is a short article about how studying our inner voice can be beneficial to science and medicine.
Why we can "hear" our Inner Voice Experiment
After reading this article I was a bit dizzy because thinking about the inner voice while reading with my inner voice was a bit mind-boggling. Once again it's that concept where we don't think about our language until we compare it to something else, or to the lack of language all together. I picked this article because I don't often think about the fact that I hear my own voice in my head while reading, typing, or thinking about my situation. But the article's argument makes sense. We can hear our own voices in our head so that our auditory system can take a break or focus on other things while we predict what our voice would have sounded like out loud. I think that the evolution of the capability to do this is an amazing thing and very interesting! I want to learn more about speech impediments and what areas of the brain are activated when they are overcome so that I can see the connection between the science experiments. This topic clearly affects the world because everyone uses language and the ability to overcome speech impediments and be more knowledgable about the human capability to use language is key to understanding our potentials.

Not-So-Random Fun Fact: Reading silently is a generally new activity in the scheme of human evolution.

Introductory Post

This is me with messy hair from being
on a motorcycle
 and in the background is my sister

Hi everyone, my name is Evelyn Michaud. Some people call me Ev or Eve or Eevee, but most of the time Evelyn is what I answer to. I am 18 and I have been attending Glendale Community College since the first Summer session of 2013. I am working on the accumulation of credits and required classes to transfer to ASU to finish a Bachelor's degree in Business with a focus in Communications. I later plan to achieve a Master's degree in Communications as well. I'm very interested in the Arts, being a former theater student and art fanatic, and therefore am working on many personal art projects just for fun. I also enjoy singing, playing acoustic guitar, writing, and being a part of the Forensics Team here at GCC. This team is not the awesome "forensics" where you get to cut open dead bodies and observe the evidence of a crime scene, but a team that competes both nationally and internationally as a Speech and Debate team. I can only speak English, but I took Mandarin Chinese for two years in high school and plan to one day become fluent in it. I am taking ENG 213 because it was a choice requirement for my major and it has an Honors credit for my scholarship from the school. Even with all that however, I truly have been excited about this class because language is so interesting to me. Experiences that I have had that relate to language would probably be moving from Connecticut to Arizona 2 years ago. Moving from a place that's residents are predominantly white English-speaking folk, to a much more diverse location was huge change for me. In CT there weren't many people who spoke Spanish, and in business very few people seemed to need to use their knowledge in a second language. But here, I go to the post office and one the workers is speaking fluent Spanish to make communication easier with her customers and that's fascinating. From moving, I see how language is such a big deal in the world and how important it is that we all understand it and use it to the best of our abilities. And that's what I'm here to do. Hopefully you are too!