is the woman who is short happy?

was reading today about a film about Noam Chomsky entitled "Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?" If you don't know, Noam Chomsky is a renowned linguist and professor at MIT. Linguistics is the scientific study of language.

and i'm reading this in light of my post yesterday where i declared all the things i might do if i were rich. and one of them was that i'd take classes in things that interest me. and one of the things that interests me is the field of linguistics. The study of the forms, meanings, and contexts of language.

of course, i didn't always know that linguistics interested me. and in fact, for a good portion of my adult life, i really didn't even know what linguistics was. up and until, i was sharing an office with one of our speech therapists, who had been "promoted" to an administrator.

this woman was very very bright. and i loved sharing the office with her because our conversations were always interesting and always lively and always thought-provoking. i'd often start a conversation with her saying "tell me where i'm wrong....." and then i'd propose whatever i was thinking about at the time and my thoughts on it. i learned much from this woman. and i liked her immensely, even while a lot of people did not. people thought she was too critical and not very nice because she was so bluntly and firmly honest. but i liked her, i suppose largely because a great many times, she'd tell me "well, you're not at all wrong and here's why...." but also she was never afraid to tell me "well, yeah, you are wrong, and here's why and here's where...."

i really don't mind being told i'm wrong if you can show me how or why and it makes sense to me. and i don't think it's a weakness to admit you've been wrong and to reverse or change course. in fact, i think it's a strength and it shows strength. so i didn't mind being told i was wrong from time to time by her because she was very good at pointing out exactly where my own thoughts or information had steered me wrong.

anyway, a small part of my job was to provide assistive technology to students who had deficits in communicating. it wasn't really my job, but because no one else in our system was doing it, i just started doing it and continued doing it informally until the administrators finally realized the value in what i was doing and they officially made it part of my job. and so anyway because her expertise, speech and language, promotes communication, and i did not have a speech therapy background, i'd also often run "solutions" past her to see if they made sense or not. and i think that together, both formally and informally, we helped a great many students.

anyway, one day i was telling her that i was really fascinated by speech and language therapy and in fact wished i could go back to school to become a speech and language therapist, but i bemoaned the fact that my hearing is not up to snuff and that it would be very difficult for me to ever deal with the "speech articulation" part of such a job. my hearing is such that i get understanding partly from what i can hear and partly from what i can see and partly from the context of any given situation. oh, and i say "what?" a lot. a lot of people are not even aware that i have problems hearing and have for years. i'm careful to watch expressions and to read a lot and prepare. i'm careful to place myself in position to people so that i can hear better. (interestingly, i can hear you better if i'm beside you rather than across from you.)

so back to my story, i asked my office/mate/friend that day, what could i be along these lines since i can't hear well? and she said, "what you want to study is linguistics, in fact, I think what you're really more interested in, in the first place, is linguistics. you should be a linguist."

and that is when i learned what a linguist was. and what they did. and i guess i always thought that perhaps one day if i were rich, i might study linguistics. and maybe that would make me happy.

a little aside to this story is that after a few years, my office mate and i got separated. Not because there was suddenly more office space available, but because the administration in place at the time, deemed the two of us too dangerous to be together. (i'm not making this up, one of the admins at the time told me directly later.) My office mate and i were vehemently opposed to some administrative decisions, and they found that when we were given time to talk together, we could develop arguments, and they simply could not defend their decisions in terms of what was best for children. in short, we made them look bad. sad for them, however, is that we continued to talk. only we now had to do our talking outside of work time and away from the office. it wasn't all to their detriment though. some years later, and shortly before i retired, she and i collaborated on a project that won one of our systems a great deal of competitive grant money. i know that made me happy.