June 9, 2006

Pretty Ugly Language

The richness of the English language is under daily assault, particularly on college campuses, where the clichés of popular culture are, like, omnipresent. To force his students to really think about their language rather than falling back on the vernacular, Robert Wolverton, a classics professor at Mississippi State University, asked a hundred of them to list the most beautiful and the ugliest words. He was pleasantly surprised by the diversity of choices. The question remains, he