Life's tough, get a helmet.

"The winter evening settles down
with smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o' clock
The burnt-out ends of smoky days."
(PRELUDES-T.S.ELIOT)
Such exotic imagery. It brings to my mind a vivid picture of long dark palace hallways, in that Long-ago Victorian time, full of bustling homely-maids, preparing for "supper" and the fire blazing away in the fire place, and the man of the house sitting with his evening paper....and the burnt out ends of smoky days..............ok. stop.
I quote this to bring about the exoticism of Linguistics(which is actually cheating, coz this is literature! :-P). Yes, this is Literature, yet i study it as Linguistics. so there.
But Why? i see the 'burnt-out ends' of smoky days when there are none in reality. I see 'colorless green ideas'(ok I am not whacko!) when 'they sleep furiously'[Noam chomsky, 'mother' of Linguistics(lol, just made that up! the 'mother' part]
Anyway, this use is termed as 'foregrounding'. Where you dont really make sense but actually do.
Bah, wot a way to tribute. half of you must be thinking, what crap is this linguistics........sorry, but i just realized I am really bad at this!!
Linguistics is an analytical and scientific technique of viewing languages. it looks for connections between languages, the 'whys' and 'hows' of languages.........and other things along that line.
what I personally gained in my three short years of its study at the undergraduate level is an insight as to why people tend to speak the way they do, from where a certain pattern or an anomaly occured in the use of language, what sound were we articulating(and why?) at a particular situation......and so on.
At first, to be honest, i thought what friggin crap this is. we all know our language, and there's no use for studying all that.......but later, when i read some path-breaking works of great Linguists, it actually occurred to me that, hey, people wrote thick never-ending books on this, this has to mean something!! :P
Anyway, now I am leaving this intriguing subject behind(officially. would love to continue reading up on it, but let's just pray i follow-up on that)and so would like to quote a poem on the study of Phonetics(sounds in a language)
I take it you already know
of tough and bough and cough and dough?
others may stumble but not you
on hiccough, thorough, lough and through.
well done! and now you wish, perhaps,
to learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead: its said like bed, not bead-
For goodness sake dont call it "deed"!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)
-T.S.W(1970)
the poem's only asking us to understand the difference in pronunciations, and still seems to make perfect sense with the strings of sentences connected together(syntax study)........lovely.