No no, this isn't language evolving, it's just stupidity.
To the contrary, it is language evolving. The change follows a pattern already recognized by historical linguists.
Essentially, you only hear the words/phrases "could" and "care less" together is in the context of negation. After hearing this enough, you don't need the negation to recognize the intended meaning, and the negation drops out.
Read what professional linguists have to say about it: here, here, here, and here.
By the time you are in your 70's so much stuff pisses you off that you can barely deal with it. Things change so much from what it was even when you were growning up.
Part of the reason it changes so much is that the elderly no longer play a major role in daily life. They aren't running major corporations anymore. They aren't teaching children. They aren't interacting with substantially younger people they aren't related to.
If essentially everybody 70 years old were as healthy and strong as they were at 35, they would continue to directly influence the world. Their opinions would have greater impact. Young people wouldn't think of them as useless old people out of touch with the world, and then disregard their out-dated ideas, because they would continue to shape current thinking.
IAAL (I am a linguist). Lots of people have started using the abbreviation IMNAx as an acronym for "I'm not a x". No "A" in the contraction, so no "A" in the acronym.
The description of the Choctaw facts in this article are misleading.
Choctaw does have two past tenses, but they are not differentiated in the way claimed. The regular past tense, written -tok (or -tuk in older orthogrophies) is used for completed events ranging back about a year. The other suffix -ttook is for events that were completed more than a year ago. Furthermore, events that happened within the past few minutes and are still relevent for the current situation are often marked as "present" (-h).
Choctaw, and a huge number of other languages in the world, also have what are called evidentials. These are suffixes that indicate how you know the statement is true. In Choctaw, there is a first-hand knowledge suffix -hlih, used when you have direct evidence of the claim (you saw it, heard it, smelled it, etc). There is also the suffix -ashah which indicates that you are guessing that it is true -- you have some indirect evidence, such as hearsay, or very circumstantial evidence.
Tense and evidentiality are definitely distinct, as you can find tense and evidentiality marked at the same time on the verb.
Since we're getting serious, where did all this draft talk come from? I've heard the President flatly deny plans for a draft on more than one occasion.
My co-worker comes to confront me about some issue. Rather than argue with him, I bear my teeth and jump up and down on my chair. I look so stupid, he isn't able to get a rational thought out through his laughter. Finally he gives up and goes back to his own cubicle. Crisis averted.
I only have to worry about loss of respect -- but I gave that up when I started working here.
Unless I'm mistaken, a sound is just a vibration until there's a listener to interpret it. Ergo, no; the tree falling makes vibrations unless someone is around to hear it.
Following this logic, vibrations that are too low or high to trigger response by the human ear are not sounds. That means dog whistles are indeed silent. Surely, that can't be right, because dogs seem to hear them.
Obviously, there are easy ways to fix this problem. However, I think these kinds of answers just miss the point. Is the vibration exactly the same whether or not something senses it? If it is, then calling it a "sound" is simply due to the way we choose to talk about it, not due to its reality. Do we really want to answer this question with a language game? (Maybe we do -- I'm playing Devil's Advocate here.)
Another aspect of the koan can be brought out by asking: If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody is around to sense it, does it cause a vibration? (How do you know? Why do you think you are right?)
This very likely isn't an issue of discipline or lack thereof. Based on his description, I'd say he's just like me; and I don't have a discipline problem (finished BA in 4 years, MA in 2, on track for PhD in 3). The problem is just that some people do not work in the classic sit-at-the-desk-and-concentrate style -- not without some kind of personality alterning drugs.
The best thing someone like us can do, I believe, is figure out what style works best for us individually.
Personally, I do my second best work while ignoring/neglecting something. (My best work is late at night, struggling to meet a deadline.) I cannot work in silence or with basic white noise. I need something that could potentially occupy my attention for me to ignore: music, television shows, or movies that I am very familiar with. The part of my mind that worries about bills or what's new on slashdot gets caught up in trying to keep track of what's going on around me, but since I am familiar with the music/etc it can't steal my entire attention away.
Sometimes the best thing for me to do is neglect my work. I leave the area I've been working and do something else. Nothing that requires real thought, but nothing too passive. Walk around the block or strum my guitar, good; watch TV, bad. My main focus enjoys the change of topic, but the back of my mind can keep working. When I sit down again, I go through a flurry of work. Just before I started grad school, I had a boss who recognized this about me very quickly and gave me a blank check to leave my desk or the office whenever I needed to. She loved the resulting increase in my productivity.
Basically, I'm saying that you need to figure out your work personality, and adapt your environment and habits to that. You might have to adapt your personality to accomodate environmental things you can't change or genuine immaturities; but you shouldn't think that there is simply something wrong with you.
Everybody is different; find out what works for you and do it.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in high school, shortly before it became the "disorder of the month". I was actually the last of my family to be so diagnosed: three siblings and both parents have it as well.
I took medication for about 6 months before deciding to quit. The medication allowed me to concentrate and work much better, but with what I considered horrible side effects. They really changed my personality; it could feel my thought process slowing down, which prevented me from making snappy one-line comebacks or (more importantly) almost instantly grasping the point in class.
I stopped taking the medication, and began looking for my own ways to cope. And I found them.
I don't force myself to sit in front of the computer, but take frequent walks around the living room.
When little walks don't work, I take my hand-held recorder on a walk around the block.
I never work in quiet conditions: I need something to ignore.
I listen to music with earphones on, even if no one is around to hear: the cord acts as a tether.
In class, I take full advantage of the breaks to walk around, get some engery out, and just accept that I will miss portions of the lecture.
I just finished a MA degree earlier this year using these techniques. But everybody is different; I've shared these techniques with my siblings and some help, some hurt. My brother doesn't take a walk, he takes time to doodle. My other brother can't use music, but uses the TV for the same effect.
Take medication if you need to, but don't feel like that is the best or only option. It wasn't for me. Your doctor cannot give you the best therapy, s/he can only give you ideas. Find what ADHD does to you specifically, and find specific remedies. If drugs work, don't hesitate to take them. If not, don't hesitate to drop them.
The fact that it makes sense to you and not to me proves there is no such thing as "the" human conceptual way to interpet this.
It just shows that the human conceptual system is subconscious, which is what all CogSci, Psych, and Ling professors I've ever talked to believe. We don't have direct access to our basic conceptual system. Double negation doesn't make sense to you on a much higher cognitive level where you start invoking rational thought.
My statement wasn't about the way it actually gets interpeted, but about the way it *should* get interpeted.
That's a matter of personal taste, not objective reality. There is nothing in English that has a direct correspondance to anything in predicate logic. You might as well tell me all bands should have an accordian player: I'm just going to disagree.
And, NO, "not not X" is not a case of "-1 + -1", nor is it a case of "-1 * -1". It's a case of "negative negative one = - (-1) = 1"
You're right, it isn't addition or multiplication. I was just using that to show a logical system where double-negation (yes, I equivocated on the word "negation") is rational. But it isn't predicate logic negation either. If it were, then negative negative negative 1 would be acceptible. "I ain't never seen nobody" should mean "I haven't ever seen anybody." (It does mean that, but it would under "double-negation is simple negation" idea too.) I'm willing to bet you don't like these exampes; most opponents of double-negation don't.
To make on overly long story short: The logic of English is far more powerful than the simple logic people usually compare it to. If English did behave like simple predicate logic, the language would be much "dumber" than it currently is. You say English *should* be like basic logic, but I really cannot agree with that at all; I like the subtle shades of meaning I can express in English that are between absolutely true and absolutely false.
More accurately: a LACK of logic all their own. I'm sorry but calling a double-negative still a negative is not reasonable.
Let's look at this mathematically.
-1 + -1 = -2
-1 x -1 = 1
So you are saying that when languages put two words together, they are multiplying rather than adding. If you look at word concatenation as addition rather than multiplication, then two negatives should result in something even further away from a positive. In other words, two negatives should be emphatically negative. This is, in fact, one of the uses of double negation.
Languages are massively redundant. In a sentence like "I am writing", I have specified that the subject is first person singular TWICE, once with "I" and again with "am". In, for example, Spanish, redundancy can be even more blatant: el perro feo 'the ugly dog' marks that the dog is masculine three times: on el, perro, and feo. Double negation is the same kind of thing, when not emphatic. You are marking the utterance as negative in two different contexts.
"I'm not an atheist" "I'm not no theist" Logically, those should mean the same thing
No, they should not.
A "theist" is someone who believes in god (some x, x believes in god)
An "atheist" is someone who does not believe in god (some x, x does not believe in god)
What do we do with people who are undecided? Clearly, they are not subsumed under the meaning of "theist" or "atheist".
Thus, "I am not an atheist" is a statement that it is not the case that you are someone who does not believe in god; you could be agnostic.
"I am not no theist" is a statement that it is not the case that you are not someone who believes in god; you could be agnostic.
In other words, the scope of negation in your examples are quite different, and that will effect the interpretation.
That said, "I ain't no theist" (to make your example more like real English) means "It is not the case that I am a person who believes in god". The speaker could be atheist or agnostic. The double negation here is a good example of an emphatic reply, where the speaker is distancing himself from a group of people he doesn't want to be associated with. (A: "You damn theist!" B: "I ain't no theist!").
Language does have an internal logic. It is just based on the human conceptual system, rather than some external, unintuitive metaphysics.
the reason why English is now lingua franca in technology, and business, is not controlled but is open to evolving by incorporating whatever was in popular use; as opposed to French in which "proper" usage is "controlled" by a standards body
It is true that English does not have an official Language Academy, but a lot of "Standard English" was imposed on the language by "educated" people (read: English teachers) forcing their views on everybody else. You know what I mean: "Don't split infinitives! It should be 'to go boldly', not 'to boldly go'." Or "Two negatives make a positive" so 'I don't want nothing' means who really want something." These kinds of things were fabrications of the Victorian Era, imposed by a network of English teachers who didn't realize languages have a logic of their own, and tried to force English to be more philosophically logical, or more like Latin.
One could also argue that English continues to evolve (innovate? break up?) into several separate languages.
The only languages in the world that are not evolving are the ones that are dead (eg, Etruscan, Hittite) or ones that will be dead with the current generation of speakers (eg, most the indigenous languages in North America).
To keep this post on topic, I wonder how far the analogy between standards and languages actually goes. "Standard English" is a very loose "specification" of how English should be. Major structures (like word order of clauses) and grammatical marking (he/him/his) are well specified, in general.
Other parts are not specified, but we would all agree on what is correct. For example, "fan-fuckin'-tastic" is great, but "fanta-fuckin'-stic" is horrible; I think we would all agree. The "possessive" construction is not well specified by traditional grammar, but we can all agree, that in the following sentences, neither John or Bill own their respective companies. "John and Bill were comparing the companies they worked for. John's company gave him more money, but Bill's gave him better health insurance."
Finally, there are portions of English that might have an official standard, but few people care about. "On what did you put the computer?" vs. "What did you put the computer on?" Which one you prefer depends on factors like age, location, and education, but none of us would have a problem understanding or using either.
Would technology standards be better off following the language pattern? Specify major issues, but leave smaller issues open to the preferences and needs of individual applications? Make things flexible enough that minor things can be ignored without major compatibility issues.
Funny. I'm searching lexis-nexis right now, and can't find a single reference to Murberry-Slocomb for "All available dates". Nothing about VA Software filing the cited form either.
I have never had mail I sent out disappear, but I have had several instances of mail sent to me disappear. The very first month I was in my current appartment, none of my utility bills (except the phone bill arrived) until I got a missed-bill notice.
When my former roommate moved out last summer, he submitted all the mail forwarding forms, but about half his mail continued to arrive in our mailbox -- personal letters, not bulk mail.
I used to order books from Amazon regularly. They sent most the packages USPS, and they failed to arrive at a rate of once every two years: a roughly 1 in 10 failure rate.
That's not to mention the letters that have come ripped, bent, or water stained.
That said, they have done some very hard work to get me my mail at times as well. The last jury summons I received was addressed to an place I hadn't lived in for four years, and I had moved three times since then. (I wish the HAD lost that one, but I guess you gotta give credit where due.)
I doesn't surprise me that most people have decent service, but some have terrible service; it all depends on the person working your route. The guy who delivered to my parents' place while I was in high school was very popular with the us teens. He never missed a basketball game in somebody's driveway. He'd always take the losing side, and he was a pretty good shot. He'd spend a good 5-10 minutes at each game. He'd also disappear into people's houses for 30 minutes (coffee breaks, affairs, who knows?), leaving the truck on the street.
Of course, through six degrees of seperation, you're supposed to be linked with everyone on the planet. (I question that, but without a traceroute for people, who knows?)
According to the book Linked, it's more-or-less true. The book describes an experiment done by Harvard psychologist Stanley Milgram in the late 60s, wherein he chose two people living in Boston (the wife of a grad student and a stock broker), and sent their name, addresss, and a picture to randomly selected people in Omaha and Wichita. The letters explained the experiment, and asked the recipient to send a copy of the letter to these two Bostonians if they knew them personally, or to send it to somebody else who they thought had a better chance of knowing them.
When all was said and done, it took on average, only 5.5 mail-hops to get from the original recipients to the chosen Bostonians.
The letters almost certainly did not take the optimal route between the two points, so the actual degree of separation might have been shorter. Later experiments have apparently confirmed that the number of links is very small even within much wider geographical areas. My roommate (grad student in Sociology) tells me social networks of this sort are actively pursued in his department, though he finds them uninteresting.
To start with:
"When you lose a language, you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It's like dropping a bomb on a museum, the Louvre."
-- Kenneth Hale
Historical and sentimental issues aside, human languages are incrediblly complex beasts, with infinite shades of meaning and subtlty, and somehow children learn them spontaneously. If we ever want to understand the human mind, we have to understand how people learn and use languages. This cannot be done through the study of a few closely related languages, anymore than we can understand all of astrophysics through studying our solar system.
Slashdot Mirror
To the contrary, it is language evolving. The change follows a pattern already recognized by historical linguists.
Essentially, you only hear the words/phrases "could" and "care less" together is in the context of negation. After hearing this enough, you don't need the negation to recognize the intended meaning, and the negation drops out.
Read what professional linguists have to say about it: here, here, here, and here.
Not really. You have chosen an inaccurate definition of "respecting".
The definition you want is definition 3b. of the OED:
In pres. pple. With reference or regard to.
So what it means is: "Congress shall make no law with reference to an act of establishing of religion."
That's like saying they don't speak German in Germany, they speak Deutsch.
That's what my Iranian roommate told me when I asked him if he called his language "Persian" or "Farsi".
Part of the reason it changes so much is that the elderly no longer play a major role in daily life. They aren't running major corporations anymore. They aren't teaching children. They aren't interacting with substantially younger people they aren't related to.
If essentially everybody 70 years old were as healthy and strong as they were at 35, they would continue to directly influence the world. Their opinions would have greater impact. Young people wouldn't think of them as useless old people out of touch with the world, and then disregard their out-dated ideas, because they would continue to shape current thinking.
IAAL (I am a linguist). Lots of people have started using the abbreviation IMNAx as an acronym for "I'm not a x". No "A" in the contraction, so no "A" in the acronym.
Choctaw does have two past tenses, but they are not differentiated in the way claimed. The regular past tense, written -tok (or -tuk in older orthogrophies) is used for completed events ranging back about a year. The other suffix -ttook is for events that were completed more than a year ago. Furthermore, events that happened within the past few minutes and are still relevent for the current situation are often marked as "present" (-h).
Choctaw, and a huge number of other languages in the world, also have what are called evidentials. These are suffixes that indicate how you know the statement is true. In Choctaw, there is a first-hand knowledge suffix -hlih, used when you have direct evidence of the claim (you saw it, heard it, smelled it, etc). There is also the suffix -ashah which indicates that you are guessing that it is true -- you have some indirect evidence, such as hearsay, or very circumstantial evidence.
Tense and evidentiality are definitely distinct, as you can find tense and evidentiality marked at the same time on the verb.
Checkout the papers by a Choctaw expert: Aaron Broadwell.
"Read my lips, no new draft."
My co-worker comes to confront me about some issue. Rather than argue with him, I bear my teeth and jump up and down on my chair. I look so stupid, he isn't able to get a rational thought out through his laughter. Finally he gives up and goes back to his own cubicle. Crisis averted.
I only have to worry about loss of respect -- but I gave that up when I started working here.
they had released this before I married that axe murderer.
I feel betrayed! This isn't the Slashdot I know and love.
Following this logic, vibrations that are too low or high to trigger response by the human ear are not sounds. That means dog whistles are indeed silent. Surely, that can't be right, because dogs seem to hear them.
Obviously, there are easy ways to fix this problem. However, I think these kinds of answers just miss the point. Is the vibration exactly the same whether or not something senses it? If it is, then calling it a "sound" is simply due to the way we choose to talk about it, not due to its reality. Do we really want to answer this question with a language game? (Maybe we do -- I'm playing Devil's Advocate here.)
Another aspect of the koan can be brought out by asking: If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody is around to sense it, does it cause a vibration? (How do you know? Why do you think you are right?)
*SMACK* *SMACK* *SMACK* *SMACK* *SMACK*
I wish my sister's friends weren't so stupid.
Personally, I do my second best work while ignoring/neglecting something. (My best work is late at night, struggling to meet a deadline.) I cannot work in silence or with basic white noise. I need something that could potentially occupy my attention for me to ignore: music, television shows, or movies that I am very familiar with. The part of my mind that worries about bills or what's new on slashdot gets caught up in trying to keep track of what's going on around me, but since I am familiar with the music/etc it can't steal my entire attention away.
Sometimes the best thing for me to do is neglect my work. I leave the area I've been working and do something else. Nothing that requires real thought, but nothing too passive. Walk around the block or strum my guitar, good; watch TV, bad. My main focus enjoys the change of topic, but the back of my mind can keep working. When I sit down again, I go through a flurry of work. Just before I started grad school, I had a boss who recognized this about me very quickly and gave me a blank check to leave my desk or the office whenever I needed to. She loved the resulting increase in my productivity.
Basically, I'm saying that you need to figure out your work personality, and adapt your environment and habits to that. You might have to adapt your personality to accomodate environmental things you can't change or genuine immaturities; but you shouldn't think that there is simply something wrong with you.
Everybody is different; find out what works for you and do it.
I took medication for about 6 months before deciding to quit. The medication allowed me to concentrate and work much better, but with what I considered horrible side effects. They really changed my personality; it could feel my thought process slowing down, which prevented me from making snappy one-line comebacks or (more importantly) almost instantly grasping the point in class.
I stopped taking the medication, and began looking for my own ways to cope. And I found them.
I just finished a MA degree earlier this year using these techniques. But everybody is different; I've shared these techniques with my siblings and some help, some hurt. My brother doesn't take a walk, he takes time to doodle. My other brother can't use music, but uses the TV for the same effect.
Take medication if you need to, but don't feel like that is the best or only option. It wasn't for me. Your doctor cannot give you the best therapy, s/he can only give you ideas. Find what ADHD does to you specifically, and find specific remedies. If drugs work, don't hesitate to take them. If not, don't hesitate to drop them.
It just shows that the human conceptual system is subconscious, which is what all CogSci, Psych, and Ling professors I've ever talked to believe. We don't have direct access to our basic conceptual system. Double negation doesn't make sense to you on a much higher cognitive level where you start invoking rational thought.
My statement wasn't about the way it actually gets interpeted, but about the way it *should* get interpeted.
That's a matter of personal taste, not objective reality. There is nothing in English that has a direct correspondance to anything in predicate logic. You might as well tell me all bands should have an accordian player: I'm just going to disagree.
And, NO, "not not X" is not a case of "-1 + -1", nor is it a case of "-1 * -1". It's a case of "negative negative one = - (-1) = 1"
You're right, it isn't addition or multiplication. I was just using that to show a logical system where double-negation (yes, I equivocated on the word "negation") is rational. But it isn't predicate logic negation either. If it were, then negative negative negative 1 would be acceptible. "I ain't never seen nobody" should mean "I haven't ever seen anybody." (It does mean that, but it would under "double-negation is simple negation" idea too.) I'm willing to bet you don't like these exampes; most opponents of double-negation don't.
To make on overly long story short: The logic of English is far more powerful than the simple logic people usually compare it to. If English did behave like simple predicate logic, the language would be much "dumber" than it currently is. You say English *should* be like basic logic, but I really cannot agree with that at all; I like the subtle shades of meaning I can express in English that are between absolutely true and absolutely false.
Let's look at this mathematically.
-1 + -1 = -2
-1 x -1 = 1
So you are saying that when languages put two words together, they are multiplying rather than adding. If you look at word concatenation as addition rather than multiplication, then two negatives should result in something even further away from a positive. In other words, two negatives should be emphatically negative. This is, in fact, one of the uses of double negation.
Languages are massively redundant. In a sentence like "I am writing", I have specified that the subject is first person singular TWICE, once with "I" and again with "am". In, for example, Spanish, redundancy can be even more blatant: el perro feo 'the ugly dog' marks that the dog is masculine three times: on el, perro, and feo. Double negation is the same kind of thing, when not emphatic. You are marking the utterance as negative in two different contexts.
"I'm not an atheist" "I'm not no theist" Logically, those should mean the same thing
No, they should not.
A "theist" is someone who believes in god (some x, x believes in god)
An "atheist" is someone who does not believe in god (some x, x does not believe in god)
What do we do with people who are undecided? Clearly, they are not subsumed under the meaning of "theist" or "atheist". Thus, "I am not an atheist" is a statement that it is not the case that you are someone who does not believe in god; you could be agnostic.
"I am not no theist" is a statement that it is not the case that you are not someone who believes in god; you could be agnostic.
In other words, the scope of negation in your examples are quite different, and that will effect the interpretation.
That said, "I ain't no theist" (to make your example more like real English) means "It is not the case that I am a person who believes in god". The speaker could be atheist or agnostic. The double negation here is a good example of an emphatic reply, where the speaker is distancing himself from a group of people he doesn't want to be associated with. (A: "You damn theist!" B: "I ain't no theist!").
Language does have an internal logic. It is just based on the human conceptual system, rather than some external, unintuitive metaphysics.
It is true that English does not have an official Language Academy, but a lot of "Standard English" was imposed on the language by "educated" people (read: English teachers) forcing their views on everybody else. You know what I mean: "Don't split infinitives! It should be 'to go boldly', not 'to boldly go'." Or "Two negatives make a positive" so 'I don't want nothing' means who really want something." These kinds of things were fabrications of the Victorian Era, imposed by a network of English teachers who didn't realize languages have a logic of their own, and tried to force English to be more philosophically logical, or more like Latin.
One could also argue that English continues to evolve (innovate? break up?) into several separate languages.
The only languages in the world that are not evolving are the ones that are dead (eg, Etruscan, Hittite) or ones that will be dead with the current generation of speakers (eg, most the indigenous languages in North America).
To keep this post on topic, I wonder how far the analogy between standards and languages actually goes. "Standard English" is a very loose "specification" of how English should be. Major structures (like word order of clauses) and grammatical marking (he/him/his) are well specified, in general.
Other parts are not specified, but we would all agree on what is correct. For example, "fan-fuckin'-tastic" is great, but "fanta-fuckin'-stic" is horrible; I think we would all agree. The "possessive" construction is not well specified by traditional grammar, but we can all agree, that in the following sentences, neither John or Bill own their respective companies. "John and Bill were comparing the companies they worked for. John's company gave him more money, but Bill's gave him better health insurance."
Finally, there are portions of English that might have an official standard, but few people care about. "On what did you put the computer?" vs. "What did you put the computer on?" Which one you prefer depends on factors like age, location, and education, but none of us would have a problem understanding or using either.
Would technology standards be better off following the language pattern? Specify major issues, but leave smaller issues open to the preferences and needs of individual applications? Make things flexible enough that minor things can be ignored without major compatibility issues.
Funny. I'm searching lexis-nexis right now, and can't find a single reference to Murberry-Slocomb for "All available dates". Nothing about VA Software filing the cited form either.
Looks like a hoax to me.
Absolutely!
I have never had mail I sent out disappear, but I have had several instances of mail sent to me disappear. The very first month I was in my current appartment, none of my utility bills (except the phone bill arrived) until I got a missed-bill notice.
When my former roommate moved out last summer, he submitted all the mail forwarding forms, but about half his mail continued to arrive in our mailbox -- personal letters, not bulk mail.
I used to order books from Amazon regularly. They sent most the packages USPS, and they failed to arrive at a rate of once every two years: a roughly 1 in 10 failure rate.
That's not to mention the letters that have come ripped, bent, or water stained.
That said, they have done some very hard work to get me my mail at times as well. The last jury summons I received was addressed to an place I hadn't lived in for four years, and I had moved three times since then. (I wish the HAD lost that one, but I guess you gotta give credit where due.)
I doesn't surprise me that most people have decent service, but some have terrible service; it all depends on the person working your route. The guy who delivered to my parents' place while I was in high school was very popular with the us teens. He never missed a basketball game in somebody's driveway. He'd always take the losing side, and he was a pretty good shot. He'd spend a good 5-10 minutes at each game. He'd also disappear into people's houses for 30 minutes (coffee breaks, affairs, who knows?), leaving the truck on the street.
According to the book Linked, it's more-or-less true. The book describes an experiment done by Harvard psychologist Stanley Milgram in the late 60s, wherein he chose two people living in Boston (the wife of a grad student and a stock broker), and sent their name, addresss, and a picture to randomly selected people in Omaha and Wichita. The letters explained the experiment, and asked the recipient to send a copy of the letter to these two Bostonians if they knew them personally, or to send it to somebody else who they thought had a better chance of knowing them.
When all was said and done, it took on average, only 5.5 mail-hops to get from the original recipients to the chosen Bostonians.
The letters almost certainly did not take the optimal route between the two points, so the actual degree of separation might have been shorter. Later experiments have apparently confirmed that the number of links is very small even within much wider geographical areas. My roommate (grad student in Sociology) tells me social networks of this sort are actively pursued in his department, though he finds them uninteresting.
To start with: "When you lose a language, you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It's like dropping a bomb on a museum, the Louvre." -- Kenneth Hale Historical and sentimental issues aside, human languages are incrediblly complex beasts, with infinite shades of meaning and subtlty, and somehow children learn them spontaneously. If we ever want to understand the human mind, we have to understand how people learn and use languages. This cannot be done through the study of a few closely related languages, anymore than we can understand all of astrophysics through studying our solar system.