Or as Strunk and White said in Elements of Style (to the best of my memory), “Feel free to ignore everything in this book rather than write something inelegant.”
Recently, driven primarily by institutional pressures to “globalize,” something called “world literature” has surfaced on literary curricula with confounding aplomb. In its wake, scholars and students alike have been left to wonder about “world” and “literature”. How do we teach something so vague and well-meaning when the world remains unequal and literature elusive? It seems to me that this question about the relation between the world and literature, made newly urgent, may indeed be a gift. In a framework that is perhaps a tad too glib, “world literature” requires us to place English literature in the world and read (translations from) other languages. But seeking the worlds within English can also lead us to the unexpected and inexhaustible mother tongues of Englishes. Here, we may hear the language a lot of us share but none of us speaks. Here, we may note the complex relations of precarity and survival in a language of blustering parochialism. That seems like a good place to begin.
The firststuffs have their being as motes called *unclefts*. These are mightly small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called *bulkbits*. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in ices when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike clefts link in a bulkbit, they make *bindings*. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff.
‘Language shift’ is the process whereby members of a community in which more than one language is spoken abandon their original vernacular language in favour of another. The historical shifts to English by Celtic language speakers of Britain and Ireland are particularly well-studied examples for which good census data exist for the most recent 100–120 years in many areas where Celtic languages were once the prevailing vernaculars. We model the dynamics of language shift as a competition process in which the numbers of speakers of each language (both monolingual and bilingual) vary as a function both of internal recruitment (as the net outcome of birth, death, immigration and emigration rates of native speakers), and of gains and losses owing to language shift.
