Readers are welcome to share their own stories of language learning embarrassments, if only to make me feel a little less silly.
That recording, on YouTube as Air China 981, is a favorite among air traffic controllers and pilots who have their own stories of language misunderstanding in global aviation.
AT first glance, they seem like typical American college students on their junior year abroad, swapping stories of language mishaps and cultural clashes, sharing sightseeing tips and travel deals.
And this story of language and its confusions continues.
The story of language led him to a story of making art.
He is an expert in the creation of modern Hebrew, the great success story of language revival.
I blame the philologist Mario Pei, who spread the tale in The Los Angeles Times in 1946 and then again in his widely read 1949 book, "The Story of Language".
His production, which last month concluded a sold-out tour of Turin, Naples and Milan, featured minstrels, two overlapping stories, layers of language (English, Italian, Western Lombardian, Sicilian, Neapolitan, Piedmontese, Abruzzese) and characters blissfully free of self-consciousness.
Considering "victim impact statements," a new sentimental favorite in the courts, he again poses unsettling questions: "What is the right story, what is its correct place, and how should it be listened to?" We shape ourselves through stories and stories are made of language.
Morpurgo accused schools of taking the wonder of stories and playfullness of language and removing the joy from reading by making it about spelling, handwriting, grammar and comprehension tests.
In a paper in the magazine Nature last week, the team - led by Tony Monaco, of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University - revealed it had uncovered a startling genetic secret among a single, anonymous London family, one that has a close bearing on the story of human language.
