The last book of my Pop Culture Assignment and I don’t even know where to begin. There is a lot going on and I think it needed a glossary for all the new terms he made up for this world. Our Protagonist Avice, is an immerser that knows how to control the immer but it was never really explained what that is but it has to do with space travel. Her ability allowed her to leave Embassytown and return but I’m getting ahead of myself. Avice is from a colony in the middle of nowhere. There lives an mysteries species called the Hosts that have a peculiar way of communication called language. Only few people know and few can speak it. The few who can are Ambassadors are two people modified to think as one. It’s complicated. Avice has a rare place in language as she was once used as a simile. The Hosts can not lie. They can only speak the truth so for something to be said it must has a place in the world so they make people or things a simile to help explain things. It’s very complicated. Anyway, Avice leaves Embassytown only to return with a new husband who is a linguist and seems more interested in language than Avice but whatever. As soon as they return things get crazy. The end of the world crazy. The nation that oversee them decides to bring in their own Ambassador and well, things don’t go as planned and all hell breaks loose.
It was an interesting read but it was very confusing. I felt like so many things that were left unexplained like the immer that we are just expected to understand. Language too is very complicated that it does take the whole book to understand but that also might have been the point. It took a while to get into because the world building was immense and once I got past that I really enjoyed it. I was still left confused on several things but still enjoyed it.
My pop culture assignment from 
I’m not sure where to begin because there is so much here and hard to explain. The assignment is examine how Ursula K. Le Guin uses language to tell her story. The language is very lush and full of descriptions of the strange world of Winter. A harsh world that is like living on the Artic in our world. The people of this world are gender neutral and assexual for most of the life except for when they are in “kemmer” where partner with another person in “kemmer” and could be female or male depending on things went. They could be the a father to one child and mother to another. Le Guin uses the “he” pronoun for all the Getheren even though they are not male or female. I believe it was used more simplistic reasons then insinuated that they are more male most of the time then female. It was hard as the reader to understand that, that when “he” was being used it wasn’t that the character was a male but a Genthen.
You know when you meet someone who loves what they do so much that when they talk about it they get so excited about it even though you have absolutely no idea what they are talking about but you are so taken in by their enthusiasm that it doesn’t matter. This is often how I feel when Kate talks about Linguistics. She gets so excited and her face lights up and it’s just so Kate that I want to know what she’s talking about and be just as excited as she is. John McWhorter is the same way. I can feel his excitement on the page as he talked about one language after another. I’ll admit that there were a few things I still don’t understand but I think I get the gist. It’s interesting on how languages evolve and change over centuries. Obviously I knew that the English we speak today is not the English that was spoken in Shakespeare’s day or even Chaucer’s but never really thought about it how we got to where we are now. Basically, adults needed to be able to communicate but were unable to grasp some on the complexities of the language so they simplified it and taught it to their kids and so forth and so on. It’s kind of amazing. I basically learned that the more people who speak a language over centuries, the less complicated it is. If you speak a language that only a few know and have all learned from childhood it’s going to be more complicated it because adults from the outside have little use to learning it to communicate it. I’m probably oversimplifying it but that’s fascinating. He makes arguments for what languages are categorized and how our own biases make us judge languages and what are real languages and what are not. Does it have to be written? Spoken by a certain number of people? Have it’s own grammar? Follow certain rules? All very interesting questions that I really can’t do justice answering but say read the book and get suck into his excitement and enthusiasm while you are at it.
2 Women, So Many Books 