The registers of a language are a fascinating thing. Even the mere fact that registers exist is fascinating. And while everyone can recognize that the kind of language that we use as human beings varies with the circumstance—people don’t use the same vocabulary and phraseology in a courtroom as in a taxi or a supermarket—for the student of a foreign language, the importance of a grasp of multiple registers is often underplayed or overlooked. And even if they are nominally recognized, often enough the registers of a language are understood as implicit. This is probably fine for the native speaker, who doesn’t need to consciously understand very much at all.…
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It is evident as a kind of motive intrinsic to the vast majority of media and entertainment that it believes it matters, and this entertainment continues to exist for a single correlative reason: as viewers in the audience, we believe that it matters. But neither of those assertions actually implies that it in itself matters enough to be worth watching, much less valorizing and investing the better part of our nighttime leisure and emotional livelihood in what amounts to noise in a box sustained by corporate profits and the lower instincts of our nameless, faceless, anonymous viewers that are right now sitting away in their nightly armchairs. It is a…
