A teacher's reward

I had a student last year. Charles. Actually for the whole two last semesters, going on the third now. A slacker as he was, something has clicked and he started coming up to me after classes with some real cool profound questions about the style and figures of speech, actually everything was to the point. And earlier this semester I stumbled on a graffiti on a class wall.

He dared sign it. The vanity of an author : )

This writing on a wall has been sitting there for the whole three months now, with nobody caring, but that's not the point. The guy has actually connected to the beauty of the language. Before he had been totally strange to the studies and all, but seeing this rhymed inscription I felt a pang of pride topped with an oblique mischievous smile. We had our hard times with me ordering him to do the homework no matter what, and him throwing a fit or two because he thought it unnecessary to study, but here we go. A proof the beauty of the language has gotten to him. The teacher of creative writing can reap now. I am happy they do not clean the wall. I enjoy reading this little poem every once in a while.

*
"Hate me. Kiss me. in hip.
Love me. Kiss me. in lip."
For the absence of the necessary building blocks he (as I had taught them) tried to use the lexical units at hand. “Hip” actually means what you thought. Now the poem takes on a sort of a philosophical spin with a tinge of some personal tragedy.

Artificial languages and language groups

The whole last week I was pursuing my little moonlighting affair, translating a loooong DVD player manual. Added to the university, sports, and extracurricular stuff at the uni, it took all my days and most of the nights, spiced up only by Dan Brown's first book (was terribly hard to put it down, so I had to read it on the run). I have just finished the translation and in the way of making up for the week of silence about my thrilling trip to Hainan here are some samples from the original of my translation. Red-hot right from the stove.

It did puzzle me at first and my linguistic guts were about to object:

But then I thought better of it. I guess it just lists the languages in a batch of programmed language sets, so English is sort of a default one everywhere. But anyhow, looks funny under that group name.

The next list is that of the languages available (possibly) on DVD discs as subtitles and audio tracks, and their abbreviations. Isn't it strange that there's an entry under the abbreviation of "VO"?

Well, I guess it's possible that there are still people around the globe who do speak Schleyer's Volapük, invented at the end of the 19th century. And even watch movies dubbed in it.

Wondrous art thy works, oh nature's wonder, a creator of hi-tech linguistic contents. I am simply curious if there is a practical justification for this.