Linguistics and Interjections Essay Example for Free

Linguistics and Interjections Essay In Western philosophy and linguistic theory, interjections—that is, words like oof, ouch, and bleah—have traditionally been understood to indicate emotional states. This article offers an account of interjections in Q’eqchi’ Maya that illuminates their social and discursive functions. In particular, it discusses the grammatical form of interjections, both in Q’eqchi’ and across languages, and characterizes the indexical objects and pragmatic functions of interjections in Q’eqchi’ in terms of a semiotic framework that may be generalized for other languages. With these grammatical forms, indexical objects, and pragmatic functions in hand, it details the various social and discursive ends that interjections serve in one Q’eqchi’ community, thereby shedding light on local values, norms, ontological classes, and social relations. In short, this article argues against interpretations of interjections that focus on internal emotional states by providing an account of their meanings in terms of situational, discursive, and social context. p a u l k o c k e l m a n is McKennan Post-Doctoral Fellow in Linguistic Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College (Hanover, N. H. 03755, U. S. A. [paul. [emailprotected] edu]). Born in 1970, he was educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz (B. A. , 1992) and the University of Chicago (M. S. , 1994; Ph. D. , 2002). His publications include â€Å"The Collection of Copal among the Q’eqchi’-Maya† (Research in Economic Anthropology 20:163–94), â€Å"Factive and Counterfactive Clitics in Q’eqchi’-Maya: Stance, Status, and Subjectivity,† in Papers from the Thirty-eighth Annual Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society (Chicago: Linguistics Society, in press), and â€Å"The Interclausal Relations Hierarchy in Q’eqchi’ Maya† (International Journal of American Linguistics 69:25–48). The present paper was submitted 1 vi 01 and accepted 27 xii 02. 1. A longer version of this article was presented at the workshop â€Å"Semiotics: Culture in Context† at the University of Chicago in January 2001. Chris Ball, Anya Bernstein, John Lucy, and Michael Silverstein all provided very helpful commentary. This article also greatly bene? ted from suggestions made by Benjamin S. Orlove and several anonymous referees. Western philosophy and linguistic theory have traditionally considered interjections at the periphery of language and primordially related to emotion. For example, the Latin grammarian Priscian de? ned interjections as â€Å"a part of speech signifying an emotion by means of an unformed word† (Padley 1976:266). Muller (1862) ? thought that interjections were at the limit of what might be called language. Sapir (1921:6–7) said that they were â€Å"the nearest of all language sounds to instinctive utterance. † Bloom? eld (1984[1933]:177) said that they â€Å"occur under a violent stimulus,† and Jakobson (1960: 354) considered them exemplars of the â€Å"purely emotive stratum of language. † While interjections are no longer considered peripheral to linguistics and are now carefully de? ned with respect to their grammatical form, their meanings remain vague and elusive. In particular, although interjections are no longer characterized purely in terms of emotion, they are still characterized in terms of â€Å"mental states. † For example, Wierzbicka (1992:164) characterizes interjections as â€Å"[referring] to the speaker’s current mental state or mental act. † Ameka (1992a:107) says that â€Å"from a pragmatic point of view, interjections may be de?ned as a subset of items that encode speaker attitudes and communicative intentions and are contextbound,† and Montes (1999:1289) notes that many interjections â€Å"[focus] on the internal reaction of affectedness of the speaker with respect to the referent. † Philosophers have offered similar interpretations. For example, Herder thought that interjections were the human equivalent of animal sounds, being both a â€Å"language of feeling† and a â€Å"law of nature† (1966:88), and Rousseau, pursuing the origins of language, theorized that protolanguage was â€Å"entirely interjectional† (1990:71). Indeed, such philosophers have posited a historical transition from interjections to language in which the latter allows us not only to index pain and express passion but also to denote values and exercise reason (D’Atri 1995). 2 Thus interjections have been understood as a semiotic artifact of our natural origins and the most transparent index of our emotions. Such an understanding of interjections is deeply rooted in Western thought. Aristotle (1984), for example, posited a contrastive relationship between voice, proper only to humans as instantiated in language, and sound, shared by humans and animals as instantiated in cries. This contrastive relation was then compared with other analogous contrastive relations, in particular, value and pleasure/pain, polis and household, and bios (the good life, or political life proper to humans) and zoe (pure life, shared by all living things). Such a contrast is so pervasive that modern philosophers such as Agamben (1995) have devoted much of their scholarly work to the thinking out of this tradition and others built on it such as id versus ego in the Freudian paradigm. In short, the folk distinction made between interjections and language 2. D’Atri (1995:124) argues that, for Rousseau, â€Å"interjections . . . are sounds and not voices: they are passive registerings and as such do not presuppose the intervention of will, which is what characterizes human acts of speech. † 467 468 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 44, Number 4, August–October 2003 proper maps onto a larger set of distinctions in Western thought: emotion and cognition, animality and humanity, nature and culture, female and male, passion and reason, bare life and the good life, pain and value, private and public, and so on (see, e.g. , Lutz 1988, Strathern 1988). In this article I avoid such abstracting and dichotomizing traps by going straight to the heart of interjections: their everyday usage in actual discourse when seen in the context of local culture and grounded in a semiotic framework. I begin by characterizing the linguistic and ethnographic context in which I carried out my research and go on to relate interjections to other linguistic forms, showing how they are both similar to and distinct from other classes of words in natural languages. Next I provide and exemplify a semiotic framework, generalizable across languages, in terms of which the indexical objects and pragmatic functions of interjections can best be characterized. Then I detail the local usage of the 12 most commonly used interjections in Q’eqchi’ and show the way in which they are tied into all things cultural: values, norms, ontological classes, social relations, and so on. I conclude by discussing the relative frequency with which the various forms and functions of interjections are used. In short, I argue against interpretations of interjections that focus on emotional states by providing an account of their meanings in terms of situational, discursive, and social context. Linguistic and Ethnographic Context While I am attempting to provide as wide a theoretical account of interjections as I can, thereby providing a metalanguage for speaking about similar sign phenomena in other languages, I am also trying to capture the grammatical niceties of Q’eqchi’ Maya and the discursive and social particularities of one Q’eqchi’-speaking village in particular. Before I begin my analysis, then, I want to sketch the linguistic and ethnographic context in which I worked. Q’eqchi’ is a language in the Kichean branch of the Mayan family, spoken by some 360,000 speakers in Guatemala (in the departments of Alta Verapaz, Izabel, and Peten) and Belize (Kaufman 1974, Stewart 1980). 3 Lin? guistically, Q’eqchi’ is relatively well described: scholars such as Berinstein (1985), Sedat (1955), Stewart (1980), Stoll (1896), and Chen Cao et al. (1997) have discussed its syntax, morphology, phonology, and lexicon, and I have detailed various morphosyntactic forms (encoding grammatical categories such as mood, status, evidentiality, taxis, and inalienable possession) as they intersect with sociocultural values and contextual features and as they illuminate local modes of personhood (Kockelman 3. Typologically, Q’eqchi’ is a morphologically ergative, head-marking language. In Q’eqchi’, vowel length (signaled by doubling letters) is phonemic; /k/ and /q/ are velar and uvular plosives, respectively, and /x/ and /j/ are palato-alveolar and velar fricatives, respectively. All other phonemes have their standard IPA values. 2002, 2003a, b). This article is therefore part of a larger project in which I examine how intentional and evaluative stances are encoded in natural languages and the relations that such stances bear to local modes of subjectivity. Alta Verapaz, the original center of the Q’eqchi’-speaking people who still make up the majority of its population, has had a unusual history even by Guatemalan standards. In 1537, after the Spanish crown had failed to conquer the indigenous peoples living there, the Dominican Friar Bartolome de Las Casas was permitted to ?pacify the area through religious methods. Having succeeded, he changed the name of the area from Tezulutlan (Land of War) to Verapaz (True Peace), and the Dominicans were granted full control over the area—the state banning secular immigration, removing all military colonies, and nullifying previous land grants. In this way, for almost 300 years the area remained an isolated enclave, relatively protected by the paternalism of the church in comparison with other parts of Guatemala (King 1974, Sapper 1985). This ended abruptly in the late 1800s, however, with the advent of coffee growing, liberal reforms, and the in? ux of Europeans (Cambranes 1985, Wagner 1996). Divested of their land and forced to work on coffee plantations, the Q’eqchi’ began migrating north into the unpopulated lowland forests of the Peten ? and Belize (Adams 1965, Carter 1969, Howard 1975, Kockelman 1999, Pedroni 1991, Saa Vidal 1979, Schwartz 1990, Wilk 1991). In the past 40 years this migration has been fueled by a civil war that has ravaged the Guatemalan countryside, with the Q’eqchi’ ? eeing not just scarce resources and labor quotas but also their own nation’s soldiers—often forcibly conscripted speakers of other Mayan languages (Carmack 1988, IWGIA 1978, Wilson 1995). As a consequence, the past century has seen the Q’eqchi’ population spread from Alta Verapaz to the Peten and ? nally to Belize, Mexico, and even the ? United States. Indeed, although only the fourth largest of some 24 Mayan languages, Q’eqchi’ is thought to have the largest percentage of monolinguals, and the ethnic group is Guatemala’s fastest-growing and most geographically extensive (Kaufman 1974, Stewart 1980). The two key ethnographies of Q’eqchi’-speakers have been written by Wilk (1991) and Wilson (1995), the former treating household ecology in Belize and the latter upheavals in village life and identity at the height of the civil war in highland Guatemala during the 1980s. In addition to these monographs, there are also a number of dissertations and articles on the history (King 1974, Sapper 1985, Wagner 1996), ecology (Carter 1969, Secaira 1992, Wilson 1972), and migration (Adams 1965, Howard 1975, Pedroni 1991) of Q’eqchi’-speaking  people. The data for this article are based on almost two years of ethnographic and linguistic ? eldwork among speakers of Q’eqchi’, most of it in Ch’inahab, a village of some 80 families (around 650 people) in the municipality of San Juan Chamelco, in the department of Alta Verapaz. At an altitude of approximately 2,400 m, Ch’inahab is one of the highest villages in this area, with an annual precipitation of more than 2,000 mm. It is also one of k o c k e l m a n The Meanings of Interjections in Q’eqchi’ Maya F 469  the most remote, access to the closest road requiring a three-hour hike down a steep and muddy single-track trail. Its relatively high altitude and remote location provide the perfect setting for cloud forest, and such a cloud forest provides the perfect setting for the resplendent quetzal, being home to what is thought to be the highest density of such birds in the world. Because of the existence of the quetzal and the cloud forest in which it makes its home, Ch’inahab has been the site of a successful eco-tourism project the conditions and consequences of which are detailed in my dissertation (Kockelman 2002). While the majority of villagers in Ch’inahab are monolingual speakers of Q’eqchi’, some men who have served time in the army or worked as itinerant traders speak some Spanish. All the villagers are Catholic. Ch’inahab is divided by a mountain peak with dwellings on both of its sides and in the surrounding valleys. It takes about 45 minutes to hike across the village. At one end there is a biological station kept by the eco-tourism project and used sporadically by European ecologists, and at the other there is a Catholic church and a cemetery. In the center there is a small store, a school for primary and secondary grades, and a soccer ? eld. The surrounding landscape is cloud forest giving way to scattered house sites, agricultural parcels, pasture, and ? elds now fallow. All villagers engage in corn-based, or milpa, agriculture, but very few have enough land to ful? ll all of their subsistence needs. 4 For this reason, many women in the village are dedicated to chicken husbandry, most men in the village engage in seasonal labor on plantations (up to ?ve months a year in some cases), and many families engage in itinerant trade (women weaving baskets and textiles for the men to sell) and eco-tourism (the women hosting tourists and the men guiding them). Dwelling sites often contain a scattering of houses in which reside an older couple and their married sons, all of whom share a water source and a pasture. The individual families themselves often have two houses, a relatively traditional thatched-roof house in which the family cooks and sleeps and a relatively new house with a tin roof in which they host festivals and in which older children and ecotourists may sleep. Because of eco-tourism and the in? ux of money and strangers that it brings, there has been an increase in the construction of such tin-roofed houses, and, as will be seen, many of my examples of interjections come from such construction contexts. My data on the use of interjections among villagers in Ch’inahab comes from 14 months of ? eldwork carried out between 1998 and 2001. The data collection con4. Before 1968, what is now Ch’inahab was owned by the owner of a plantation. Q’eqchi’-speakers who lived in the village of Popobaj (located to the south of and lower than Ch’inahab) were permitted to make their milpa in this area in exchange for two weeks of labor per month on the ? nca (Secaira 1992:20). Only in 1968, when a group of villagers got together to form a land acquisition committee, were some 15 caballer? as (678 ha) of land purchased from the owner ? for 4,200 quetzals (US$4,200). This land, while legally owned by the entire community, was divided among the original 33 villagers as a function of their original contributions.  sisted in part of characterizing tokens of usage when I heard them and in part of tracking tokens of usage through recordings of naturally occurring conversations. 5 In particular, given the fact that many interjections occur in relatively nonconversational, task-engaged situations (house building, planting, playing, cooking, etc. ), trying to record them in such contexts was futile. Luckily, as will be seen, they often occur in modes of disruption (when some goal-directed action goes awry), which makes them relatively easy to notice in real-time context and their contextual regularities relatively easy to stipulate. In addition, I tape-recorded naturally occurring conversations in the households of three families once a week over several months, usually at dinnertime. 6 After I describe the forms and meanings of the interjections I will discuss the relative frequency of the various tokens collected and thereby illuminate which forms and meanings are most often used by whom. The Grammatical Form of Interjections There are four criteria by which interjections may be differentiated from other linguistic forms within a particular language and generalized as a form class across languages (Ameka 1992, Bloom?eld 1984[1933], Jespersen 1965, Wilkins 1992). First, all interjections are conventional lexical forms, or words, that can constitute utterances on their own (Wilkins 1992). They are conventional in that their sign carriers have relatively standardized and arbitrary phonological forms, and they can constitute utterances on their own because their only syntagmatic relation with other linguistic forms is parataxis—in which two forms are â€Å"united by the use of only one sentence pitch† (Bloom? eld 1984[1933]:171). They can therefore stand alone as perfectly sensible stretches of talk before and after which there is silence. Second, with few exceptions, no interjection is simultaneously a member of another word class (Ameka 1992a, Wilkins 1992). Almost all of them are what Ameka (1992a:105), following Bloom? eld (1984[1933]), calls primary interjections: â€Å"little words or non-words which . . . can constitute an utterance by themselves and do not normally enter into constructions with other word classes. † In Q’eqchi’, the main exceptions are interjections built, through lexical extension, from the primary interjection ay. In the case of ay dios, the additional 5. I also include several examples of interjection usage that occurred in the context of ethnographic interviews about topics other than interjections, for these often indicated that an ethnographic question was poorly posed or inappropriate in the local context. I also carried out extensive interviews about the meanings of interjections with native speakers (see Kockelman 2002 for an extended discussion of the relationship between form, usage, and speakers’ re? ections). 6.  Indeed, the best two accounts of interjection-like things— â€Å"response cries† in Goffman (1978) and â€Å"emblematic gestures† in Sherzer (1993)—explicitly take into account social interaction and ethnographic description. Good accounts of the discursive use of interjections are offered by De Bruyn (1998), Ehlich (1986), Gardner (1998), and Meng and Schrabback (1999). 470 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 44, Number 4, August–October 2003 element, dios, is a loan noun from Spanish, meaning â€Å"god. † In the case of ay dios atinyuwa’, besides the Spanish loanword there is a Q’eqchi’ expression, at-in-yuwa’ (you [are] my father). Interjections of this latter kind, which are or involve forms that belong to other word classes, will be called secondary interjections (again following Ameka and Bloom? eld). Similarly, the English secondary interjections damn and heavens may be used as both interjections and verbs or nouns. Third, with few exceptions, an interjection consists of a single morpheme and undergoes neither in? ectional nor derivational processes (Wilkins 1992). Interjections cannot be in? ectionally marked for grammatical categories such as tense or number, and they cannot be further derived into another form class such as noun or verb. Such forms are often classi? ed as a subclass of â€Å"particles† or discourse markers (see Ameka 1992a, Fraser 1999, Jespersen 1965, Schiffrin 1987, Wilkins 1992, and Zwicky 1985). In Q’eqchi’ there are three exceptions to this characterization. First, uyaluy is what I will call a reduplicative interjection, being composed, through syllabic reduplication, from the interjection uy. Second, ay dios and ay dios atinyuwa’ are what I will call extended interjections, being composed, through lexical extension, from the interjection ay. And lastly, the interjection ay may undergo further derivation into a delocutionary verb (becoming ayaynak, â€Å"to cry or yell continually,† often said of dogs howling), which may then undergo normal verbal in? ection for grammatical categories such as tense, aspect, person, and number. Lastly, although it is not a criterial feature, many of these forms are phonologically or morphologically anomalous, having features which mark them as odd or unique relative to the standard lexical forms of a language. For example, unlike most Q’eqchi’ words, in which stress falls on the last syllable (Stewart 1980), the interjection uyaluy has syllable-initial stress. Similarly, while reduplication is a common morphological process in Q’eqchi’ (Stewart 1980), the reduplicative interjection uyaluy is derived through a nonstandard morphological form. While many Q’eqchi’ words involve a glottalized alveolar stop, the interjection t’ is also implosive. 7 Whereas the Spanish loanword dios is usually phonetically assimilated in Q’eqchi’ as tiox when used as a noun, in the interjection ay dios there is no devoicing of the initial consonant of this noun (i.e. , /d/ does not become /t/) or palatization of its ? nal consonant (i. e. , /s/ does not become /x/). And the interjection sht differs from ordinary Q’eqchi’ words in using /sh/, rather than a vowel, as a syllabic (see Bloom? eld 1984[1933]:121). In short, it is clear from the number of quali? cations that interjections, like most linguistic forms, are dif? cult to characterize with necessary and suf? cient conditions (see Taylor 1995, Zwicky 1985). Nevertheless, they may simultaneously be differentiated from other form classes within a particular language and generalized as a form class across languages. 7. Often called a â€Å"dental click† (Wilkins 1992) or a â€Å"suction stop† (Jespersen 1965:90). Readers who speak some Spanish may have noticed that many Q’eqchi’ interjections look similar to Spanish interjections—ay (dios), uy, ah, eh, sht—and even to English interjections (sh[t] and t’). While I have no historical data that would attest to such a claim, given the history of sustained linguistic contact between speakers of Spanish and Q’eqchi’ via the colonial encounter and between speakers of Spanish and English this should come as no surprise. The one good account of interjections in Spanish (Montes 1999) discusses only a small range of the discursive functions of interjections and focuses on the internal state of the speaker. As I will show, however, the meanings of some of these interjections in Q’eqchi’ seem to bear a resemblance to their meanings in Spanish, as far as can be discerned from the comparative data. In this way, these â€Å"loan interjections† show that almost any linguistic form may be borrowed (see Brody 1995) with some maintenance of its meaning. The Meanings of Q’eqchi’ Interjections  Although interjections are relatively easy to characterize from the standpoint of grammatical form, there is no framework in terms of which one may order and compare their meanings—that is, the classes of objects and signs that they index (and thereby stand in a relationship of contiguity with) and the types of pragmatic functions they serve (and thereby may be used as a means to achieve). In what follows, I frame their use in terms of situational, discursive, and social context. I will begin with an extended example through which the framework will become clear. The Q’eqchi’ interjection chix indexes loathsome objects in the situational context. For example, when picking up his bowl of food from the ground, a man notices that he has set it in chicken feces. â€Å"Chix,† he says, scraping the bowl on the dirt to wipe off the feces. His wife, herself responsible for the chicken, then takes his bowl for herself and gives him a new one. Similarly, when opening the door to her house early one morning, a woman notices that the dog has vomited right outside the doorway. â€Å"Chix,† she says, and her ? ve-year-old son comes over to look. She tells him to scrape it away with a machete. Like most interjections that have indexical objects in the situational context, this interjection serves to call another’s attention to the object. 8 Relatedly, and as a function of responsibility assessment (husband 1 wife 1 child), it directs another’s attention to what must be cleaned up, avoided, etc. The interjection chix may also be transposed to index a sign denoting or characterizing a loathsome object (see Buhler 1990). In such cases of sign-based transposition, ? the interjection is in a relationship of contiguity with a 8. Montes (1999:1293) notes that most of the Spanish interjections she examined â€Å"seem to be associated with seeing. We ? nd that a large number of the interjections [ah, oh, uh, ay, oy, uy] used in the conversations examined co-occur with directives to ‘see’ or ‘look at’ or as a response to these directives. † k o c k e l m a n The Meanings of Interjections in Q’eqchi’ Maya F 471 sign that denotes or characterizes the object or event in question (rather than being in contiguity with the actual object or event, as in the usage of chix just discussed). In other words, it is as if the speaker were inhabiting the frame of the narrated event (Buhler 1990). In this way, ? the interjection chix indexes not just loathsomeness but also signs that refer to or predicate qualities of loathsome objects. Insofar as the denotatum of such a sign has the same qualities and values as the object itself, the modality of contiguity (being able to taste, touch, see, or smell the object in question) is suspended while the ontological class of the object (loathsomeness) is maintained. For example, in telling a story to a group of  men about a friend who was bitten by a poisonous spider while working on a plantation in the lowland area of Guatemala, the speaker describes the pus blisters that rose up on his friend’s arm. â€Å"Chix,† says one of the men listening. The other men laugh, and before continuing his story the speaker adds that the pus blisters took two weeks to heal. Like most interjections that undergo signbased transposition, such usage often serves as a backchannel cue, indicating that the speaker is listening but cannot or does not want to contribute to the topic at hand (Brown and Yule 1983:90–94; Duncan 1973; compare the usage of mmm or jeez in English). Lastly, the interjection chix may be transposed to index an addressee’s relation of contiguity with a loathsome object. In such cases of addressee-based transposition, the situational indexical object is transposed to a person other than the speaker. The speaker’s sign is audible (a relation of contiguity) to the addressee, who is in a relationship of contiguity with the object. In other words, it is as if the speaker were inhabiting the ad? dressee’s current corporal?  eld (see Buhler 1990, Hanks 1990), and, again, the modality of contiguity is suspended while the ontological class is maintained. For example, a mother watching her three-year-old son approach a dog that is defecating wormy stool calls out to him â€Å"Chix. † The child stops his advance and watches from a distance. In this most addressee-focused way, the sign is used by a parent to index that a child is within reach (typically tactile) of a disgusting object and serves as an imperative not to touch the object. Interjections are primarily indexical (see Peirce 1955) in that they stand for their objects by a relationship of contiguity rather than by a relationship of convention (as in the case of symbols) or similarity (as in the case of icons). 9 Although the indexical modality of interjections is emphasized in this article, the symbolic modality is always present in at least two interrelated ways. First, and trivially, the interjection itself has a standard9. If interjections were iconic, then they would be expected to resemble their objects. The problem with this, as exempli?  ed by Kryk-Kastovsky’s (1997) argument that interjections are the most iconic of all linguistic elements expressing surprise, is that one needs to know what â€Å"surprise† looks like when usually our only indication of surprise is the interjection or behavior itself. However, interjections as indexical of situational and discursive objects do in certain cases have iconic modalities of meaning (see, e. g. , the discussion of ay, ay dios, and ay dios atinyuwa’ below). ized but relatively arbitrary form that is conventionally used by members of a given linguistic community. Second, interjections conventionally stand in a relation of contiguity with particular classes of objects. These conventional classes of indexical objects are present in two ways. First, across interjections, one may characterize what semiotic class of objects is being indexed. Second, in the case of any particular interjection, one may characterize what ontological class of objects is being indexed. Besides indexing objects or signs in the immediate context, interjections have pragmatic functions: they serve as a means to achieve certain ends. For example, chix variously serves as an attentative (when nontransposed), a back-channel cue (when undergoing sign-based transposition), and an imperative (when undergoing addressee-based transposition). Both the objects indexed and the pragmatic functions served (see Silverstein 1987) are integral aspects of the meanings of interjections. Finally, interjections may index more than one object at once. In particular, they may index objects, signs, internal states, and social relations. In what follows, I will refer to these distinct types of indexical objects as situational, discursive, expressive, and social, respectively. Situational indexical objects are the objects or events in the immediate context of the speech event. Discursive indexical objects are the signs that occur in the speech event. 10 Together, situational and discursive indexical objects are the most stable co-occurrence regularities that interjections possess and therefore the only ones that are easy to tabulate. Expressive indexical objects are the intentional stances of the speaker—the putative mental states, whether construed as â€Å"cognitive† or â€Å"emotive. †11 Lastly, social indexical objects are the various social roles inhabited by the speaker or addressee (gender, ethnicity, age, etc. ) or the social relations that exist between the two (status, deference, politeness, etc. ). For example, chix may index not only a loathsome object in the situational context but a social relation (parentchild, husband-wife, raconteur–appreciative listener) and, in many cases, an internal state (â€Å"disgust†). And the interjection ay not only indexes a painful object in the situational context or an unexpected answer in the dis10. This is not quite the standard distinction between â€Å"text† and â€Å"context† (Montes 1999 and Wilkins 1992). For example, while it is tempting to put sign-based transposition into the discursive context for the purposes of schematizing the data, sign-based transpositions make sense only in terms of the qualities of the objects referred to by the sign indexed by the interjection. In contrast, an unsolicited response such as a dubitive is directed at the truth of another’s assertion rather than at any particular quality of the state of affairs predicated by that assertion. For this reason, dubitives belong to the discursive context and sign-based transpositions to the situational context. 11. Whereas interjections creatively index expressive indexical objects in that the interjection is often the only sign of the internal state in question, they presupposedly index situational and discursive indexical objects in that both interjection and indexical object are simultaneously present in context (see Silverstein 1976 for this distinction). This difference in semiotic status (presupposing/creative) maps onto a putative difference in ontological status (world/mind). 472 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 44, Number 4, August–October 2003 cursive context but also an internal state (pain) in the expressive context and a role in the social context (in particular, female gender). Many interjections index signs in the discursive context in that they co-occur with (or serve as) a response to an addressee’s previous utterance or a nonresponse. In the case of a response, the use of an interjection occurs after and makes sense only relative to the addressee’s previous utterance. For example, the interjection ih indexes an addressee’s previous statement and serves as a registerative, indicating that the speaker has heard and understood the statement. In the case of a nonresponse, the interjection may either elicit an addressee’s utterance (and thereby occur before it) or occur in the midst of the speaker.

Impact of Education Choice on Public Funds Essay Example for Free

Impact of Education Choice on Public Funds Essay Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. Though the U. S. Supreme Court declared school desegregation in the 1954 ruling on the famous â€Å"Brown v. Board of Education case, the state of Mississippi did not allow racially or ethnically different students to mix together in schools until 1970, sixteen years after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling, according to the Civil Rights Timeline, created by the Mississippi Humanities Council at Southern Mississippi. Brown v. Board of Education prompted parents in Mississippi to create nonpublic and charter schools in efforts to keep schools segregated. Legislation and School Choice in Mississippi At the present time, Mississippi doesn’t truly offer school choice. There is no private school choice program. Parents are not given money from the state to send their children to private or parochial schools. The Education Commission of the States reports that Mississippi has enacted a mandatory inter-district school open enrollment policy. Students can move between school districts- but that is not guaranteed for those who want to change schools. Both the sending and receiving school boards must approve it. Mississippis Constitution prohibits the appropriation of any state education funds for the support of sectarian schools or private schools (Miss. Const. Art. 8, Sec. 208). Though at the same time, state accreditation is mandatory for nonpublic schools receiving state funds. According to State Regulation of Private Schools, (June 2000), Mississippi law provides free textbooks on loan to pupils in all elementary and secondary schools in the state (Miss. Code Ann.  § 37-43-1 et seq). The loan of textbooks to qualified private schools does not violate Mississippis constitutional prohibition against public support of sectarian schools or the control of educational funds by religious sects. Private, parochial or denominational schools accepting free school textbooks on behalf of their students must file annual reports as required by the State Board of Education (Miss. Code Ann.  § 37-43-51). Throughout the years, numerous bills to give vouchers or tax credits/ tax deductions have died in House Committees. It was allowed to die in 2009. During the 12 years that the law was on the books, only one traditional public school converted to a public charter school. Senate Bill 2721 is the latest bill in regards charter schools. This current bill is one authorizing new start-up charter schools to be established in Mississippi recently passed the State Senate and is now being taken up in the House of Representatives. Senate Bill 2721, which passed the senate by a vote of 50-2 in February, authorizes five new start-up charter schools to be established in the state. With this bill, the school can be brand new, not a failing school converting to a charter. Local school boards would have the first look at proposals, but authorization power would still rest solely with the state board of education. According to Bill 2721, the definition of a start-up charter school is â€Å"a public school operating under the terms of a charter granted by the State Board of Education with the approval of the local school board or school boards on the application of an eligible entity and may draw its students from across public school district boundaries† (Harrison, 2010) . Previous attempts to expand charter schools in Mississippi were shot down by fears of racial segregation. Some fear that it is a backdoor attempt to re-segregate many of Mississippi’s public schools, though supporters point out that a majority of charter school students in many parts of the country are minorities. â€Å"There’s been some resistance from the Mississippi Association of Educators and other groups that say you’re taking money from public education,† Watson continued (Harrison, 2010). â€Å"That’s an absolute falsity—this is public education† (Harrison, 2010). Opposition still remains from some caucus members and from teacher unions (Heartland. org). Those who oppose the potential implementation of charter schools believe the schools will be taking away students, resources and funding from a public school system that is already heavily financially burdened. Impacts on Funding and Analysis Mississippi charter schools are eligible for the same funding as regular schools. They may receive federal, state, local or private funding. They are not taxing authorities and may not levy taxes or request tax increases in order to generate funding. Charter schools are funded with taxes, but operate with more flexibility and fewer restrictions than the traditional public schools. Often times, charter schools have a special emphasis, such as on the art or the sciences. According to the Mississippi Code of 1972, â€Å"the State Board of Education may give charter schools special preference when allocating grant funds other than state funds for alternative school programs, classroom technology, improvement programs, mentoring programs or other grant programs designed to improve local school performance†. Allowing charter schools to be created will minimally decrease the funding that public schools receive. Minimal because at most only five charter schools will come into existence and they will be spread throughout the state, not centralized in one location. The amount of funding will still be based on the number of students enrolled in the schools. Charter schools traditionally keep their numbers small. Jackson public schools is the third largest district in the state of Mississippi, none of these legislations are negatively impacting the funding of the district. Even the state law allowing book loans to private schools has not taken away from the students of JPS. It has been speculated that having a charter school law would make Mississippi eligible for more grants through the Race to the Top program, which is part of the stimulus package passed last year by Congress and signed into law by Obama. If this speculations is true, then all districts in the state are losing funds due to lack of charter schools. But the state Department of Education has said the lack of a charter school law would not prevent Mississippi from being eligible for the grants through the program (heartland. org).

Obesity: Causes, Effects and Treatments

Obesity: Causes, Effects and Treatments Obesity , is one of the common and serious disease over the world. There must be cases of obesity no matter in urban or rural area, as it is a widespread and escalating concern. It does not just happen in adults as children also may have the possibility because they are less concern about their health nowadays. Obesity is actually a condition whereby abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that may impair health and also the genetic and environmental factors that are difficult to control when dieting. For the rate of obesity has been increasing in both adults and children. Obesity has twice increment around the world since 1980 and more than 1.4 billion adults, 20 and older were overweight. From these overweight adults, it has over 200 million men and approximately 300 million women were obese. According to a hefty new analysis from the Global Burden Of Disease Study 2013, it is stated that the number of overweight and obese people rising from 857 million in 1980 to 2.1 billion in 201 3. However, the rate change greatly throughout the world . More than half of the world’s 671 million obese individuals living in only ten countries, which is 15% combined at China and India, more than 13% at USA, Egypt, Brazil, Pakistan, Mexico, Russia, Germany and Indonesia. USA, one of the high-salary countries, has the highest increases in adult obesity, where approximately one third of the adult population are obese. In Australia, it is estimated around 28% of men and 30% of women are obese, and in UK is about a quarter of the population are obese. [ Refrence 1,2 ] There are mainly many risk factors of obesity. Obesity is mainly due to the overindulging unhealthy diet and eating habits. Many people just eat whatever they like without concern about the value of nutritious. Nowadays, many fast food outlets are opened and it is getting more and more all around the corner of the world. Those fast foods are a diet which is high in calories and the trans fats contained may raise the LDL cholesterol, or known as bad cholesterol and leads to heart attack or any other cardiovascular diseases. Examples of such food high in trans fats include French fries and cheese. Eating canned food and drinking too much sugary drinks or alcohol will also cause obesity, as the food and drinks contain high value in fat and sugar. Eating in a large portion and habits of comfort eating are also not good, since forcing yourself to eat much will cause an incomplete digestion. In order to reduce this risk, a healthy and balanced diet must be well-planned daily. A healthy and balanced diet should be consist of 7 main classes of food and the most important thing is to eat more vegetables and fruits. Reduce the intake on foods that are high in sugar and fat and you can also try replace kilojoule heavy desserts with fruits. Eat in a proper portion too to maintain a healthy body and weight. Other than that, lack of physical activity is also the vital factor leads to obesity. Nowadays, many people have jobs that involve sitting at a desk for most a day and also hectic lifestyle. They also rely on transportation such as bus or car rather than walking or cycling. Sometimes, even when the peoples have stress, the ways they choose to relax is by watching TV, playing computer games, and also surfing the internet. This kind of lifestyle can be known as sedentary lifestyle and so did not burn the calories in their body. Besides, if the energy provided by food is not used, the extra energy intake will be stored as fat in the body. Hence, regular exercise must be don e because it helps in burning away the calories in human’s body. To maintain a good health, moderate intensity exercise should be done for at least 1 hour most days of the week. During the day, simple exercise such as take the stairs and also get up often from your chair or sofa may helps too. [ Refrence 3,4,5] Obesity normally occurs when adipose cells, which adipose cells are cells that provide storage for extra energy, are increasing absurdly in size and also the number (hyperplasia). An increase in the size of adipose cell is called hypertrophic, while an increase in number of fat cell is known as hyperplastic. Thus, an increase in hypertrophic or hyperplastic resulting in obesity. Besides, adipose cells also follow a normal pattern of growth and development. For infance, adipose cells more developed and each cell grows greatly, which resulting in hypertrophic or hyperplastic obesity. While for adulthood, a person usually has a normal number of adipose cells, but there is large amount of fat in each cell. In certain extreme cases, adult-onset obesity can be both hypertrophic or hyperplastic. Then, the fat cells do not disappear in adult state once it developed. Furthermore, obesity also develops regularly as weight is gained over a period of time. When amount of energy which also means calories consumed in food and drinks exceed the energy used for exercise and metabolic processes in body, weight gain will occur. This is also known as positive energy balance. The excess energy will be stored as fat. Each kilogram of fat stores around 9000 kcal. When body needs more energy than available from food, the fat can be lost or reduced from the energy stores. This is well known as negative energy balance. So, a lack of energy balance may eventually cause obesity. [ Refrence 6,7 ] Obesity has significant effects for health and it is linked to a wide range of diseases. One of the disease that is normally caused by obesity is coronary heart disease. Coronary heart disease is usually caused by a build-up of fatty deposits on the walls of the arteries around the heart. This layer of build-up acid is normally accumulated from the food that we eat daily. Foods contain high fat value will eventually build up the fatty deposit called atheroma. It is also made up of cholesterol and other waste substances. Once the atheroma build-up on the walls of the coronary arteries, this will make the arteries become narrower and reduce the blood flow to the heart muscle. This process is called atherosclerosis. If more severe, obesity can lead to heart failure which your heart cannot pump enough blood to meet your body requirement. In addition, type 2 diabetes is also one of the health problem caused by obesity. Those who are obese are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes disease . Being overweights will add more pressure on body’s ability to control blood sugar using insulin and so makes it much more likely to develop diabetes. In type 2 diabetes, body produces insulin but its insulin cannot be used properly. The body overproduce insulin at first to keep the blood sugar normal. But overtime, this cause the body to lose ability to produce enough insulin to keep blood sugar level at a normal rate, and will eventually lead to kidney failure and heart disease. Furthermore, obesity may also lead to high blood pressure, which is known as silent killer.The blood wessels need to circulate more blood to the fat tissue, as the extra fat tissue in the body needs nutrient and oxygen to survive. Due to this, the workload of the heart will be increasing because more blood is needed to pump through the additional blood vessels. The more the circulating blood, then there is more pressure on the wall of the artery. Consequently, the higher pressure on the artery wall will increase the blood pressure. [ Refrences 8,9,10] There are actually several ways to treat obesity. Obesity can be cured either by drug therapy or bariatric surgery, as it is a more effective treatment. For drug therapy treatment, there are two types of drug which are recommended as it can be used for long-term, which is orlistat and sibutramine. Orlistat is a gastrointestinal lipase inhibitor which helps to reduce patient’s weight around 3 kg on average and also decrease patients to be high risk in diabetes. It will be effective if low-calorie diet is alongside the treatment. In orlistat way of treatment, the fat is absorbed and digested into body. It then works on small intestine and stomach to avoid the action of two enzymes found in digestive juices. The enzyme is normally to break down the fat which consumed in meal. So, orlistat block the fat from being digested as it will passed out as faeces instead of being absorbed into body. Another drug, sibutramine which is known as a monoamine-reuptake inhibitor, can help to red uce weight and the mean of weight losses is around 4-5 kg, but is related to increase of pulse rate and blood pressure. Sibutramine is called as appetite suppressants in medication class and it works to decrease appetite by acting on appetite control centers in the brain. Furthermore, bariatric surgery , also known as gastrointestinal surgery helps to reduce weight in a rapid way, by altering the digestive process. The operation can be divided into two that is malabsorptive and restrictive. Malabsorptive weight loss surgery exclude almost all of the nutrients of small intestine from digestive tract to decrease amount of nutrients and calories absorbed. For restrictive weight loss surgery, it creates a narrow passage from the upper part stomach to larger lower part to reduce the intake of food and also slowing the passage of food to stomach. [ Refrence 11,12,13 ] In conclusion, obesity disease should be more concerned and awared by everyone in the society as this disease increasingly on the rise nowadays. So, everyone must have well-planned for a health-enhancing lifestyle. Bad habit must be quited as fast as possible to save own life for a good health. There is a saying that healthy food is not tasty but however this is the golden phrase which leads everyone to a long-life span. References Obesity and overweight http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs311/en/ [ Accessed 1 October 2014 ] Obesity rates climbing worldwide, most comprehensive global study to date shows. ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 28 May 2014. Available at www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140528204215.htm [ Accessed 1 October 2014 ] Causes of obesity. http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/obesity/basics/causes/con-20014834 [ Accessed 2 October 2014 ] Mahshia Dehgan, Noori Akthar-Danesh, Anwar T Merchant. 2005. Childhood obesity, prevalence and prevention. Available from http://www.nutritionj.com/content/4/1/24 [ Accessed 2 October 2014 ] Causes of obesity. http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Obesity/Pages/Causes.aspx [ Accessed 2 October 2014 ] David Jone. Development Of Obesity. Available from http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/Development_Of_Obesity.html [ Accessed 3 October 2014 ] Obesity. How Obesity Develop. http://www.acumedic.com/onestophealth/obesity.htm#article [ Accessed 3 October 2014 ] Health Risk Of Overweight And Obesity. http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/obe/risks.html [ Accessed 3 October 2014 ] Coronary Heart Disease. http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Coronary-heart-disease/Pages/Causes.aspx [ Accessed 3 October 2014 ] Health Effects Of Obesity. http://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-conditions/healthy-living/obesity/symptoms.html [ Accessed 3 October 2014 ] Paul E O’Brien, Wendy A Brown and John B Dixon.2005. Obesity, weight loss and bariatric surgery. Available from https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2005/183/6/obesity-weight-loss-and-bariatric-surgery [ Accessed 7 October 2014 ] Orlistat. http://www.patient.co.uk/medicine/Orlistat.htm [ Accessed 7 October 2014 ] Weight loss surgery. http://www.obesityhelp.com/content/wlsurgery.html [ Accessed 8 October 2014 ]

To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee :: To Kill a Mockingbird Essays

At the beginning of the novel, Scout is an innocent, good-hearted five-year-old child who has no experience with the evils of the world. As the novel progresses, Scout has her first contact with evil in the form of racial prejudice, and the basic development of her character is governed by the question of whether she will emerge from that contact with her conscience and optimism intact or whether she will be bruised, hurt, or destroyed like Boo Radley and Tom Robinson. Thanks to Atticus's wisdom, Scout learns that though humanity has a great capacity for evil, it also has a great capacity for good, and that the evil can often be mitigated if one approaches others with an outlook of sympathy and understanding. When he agrees to defend Tom Robinson, a black man charged with raping a white woman, he exposes himself and his family to the anger of the white community. Arthur "Boo" Radley - A recluse who never sets foot outside his house, Boo dominates the imaginations of Jem, Scout, and Dill. He is a powerful symbol of goodness swathed in an initial shroud of creepiness, leaving little presents for Scout and Jem and emerging at an opportune moment to save the children. An intelligent child emotionally damaged by his cruel father, Boo provides an example of the threat that evil poses to innocence and goodness. He is one of the novel's "mockingbirds," a good person injured by the evil of mankind. Bob Ewell - A drunken, permanently unemployed member of Maycomb's poorest family. In his knowingly wrongful accusation that Tom Robinson raped his daughter, Ewell represents the dark side of the South: ignorance, poverty, squalor, and hate-filled racial prejudice. One of the book's important subthemes involves the threat that hatred, prejudice, and ignorance pose to the innocent: people such as Tom Robinson and Boo Radley are not prepared for the evil that they encounter, and, as a result, they are destroyed. The relatively well-off Finches stand near the top of Maycomb's social hierarchy, with most of the townspeople beneath them. Ignorant country farmers like the Cunninghams lie below the townspeople, and the white trash Ewells rest below the Cunninghams. But the black community in Maycomb, despite its abundance of admirable qualities, squats below even the Ewells, enabling Bob Ewell to make up for his own lack of importance by persecuting Tom Robinson. These rigid social divisions that make up so much of the adult world are revealed in the book to be both irrational and destructive. Mockingbird - The title of To Kill a Mockingbird has very little literal connection to the plot, but it carries a great deal of

The Orphan Characters of in Conrads Heart of Darkness Essay -- Heart o

The Orphan Characters of Heart of Darkness  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚      All Conrad's major characters are, in a fundamental sense, orphans. To men like Marlow, his parents offer him no predestined place in an ordered world, or, if such a place exists, they do not feel it is a real alternative for them. The knowledge of a hostile, annihilating force at the center of existence brings to Conrad's characters a constant sense of their personal vulnerability. Before this revelation, they were orphans in search of a ground for their lives, but they never doubted their ability to discover such a ground. For most of Conrad's characters, the experience of vulnerability marks the real beginning of their voyage. Conrad's novels are attempts to come to terms with this experience, to work out ways of living with or overcoming this knowledge, for only if some such way can be found can man ever attain a stable identity. Perhaps mind can confront the darkness directly and master it. Although this darkness is in its essence something alien to mind, if mind can asset its control over this force, if it can give it rational form and substance and thus fix the image of the "ombre sinistre et fuyante" the darkness will be robbed of its destructive potential. By assimilating its sources in this way, it might still be possible for man to achieve self, sufficiency. While he will not have found a father, found some source, which naturally confers its reality upon him, man will have made one. For most of Conrad's characters, the initial thrust of their attempt to assert sovereignty over the ground of their existence is directed toward its immediate source in the irrational. Ultimately, however, man's efforts to control the darkness must lead him beyond t... ...land; it is among the things they order better in France. Mr.Graham Greene, who has learned both from France and Conrad, has grasped this fact, and never proposes to make our flesh creep as Conrad and James in these stories do. Kurtz may be described as the logical consequence for any man of admitting a breach in those defenses that the guarding of personal integrity constantly requires. The line of human heads with which his station had been embellished only showed, Marlow reflects, "that there was something wanting in him- some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be bound". Or- as it is expressed elsewhere - "his nerves went wrong". There are several other tales of this period- notably Falk and The End of the Tether-, which turn upon this theme. And it makes, if with a somewhat less lurid coloring, the basis of Lord Jim (1900). (22)   

Essay --

Miner1 Shawna Pergeson Miss Miner English II 18 March 2014 Holocaust Experiments People all over the world go through a lot of hardship. Starvation, abuse, wars, bombing raids, genocide. People would suffer over the fallen economy. In Europe and even here in the United States, many people struggled to survive through the Holocaust Era. It’s weary out there. The people who had it the worse were the Polish, Russians, Gypsies, and especially the Holocaust victims; the Jewish Population. They were kicked out of their homes, shoved into cattle cars, killed, and made to work in a concentration camps and many other terrible things. The worst of all, they were experimented on. The following pages are going to tell you how the concentration camps were built, who ran the experiment camps. Also about the experiments and what the effects were. Shawna Pergeson Miner2 Miss Miner English II 18 March 2014 The medical experiments started in World War II. Buchenwald was one of the first camps built in the summer of 1937. The prisoners were made to carry very large rocks to build it during their â€Å"free time†. Prisoners were used for Virus Researches like Typhus and were infused with numerous types of pathogens to reveal the strengths of the vaccines. Usually killing the subjects, forced prisoners like the Jews and Gypsies were force to take part. The Buchenwald Camp was freed April 11, 1945. The day after that, President Franklin Roosevelt died. Soviets then used the camp as another concentration camp, not for civilians, but for their own enemies in Germany. The doctors during... ...ctors put in the tuberculosis bacteria in the prisoners at camp Neuengamme. Around two hundred adults died from this. They also cut off legs and shoulders from prisoners at Ravensbruck to attach them onto other subjects. This also included parts of bones, muscles, and nerves to analyze the healing process for the body parts. The result of the experiments were horrid pain, mutilation, disability, and death. Doctors of the Concentration Camps also experimented on birth effects. They meant to radiate and sterilize young men and study the changes in the reproduction organs. Women had substances unwillingly implanted their cervix or uterus which caused pain, bleeding, and spasms. Women were forced into artificial insemination. The subjects were told that they have monsters in their wombs and were cross bred from animals. This was probably the worse of the experiments.

Louis Armstrong Became One of the Most Influential & Musicians

When you think of Louis Armstrong you probably think of a jolly middle-aged man who can play the cornet like no one else, a man who had it all, a man who had the good life. Well, Louis was not always that lucky. From childhood to his adulthood, Louis Armstrong changed much as a person and a musician. He worked very hard to become what he became and did not let anything get in the way of becoming a musician. In this paper, you will read about how Louis Armstrong became one of the most influential Louis Armstrong†s childhood was not of the normal childhoods most of us have had. He had a very hard and painful childhood. He was treated very harshly by his family and the people around him. His mother did not even care enough to keep his birth certificate. That is why no one is really sure of Louis†s birthdate ,but people believe he was born around 1898, in New Orleans. Around Louis†s time of birth, many blacks were confined to live in the slums. The slums were in a way like ghettos. They were very poor, dirty areas where people who hadn†t much money would live. In the slums, there was much violence, drug circulation and prostitution. The only people that made any money in the slums were either the hustlers or the musicians. Considering Louis was not related to anyone of that status he and his family had very little money. That left Louis with no possessions whatsoever. He hadn†t any toys to play with, he didn†t even have a simple stick just to keep him occupied. His clothes were at the lowest of the low class. He was confined to wearing a dress as a younger child until he was a little older, then he had hand me down shirts and shorts to wear. His choice of foods was limited to rice and beans. His family did not make enough money to get better food than that. His family did not have enough of anything to keep him happy. He felt like nobody loved him. When he was born his father left his mother and him to start another life with another family. His mother always was out leaving Louis to fend for himself. But before Louis had lived with his mother he lived with his grandmother. His grandma took the best care of him out of anybody in his family. She always made sure that Louis was fed and that he was not alone. She was the only person that really loved him. She would always take him to church on Sundays which gave Louis his first singing experience. Louis loved his grandmother but, after seven years of living with her he moved 18 blocks away to live with his mother When he went to her house he found out that he had a new sister named Beatrice. She was nicknamed Mama Lucy. His mother would always be working long hours and drink in bars all night. That left Louis to take care of Mama Lucy and himself. Louis was luck enough to get work from a young white boy who helped him sell papers for pennies. He also sang in a street choir with some of his friends. As he got into his teen years he took up crapshooting. All of these odd jobs brought in enough money to feed Mama Lucy and himself. When working was not getting him anywhere he could always find a careless r drunk person stumbling in the streets who would drop his/her money. Also, when nothing was working at all he would occasionally steal some food from the local grocery stores. But still being just a boy he was not satisfied with the title of being the bearer of food for his family. He wanted to be and do so many things. He idolized hustlers and their easy lives. With a life like one of theirs, Louis could do more things with his life and still support his family. Also, Louis was starting to notice music. He always would admire the marching bands that would come booming down the streets and the blues that would ome blasting out of all the bars and â€Å"honky tonks†. Louis just wanted to be something more than he was. He was more into being a musician than being a hustler. That†s what he really wanted. So, on New Years Eve there was a big celebration. One kid picked up a gun with blanks and shot it at Louis. Louis then did the same to the kid but was caught in the act. Louis was put on a small trial in which the judge decided something that would start Louis off on his music career. Louis was sent to the Colored Waif†s Home for poor black boys which he spent most of his childhood. The home was run under military lines. A bugler would use his bugle to wake up the boys, tell them when it was time to eat, and send them to bed. Also, the boys would do intensive drills with fake guns. There were many chores that each boy had to do as well to learn responsibility. At first the home was very new to him. He was homesick for quite some time. After a while though, people started to enjoy Louis†s company and that made him feel more welcome. Once Louis got settled in, he noticed something that changed his life drastically. He found out that there was a band at the home. It was sort of a school band. They played some old tunes that had some blues influence to them. Louis liked this band a lot. He liked it so much that he would sit down at every band practice in hope that the band teacher ,Mr. Davis, would notice him and ask his to join the band. Finally a man that worked at the home named Captain Jones (he was called that because of the military ranking influence) got Louis involved with music. A woman named Mrs. Spriggins would come to the home now and then to conduct a boy†s choir. Jones put Louis in the choir. He did so well that at the next practice as Louis sat and watched that band, Mr. Davis walked ver and asked Louis to join the choir. Of course he said yes and was from then on a musician no matter how bad he was. Davis started Louis on the tambourine. Louis†s joy turned a little sour when he was presented with the instrument but, he knew that it was a custom among the New Orlean†s African Americans to start out with rhythm instruments such as the tambourine or the drums. It gets the musicians a feel for the beat they are to be playing so when they graduate to a more complicated instrument they will be able to keep an accurate beat throughout the whole song. So Louis swallowed his disappointment and layed his tambourine as best as possible. It was simple for Louis. he had been growing up listening to ragtime marches so keeping beat was natural to him. Not long after he started the tambourine Davis realized that Louis was ready to move a level up to the base drum. Louis played that with ease. He played it so well that not long after that he was moved up to mellophone or what we would today call an alto horn. This was an important switch for Louis. The alto horn is very much like the cornet he played later in his life. Now Louis was in a spot. Like most of the boys in the band he could not read music. This is where singing in the street choir comes in to play. Louis was able to work out the notes by just hearing them. Once he found the notes on the horn, it was easy to play. He was so good that he was moved up to the bugler. The bugle was much different. It helped him form notes by forming his lips around the mouthpiece a special way and using his tongue as well then by blowing into the bugle would create different notes. Soon Louis was moved to the cornet and became the head of the band. Louis was admired by the rest of the band not just for the music he played but for his humor as well. In the book the author writes that Davis † I remember Louis used to walk funny with his feet and at the first note of music he†d break into comedy dances. He could sing real well as a boy, too, even though his voice was coarse. I†d play the horn and he†d dance, and when I†d put my horn down he†d pick it up and start playing it. â€Å"(Collier, Page 32) One day as the band was marching in the streets ,with Louis leading, they headed down Louis†s old street. As Louis was playing some of the best music he had ever played at that time in his life all the people that knew him would point out their Little Louis. Louis felt o amazingly good. he was a musician, that was all he ever wanted to be. Louis was now around 16 years old. he had been living at the home for quite a few years. Sometimes his mother ,Mayann, would visit him. But one day Louis got a surpassing visit from someone he has not heard from since he was born. His own father, Willie Armstrong. Louis was curious why his father had come to see him. Willie wanted him out of the home. But why? Louis was pondering that thought for some time and came to the conclusion that Willie wanted him to babysit his two sons because Willie and his wife had to work to provide for their family. Louis did it anyway as soon as his father convinced the judge to set him free. Louis did a lot of work caring for the kids. He did it until finally, Willie†s wife was again pregnant. That left Willie no choice but to send Louis back to his mother. Mayann and Mama Lucy were glad to see him all grown up. Once Louis was back, it was back to the same old thing. But this time Louis had a new plan. He was going to become the musician he always wanted to be. Louis tried to become a big musician in the area of New Orleans he lived in. He wanted to be a person that people would always mention when they talked about music. To do that he tried to befriend some bigger musicians that could help him get gigs. So Louis would go to some of the â€Å"honk tonks† and listen to some music and get himself a 5 cent beer. He hung around there so much that he ended up meeting a drummer/hustler named Benny Williams. Benny would be conversing with another musician and Louis would stand there and wait to be noticed. When Benny finally did so they talked for a while. Finally Benny noticed this short teenager was hanging around him quite a lot. He liked this kid. So Benny Williams adopted Louis as one of his very good friends. Benny as a tough guy who no one messed with and when people found out he was watching out for Louis, nobody messed around with him. Louis was on easy street. Benny helped Louis become a better musician by letting Louis sit for Benny and play with the other musicians though he was not yet good enough. As Louis would sit in and play with the musicians he would get increasingly better. He was getting good enough to play in the â€Å"honky tonks†, and so he did. A while after Louis†s becoming a real musician, Benny was shot by his girlfriend. Louis would brag how Benny still lived a week with that old bullet n his heart, but that just is not possible. Louis was very sad but he got over it shortly. After the incident with Benny, Louis started being noticed musically. But Louis knew that he needed his own cornet by now. He could become even better if he could practice by himself more often. Louis has been borrowing other musicians instruments to play but he can†t take them home with him. So one day Louis met up with that white boy that had helped him sell papers as a child. This boy said that he would sell him a cornet for ten dollars. Louis bought the beat up old thing but made it play beautifully. After Louis ad acquired his own instrument, he was used as a substitute for other cornet players. But when Louis substituted for these musicians he really showed them up. He played so well that the manager finally told him that he was good enough to be a regular player which meant he could be a star attraction. The manager of the club arranged him to play in a band with a drummer named Garbee, and a pianist named Boogus. While Louis was playing in the band he started to get attached to another big musician. he was very well known throughout New Orleans. His name is Joe â€Å"King† Oliver. Oliver was the best cornetist in New Orleans. Louis got to know Oliver and his wife. Oliver would help Louis with cornet and Louis would often sit in for Oliver. Sometimes Oliver†s wife would invite Louis over to eat dinner with them. Finally Oliver got Louis on the right track. He recommended Louis to Kid Ory the best trombonist in New Orleans. Kid let Louis into his band. Louis did very well and Kid liked him a lot. Louis was proud to be in the best Jazz band in New Orleans. The band mostly played dances. As Louis played in a band he also worked on a coal cart to earn more money. By doing those jobs he was earning a higher income and could afford more food. So with the steady income and the great band Louis was pretty satisfied with himself. But one day the band had to break up. Kid†s doctor told him to move to dryer climates because of coughing spells. So Kid moved to Los Angeles, California. Louis just played parades and had some non-serious bands with his musician friends while Ory was gone. One dat Ory wrote to Louis asking him to move to L. A. with him. Considering Louis was scared of moving away from an area he already knows he said no. Louis then made himself even a better musician. Louis was asked by a man named Fate Marable to join a band on the Streckfus Line riverboat. Streckfus people were very strict with how they wanted the music to be played. The wanted perfect timing and a very clear sound. Louis was very worried because he could not read music. Luckily, two musicians named Joe Howard and David Jones helped Louis with his music reading abilities. Considering Louis did not play all year 'round, Marable asked him to and he said yes because he was now ready. When Louis played many enjoyed listening to him. One time a man named Fletcher Henderson asked him to tour with him. Louis would only say yes if they would take along his friend Arthur Singleton ,Zutty, a good drummer. They said that they could so Louis said the same and they went their separate ways for the time being. Finally Louis heard from Oliver. He was in Chicago and wanted Louis to come down a play in his band. Louis was ready to do so. He knew Oliver and felt comfortable around him so he did not feel alone. When Louis moved to Chicago, Oliver introduced him to a woman pianist named Lilian Hardin. At first she did not like Louis. She felt that he was a hick in a way because of his ratty old clothes and how he did not speak as proper as she did. But after a while she got to like Louis. They started dating a lot. Then on February 5, 1924 they were wed. Lil loved Louis very much and wanted only the best for him. She though ,and so did many other musicians, that Louis was too good for the band and should start his own. Louis did not want to do that because after all, Oliver had done so much for him. But it happened anyway. The band started to fall apart because not only of Oliver†s bossiness but also he was holding each of the member†s pay secretly so they all turned on him and just quit. After that was over Louis joined and band with band leader Ollie Powers. That and was moving slowly but the pace for Louis was just about to pick up. Fletcher Henderson ,who asked him to tour with him when he was playing on the riverboats, wrote him to come to New York. He wanted him to be in his Jazz orchestra. Louis said yes. While Louis was there he amazed them with his talents. He was and influence to many of them. One man would dress like him, talk like him and follow him around everywhere. He was now being considered the new king of Jazz. Louis was now asking Henderson if he could sing as well. Henderson was hesitant about it and would let him sing but not while hey record records. Louis then got a letter from Lil and she wanted him to come back to Chicago because she had arranged a band for him to lead. Louis thought it over and in October of 1925, Louis moved back to Chicago. His new band was great. Louis recorded with his band ,The Hot Fives, at OKeh records. Those were some of the most important records he ever made. Louis would also sing and entertain at the Sunset Theater on the side. And later ,after some changes in the line up, the final group of Hot Fives were without many of the originals such as Lil on the piano. You could now tell that their arriage was now in trouble because of that. By 1928 they divorced and Louis got Earl Hines to replace her on the piano. The problem with Jazz then was that it was closing down in Chicago so Louis moved to Manhattan in 1929. Now Louis was the best. Louis was now famous. He was the best cornetist in the world. He received an engraved watch that said so. But being famous was not all rewards. His introduction to the world of commercial music was very tough. There followed six years of desperate over work, nagging personal problems, appalling management and conflicts with Chicago nd New York gangs. Also, Louis was arrested and suspended for smoking pot, then he went right back to doing it. Another problem was still with Lil and the final relationship, but it all turned out that Lil and Louis stayed good friends. He also had a problem with dated all the way back to the Waif†s Home. He has been using the wrong part of his lip to play cornet. It has been getting callused and that limited his playing abilities. It even got worse when in 1931, Louis made a mistake in hiring a failed mobster with a drinking problem ,named Johnny Collins, as management. Collins saw Louis as a meal ticket. Collins cheated Louis out of a lot of money and as a result of Collins† gangland connections, Louis†s lucrative secrets became the subject of gang rivalry. But besides the gangs and personal problems, Louis was still trying to entertain the crowd. So Louis entered the movie business around the 1930†³s. He was seen dressed in a leopard†s skin in Rhapsody in Blue and was a band conductor in a later film known as Hello Dolly. Also, in a Betty Boop cartoon, Louis is seen conversing with Betty and then serenading her. He career in t he movie business was rapidly growing. Louis was starting to enter the final phases of his career. First of all, he was remarried to a girl named Alpha Smith. Alpha was very worried of what happened to Louis and Lil would happen to her, but it seemed to have not. But that was not the biggest issue going on in Louis†s life. The biggest started off in a 1946 movie called New Orleans. The movie had quite a line up of wonderful Jazz musicians. There was Kid Ory on trombone, Barney Bigard on clarinet, Zutty Singleton on drums, and the young Red Callendar on bass. This movie branched off a new band led by Louis called The All Stars. The All Stars were some of the guys from the movie and some old Hot Fives colleagues such as Earl Hines on Piano. Traditional Jazz was back in business for quite some time. This band was the most well known band of all that Louis was in. They had a succession of hits, but the most well known would have to be Blueberry Hill. Now Louis was finally up to the peak of his career. In 1952 he was voted the most important musical figure of all time in Downbeat Magazine. Louis was also starting to speak his mind. Louis†s fame made him more confident to speak out against one of his biggest problems. Louis was standing up against racism. Louis was protesting on Eisenhower†s policy on race as gutless. This angered many blacks who thought Louis should have stood up much earlier. Now Louis was trying to stay on top. Armstrong†s corncerts started to settle into a steady, routine of love songs and old favorites. Louis†s final phase of his career was getting nearer as the days passed. His health problems were getting worse as he ignored them which foreshadowed his final days on earth. He tried to ignore his heart problem for ten years. He was forced to acknowledge his precariousness f health when he had woke up one morning to discover that he had swollen up so much that he could not get his shoes on. Soon after that Louis was ordered to stay at the Beth Israel Hospital under doctor†s orders. After his final concert he returned there for the last time. He was planning another concert when he died July 6, 1971. Louis†s death was deeply saddening for everyone, but especially Lil. She conducted the band at his funeral in his memory. A memorial service followed which President Nixon attended and spoke at. That was the sad ending of Louis Armstrong. To conclude my paper I would like to highlight Louis†s life. He was just a poor child from New Orleans. He had very little education. He had to take care of his sister and himself 90% of the day until he was and adult. He had to work twice as hard as most people have to worked to get where he got to. He was just a simple man who from the beginning just wanted to play music. But he got so much more than just that and was able to fulfil his life to the fullest. Louis Armstrong will always be remembered as a wonderful man with a passion for playing the cornet beautifully. At least we have his music, movies and television appearances which keep him a live to this very day.