S. Worthen | Weblog

When I was a teenager, my local SF bookstore introduced me to Native Tongue, a novel about a futuristic America where women no longer have emancipation and communication with aliens is part of the daily job of the linguists' households. Some of the "quotations" preceding the chapters were made up of some of the most tasteful filk I have ever had the pleasure to read. I read the rest of the trilogy, and then, language junkie that I was at the time, ordered the companion volume to Láadan, the constructed language which the linguist women within the book had designed for private communication, and which the author, a linguist herself, had worked out in great detail. The book took a year to arrive, but I treasured it. I wasn't fan enough to learn the language, however.

Suzette Hadin Elgin wrote those books, along with her series of language-use books which began with The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense. I spent a good while at Jason Taniguchi's house last year discussing the series with him, since the various volumes of it littered his architecturally-balanced barricades of books.

All of this is just to tell you that Suzette Hadin Elgin now has a weblog: ozarque.