1. Mother Tongue
	2. And the Orchestra Played On
	3. The Trouble with Online Education
	4. William the Silent
	5. Don Quixote and the Lion
	6. Florence Nightingale—the World’s Greatest Nurse
	7. Education Is Supposed to Make You Rich,Nnot Wealthy
	8. Polaroid
	9. Childhood
	10. The “Busy” Trap
	11. Checkouts
	12. Two Ways of Seeing a River
	13. On Being 17, Bright, and Unable to Read
	14. Ronny’s Book
	15. After Twenty Years
	16. Traveling with a Beaver
	17. Swipe, Pinch and Zoom to the Courtroom
	18. Sweet Rituals
	19. The Trail of the Sandhill Stag
	20. John Glenn and His Day in Space
	21. The Sniper
	22. Hunger
	23. Invented Words
	24. The Education of Harry Gold
	25. The Surprise of His Life
	26. The Pedestrian
	27. Sportswriting
	28. The Luncheon
	29. Boys and Girls(1) 
	30. Boys and Girls (2)
	31. Boys and Girls (3)
	32. Boys and Girls (4)
	33. The Piracy of Privacy: Why Marketers Must Bare Our Souls
	34. Run, Boy, Run! (1)
	35. Run, Boy, Run! (2)
	36. Child Pioneer
	37. The Story of an Hour
	38. Two Ways to Belong in America
	39. “I Just Wanna Be Average”
	40. Doubts about Doublespeak
	41. Hands
	42. Ice Cover Affects Lake Levels in Surprising Ways
	43. Marked Women, Unmarked Men
	44. Momma, the Dentist, and Me
	45. What Was the Greatest Speech
	46. The Liberty Ship
	47. The Satellite Space Station.
	48. Admiral Byrd at the Sixth Continent
	49. They Called It the Associated Press
	50. In Defense of Dangerous Ideas
	Keys
	
 
	  I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinion on the English language and its variations in this country or others.
	  I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language.I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language—the way it can bring to mind an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all—all the Englishes I grew up with.
	  Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book. The Joy Luck Club, the talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a long speech using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, “The intersection of memory upon imagination” and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-andthus”—a speech filled with carefully made grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized ③ forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.
	  ……