Had a 40th birthday! It's completely just another day. It feels different, but not much and most noticeably when filling out forms - I now might find myself in the 40-49 bracket rather than the 30-39 ... Sad face.
I noticed recently that Max sometimes says the words "sad face" after a sentence. I asked him about it and he says it's a sort of verbal version of the emoticon representing sadness. It's a complex linguistic form that I'm not sure has been written about very much. If I have time I should investigate, but the essence of it is that its a deliberate transferral of the same meaning from text to spoken word. Language often works the other way around, but it seems unusual in this order.
The way it's used is definitely humourously, similar to the emoticon in text, but there's an underlying realisation that it has some deeper meaning and I think the fact that the verbal manifestation has more intrinsic meaning is very interesting to me (but not surprising when I consider it).
I hope to come back to this theme: language evolution. It's fascinating to me how language changes and I'm listening intently to my boys to see what they'll come up with next. I'm definitely not one of those morons who thinks that language needs to be fixed (it never is!) and that grammar, syntax or spellings etc are even remotely important. Cognition is where it's at, baby! The revolution in the next 100 years will be cognitive and language will be shown up for it's shallowness. The link between cognition and language is little known to individuals - mostly because we happen to be innately shielded from it!
