Author: Marina Salandy-Brown

The 2025 Carnival songs fill the airwaves right now. Generally, they focus on tempo more than rhythm, and much less on lyrics which are difficult to grasp without repeated listening. This is not a lament for the good old days, but the current style makes it hard to argue that our songwriting is poetic. Sparrow, […]

It has been a very strange start to 2025. Just six weeks in and we have been presented with a host of developments that confound our fragile understanding of how things are supposed to work – and that is leaving aside President Trump and his increasingly wild antics. Here in tiny TT there is much […]

An estimated half-million Palestinains who were temporarily displaced by the Gaza War began returning to north Gaza last Sunday as a result of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Their destination is a place of destruction – mountains and mountains of rubble and severely damaged buildings. The scenes of destruction resemble World War II. It […]

The widely reported state events in the US, so far, this year have provided perfect examples of the variety of human-linguistic interactions. Phatic communion is a good place to start. Phatic communion is how we communicate and interact with one another in social situations or upon encountering strangers. The term was coined by the anthropologist […]

It may be January 12, but there’s no harm in making or renewing a wish for this bold new year we are embarking upon –not an empty wish such as “I wish I’d been born on Mars,” which is a hopeless wish. The act of wishing may appear flaky, but it is an expression of […]