Last semester I spent a few months torn between a psychology minor and a linguistics minor. The study of brains and the study of languages. They both sound pretty cool, right? I ended up declaring a minor in linguistics after taking the intro class. This semester, I’m taking two very technical linguistics classes. I’m also in a psycholinguistics class, which, you guessed it, combines psychology and linguistics to study how the brain acquires language. All three of these classes are super exciting and I enjoy them to no end, but I’ll be the first to admit that I was totally unprepared for the sheer amount of new data and ideas that I’d have to be stuffing my head with each week. And there have been countless days this semester when I’ve found myself face-to-face with charts detailing every linguistic feature of every consonant sound possible in every spoken language in the world and wondered, “Who on earth thought writing all this down would be a good use of their time?” Then I remember: “Wait, I’m the one who thought studying it would be a good use of my own time.”
I’m a junior in college. I’ve spent a good portion of my life studying things. Many of those things have seemed completely pointless to me (shout out to chemistry and precalc), and I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who think the things I enjoy are completely pointless (who cares about the difference between front and back vowels?). Maybe these things are pointless. I know my chemistry final was the last time I’ll ever use Avogadro’s number for anything. I also know that most people who plan on using that number throughout their careers will never need to know how to tell a voiceless alveolar stop from a voiced bilabial stop. In fact, I will probably never need that information for anything myself. But I still think it’s fascinating. I love the fact that the study of morphology and phonology is actually a little bit like the chemistry of language—breaking words down into smaller units of meaning, and breaking those units of meaning down into even smaller units of sound. I want to understand the rules that we unconsciously follow. Did you know that English tends to turns two-syllable words from nouns to verbs by switching the emphasis from the first to second syllable? No. You didn’t. But you do it all the time anyways. PREsent, preSENT. I think that’s the coolest thing ever. You disagree. That’s okay.
The point of all this rambling: you may think that what you love is useless. Give it your time anyway. So what if it won’t make you a millionaire? I may not have survived two whole decades yet, but I can already tell you that I’d rather live in a studio apartment crammed with paper and ink and words than a five-bedroom house with wood floors that I leave every morning for a job in accounting. Study that thing no one else has ever thought worth studying. You’ll be happy. That’s important.
P.S. Remember the voiceless alveolar stop? That's the letter t.
