Professional football players, too, are selected for gameness. When Kyle Turley was knocked unconscious, in that game against the Packers, he returned to practice four days later because, he said, “I didn’t want to miss a game.

N.F.L. veteran, when you bring in his college and high-school playing days, could well have been hit in the head eighteen thousand times: that’s thousands of jarring blows that shake the brain from front to back and side to side,

But a football player’s real issue isn’t simply with repetitive concussive trauma. It is, as the concussion specialist Robert Cantu argues, with repetitive subconcussive trauma. It’s not just the handful of big hits that matter. It’s lots of little hits, too.

it was that it came after the 76-g blow in warmup, which, in turn, followed the concussion in August, which was itself the consequence of the thirty prior hits that day, and the hits the day before that, and the day before that, and on and on, perhaps back to his high-school playing days.

no one has died in Nascar’s three national racing series. Stock-car fans are sometimes caricatured as bloodthirsty, eagerly awaiting the next spectacular crash. But there is little blood these days in Nascar crashes

It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.

This was a teen-ager, and already his brain showed the kind of decay that is usually associated with old age. “This is completely inappropriate,” she said. “You don’t see tau like this in an eighteen-year-old. You don’t see tau like this in a fifty-year-old.”

Of those players who were older than fifty, 6.1 per cent reported that they had received a diagnosis of “dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or other memory-related disease.” That’s five times higher than the national average for that age group. For players between the ages of thirty and forty-nine, the reported rate was nineteen times the national average. (The N.F.L. has distributed five million dollars to former players with dementia.)

everything seemed entirely normal until you looked under the microscope and saw the brown ribbons of tau

If he hadn’t had the accident, he would almost certainly have ended up in a dementia ward.

are actually victims of preventable brain trauma?

called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.), which is a progressive neurological disorder found in people who have suffered some kind of brain trauma. C.T.E. has many of the same manifestations as Alzheimer’s: it begins with behavioral and personality changes

“I reached out to an awful lot of people to get their views—not only on what was right for the young man but also what was right for our society and the N.F.L.”

Vick was suspended from football. He was sentenced to twenty-three months in prison.

There is no middle ground. If you are hurt, you can play. If you are injured, you can’t, and the line is whether you can walk and if you can put on a helmet and pads.”

“They cleared me for practice that Thursday. I probably shouldn’t have. I don’t know what damage I did from that, because my head was really hurting

But their real problem was with their heads, the one part of their body that got hit over and over again.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.

If two black people, at that bitter hour of the world's history, had been able to speak to each other, the institution of chattel slavery could never have lasted as long as it did. Subsequently, the slave was given, under the eye, and the gun, of his master, Congo Square, and the Bible--or in other words, and under these conditions, the slave began the formation of the black church, and it is within this unprecedented tabernacle that black English began to be formed.

going

Jazz, for example, is a very specific sexual term, as in jazz me, baby, but white people purified it into the Jazz Age. Sock it to me, which means, roughly, the same thing, has been adopted by Nathaniel Hawthorne's descendants with no qualms or hesitations at all, along with let it all hang out and right on! Beat to his socks which was once the black's most total and despairing image of poverty, was transformed into a thing called the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely, composed of uptight, middle- class white people, imitating poverty, trying to get down, to get with it, doing their thing, doing their despairing best to be funky, which we, the blacks, never dreamed of doing--we were funky, baby, like funkwas going out of style.

It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity.

the same things: They each have very different realities to articulate, or control.

Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other--and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him.

That is, here in 2010. I love French and I’ve read Stendhal. But last time I checked, some interesting things had been written in Arabic, too.

This will occasion an ever greater need for Chinese speakers for business purposes. The Chinese are also avidly interested in learning English, which will make teaching English in China as common a goal for young people as being an au pair girl in France used to be. China is happening, in a way that Italy is not.

you can be richly immersed in that via solid English translations; Nietzsche need not be read in the original

The advanced study of the languages, literatures, and cultures of the French-, Italian-, and Russian-speaking world are essential components of a liberal arts education in a university setting.”

Isn’t the sense of French as a keystone of an education a legacy of

I have as deep-seated a sense as anyone that an educated person is supposed to be able to at least fake a conversation in French.

there was a moment when the living language – which I'd heard spoken around me when I was growing up – suddenly revealed itself to me,

I speak French with my sons, unless my Korean wife is there, in which case we'll use English. If we don't want the kids to understand everything we're saying, we use Korean.

I'm increasingly drawn to dead and endangered languages, and want to set up a polyglot academy where people with similar interests to mine can flourish.

it makes me more confident. If I were kidnapped tomorrow and dropped in an unknown region, I think there are only a few very remote areas I'd struggle to make myself understood.

But to have the language come alive you have to speak it, to live it. Now, I find when I'm immersed in a language, I have another, more garrulous persona.

The more of them you know, the more you see how inter-related they are.

never studied Swedish, but when I heard it spoken around me, it seemed to combine elements of languages I was familiar with. All it took was three weeks and I was able to hold my own in complex conversations.

loving many German writers in translation, I wanted to read them in their native tongue, and that's been my main motivation for learning new ones since.