Heh

In true pop-up art fashion, the 7-foot-tall monolith made of tasty and aromatic gingerbread mysteriously appeared in San Francisco and then – perhaps unsurprisingly – collapsed the next day.

The tower, held together by icing and decorated with a few gumdrops, delighted the city on Friday when word spread about its existence.

People trekked to Corona Heights park throughout the day, even as light rain fell on the ephemeral, edible art object. In one video posted online, someone took a bite of the gingerbread.

Phil Ginsburg, head of city’s Recreation and Parks Department, told KQED the site “looks like a great spot to get baked” and confirmed his staff will not remove the monument “until the cookie crumbles”.

I love this stuff.

But if you approach the village’s central cafe, you’ll hear a rather unusual sound. It’s the buzz of conversations among elders in a 3,000-year-old language called Tsakonika.

The speakers are the linguistic descendants of ancient Sparta, the iconic Greek city-state, and part of a rich cultural heritage and population called Tsakonian.

Thomais Kounia, known as the “empress of Tsakonika” for her mastery of the language, tells her friend about the bread she baked that morning, but my Greek translator cannot understand her. Instead, Kounia translates for him in Greek, and he then tells me, like a game of Chinese whispers. I am in awe. These ladies are some of the last fluent speakers of one of the world’s oldest living languages

Today, only about 2,000 of the 10,000 Tsakonians, primarily elders, still speak Tsakonika at all, and the language is limited to 13 towns, villages and hamlets located around Pera Melana. While Greek is the region’s official language, Tsakonika is often spoken at home and casually in public here. Yet, its future remains uncertain.

This is insane.

A young mother says she and her husband were kicked off a United Airlines flight because their two-year-old daughter refused to wear a mask.

Eliz Orban was in tears during a video she shared Friday on Instagram showing herself in the airport along with her husband and daughter, Edeline, after getting off the plane.

‘We just got kicked off a flight because our two-year-old would not put on a mask,’ Orban, who was flying with her family from Colorado to Newark, New Jersey, said.

[…]

In the clip, the agent is heard telling the couple that their luggage, including their daughter’s car seat, would remain on the plane and head to their final destination.

‘Our child seat is on that plane. How are we supposed to go home?’ Orban is heard asking.

I have mixed feeling about this.

Workplace harmony, culture and productivity all depend on successful communication. And while language gaps between senior leadership and newer hires aren’t unusual, they’re usually bridged by a shared lexicon of ‘business speak‘. But now, the first generation of true digital natives is entering the workforce, and a pandemic has forced us into virtual offices. Workplace communication is undergoing a major shift, with some huge potential pitfalls.

[…]

The move to remote work in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic means younger generations, who are digitally fluent, suddenly have far more influence over communication and culture. It goes beyond slang and internet-speak abbreviations. Gen Z, used to informal, near-constant contact, spurns the prim email in favour of a quick Slack message. But that can be a tough pill to swallow for older generations, who are accustomed to dictating the professional rules of communication.

Kovary points to a former client: a company who came to her for advice after a run-in with a young intern. “On the first day, she emailed the CEO because she couldn’t find access to information she wanted. At the end of week one, she sent a company-wide email, to 8,000 people, with all her ideas. They called me and said, ‘obviously, we let her go’.”

Kovary explains that while the company’s leadership felt the intern “totally violated the unspoken rules of the communication chain”, what really happened was a generation-gap issue. “Most companies don’t want a new hire to email the CEO directly, even if that CEO has said, ‘I’m always available!’ They don’t really mean it, but the new hires don’t understand. I tell executives all the time, don’t tell young people ‘message me with your ideas’, and then be surprised when you get them.”

Stillman says Gen Z values authenticity above all else. It’s why younger employees are less willing to do the same ‘code-switching’ that past generations have. Forced assimilation to a shared lexicon isn’t sustainable anymore, says Nicky Thompson, a London-based business psychologist with a background in linguistics. Code-switching can be especially harmful for people of colour; research shows it can hinder performance and increase burnout. And Gen Z won’t put up with it.

Language and communication evolves and that’s great. What I struggle with is the hubris infused in this article. The underlying assumption is that business needs to adopt the communication norms of Gen Z. Maybe some of them, but the purpose of communication is to… you know… communicate. The purpose is to convey a thought, directive, or query to someone else. Every good communicator must think about their audience and be willing to craft their communication in a way to effectively send the intended message. I would suggest that it is just as important for Gen Z to think about how to appropriately communicate to other generations as it is for the rest of us to figure out how to communicate with them.

Awesome.

It was just a normal start to the game between the Waverly High Tigers and the Portsmouth West High Senators in West Portsmouth, Ohio. Both teams were lined up and the game announcer directed everyone to stand for the National Anthem, but something went wrong. Instead of music, all you hear is silence during a livestream of the game.

The sound system was experiencing some technical difficulties and after several awkward minutes, a man’s voice begins singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

One of the Waverly parents, Trenton Brown, decided to sing the anthem to get the game going after some encouragement from his wife.

“I looked over at the announcer and the music didn’t play and didn’t play and I looked over and he was getting a little frustrated. My wife gave me a little nudge and said “Sing” and I said, “All right,'” Brown told CNN.

Although Brown said he has been singing and playing music most of his life, he had never performed the National Anthem solo.

“There was a lot of awkward silence … and then I started singing and that was it,” he said.

When he finished, he said he sat down and started his eating popcorn and drinking his Mountain Dew.