ABSTRACT
The author began his academic career forty years ago as a linguist studying the structure of language. At that time, thanks to the seminal work of Noam Chomsky, the fashionable thing to study was the basic design properties of language, the core grammatical properties that all human languages shared. The author had been "coerce" to work on literacy and was trying to get any help he could, he ended up meeting Sarah Michaels, then working at Harvard and now at Clark University. His colleague David Dickinson introduced him to Sarah. The author was confronted with the sharing-time data at the same time his Dean was pushing him to work on literacy. The author had been a product of Catholic schools. Modern social and digital media, young people are creating new styles of language by mixing and matching "natural language" with new symbols and new conventions. Leona uses poetic devices that are the hallmark of oral literature across the world.
