In 1988 I came back to the USA from Korea, eager to start on an ESL teaching career but at the same time still considering some of the things I'd seen in Korea. For example, once in the monsoon season, I'd seen three girls and three violins, all under one umprella, all staying dry. How can they work together so closely? I thought - American girls or boys could never do that... I was amazed by a country where people walked on the left side of the sidewalk, but drove on the right side of the road. Was there some kind of reason for this? Or for what we do?

Similarly, the language amazed me. It wasn't that they had no subjects or verbs, they did. It was more that they didn't matter much of the time, they were thrown in as an afterthought or left out altogether. All that stuff in graduate school about SVO or SOV languages was based on the apparently Eurocentric idea that subjects, verbs objects were the basic building blocks of sentences in languages the world around, when in Korea, apparently, you made sentences by ecpressing a topic (In my case...), some other words (interesting experience...) that may or may not be object, verb or anything else, and finally (it is) thrown in accidentally as if almost an afterthought. That last part being da, you'd hear it at the end of so many sentences that Americans learning Korean would use mixed phrases like No Biggie-da kind of making fun of it, yet my point is, if it was the basic building block of sentences as subject and verb are here, you'd never know it from the way they made sentences.

So back to 1988. I was driving on Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, coming in from Evanston; the morning sun came up behind the buildings on my right, the light shimmering off the lake on the left. Seven lanes of Lakeshore Drive are all going seventy, bumper to bumper, fifteen mph over the speed limit. At the same time I'm terrified of using the brake and causing an accident for miles back, or going too fast, having cars accordion up in front of me. It's a delicate dance - staying seventy, staying reasonably close to another car going seventy, taking occasional glances at the Gold Coast or the Lake.

This is literally how I got my inspiration for "language is a self-organized system." These drivers were operating in tandem with the others, attention on the others, acting as a coordinated system for their own benefit.

Two minor problems: This probably actually happened in 1994, six years later, after I'd already. taught in Kansas for six years. I'll reconcile it. Perhaps it won't matter as I write the book.

Second, I probably shouldn't get into sentence analysis in the first page. I mean, what reader actually wants to go back and analyse. them? None. Space out the introduction of Korean sentneces.

Thank you foor listening. My new book Vowels in an Elevator, will be out shortly I hope.