Is it just me, or have the talks at GC so far been really generic and forgettable? Maybe it's because I'm just reading the talk summaries on lds.org and not actually listening (which I can't bring myself to do), but it doesn't seem like there's any major policy change or any major shaming (like we could always count on Boyd K Packer to do). Other than that incredibly awkward misuse of a Star Wars quote, it doesn't seem like there's much there even for TBMs to talk about.

With that said, the talk that has bothered me the most so far has been Valeri V. Cordon's "The Language of the Gospel," where he tries to compare language preservation to preserving the Gospel. Since my background is in linguistics, it somewhat intrigued me, but since his background clearly isn't, I feel like he really missed the mark. He made the observation that it's not enough to merely speak the language in the home, but it must explicitly be taught. The thing with first language acquisition is, however, that speaking the language is actually all that matters. In fact, you can't really explicitly teach the language to child. For example, children acquire grammatical elements in a language in a fixed, universal order. No matter how much you try and teach a child to say "went" instead of "goed," if they are not at that stage in their acquisition, they will not make the change.

My guess would be though that he had the mostly unrelatable experience of moving away from Guatemala with his family to another country where they speak English and then struggling to have his kids still speak Spanish. The closest parallels I can think of would be Native American languages, or perhaps Irish. In this metaphor, these languages are the church and English is the "world." I know in Ireland that they force everyone to learn Irish in school, but for the most part very few people come out actually speaking the language when they graduate. Teaching is not enough; you learn a language when it actually has a use in your life. I think there is actually a nice parallel there of parents who love TSCC struggling to get their kids to care. That should have been the question he addressed: how do we get the next generation to care about the church? It's a much harder question to answer. Instead he went off on making sure families keep the Sabbath and avoid pornography, you know, forcing church upon families. But that doesn't lead to full-tithe payers with unwavering belief any more than forcing people to learn a language they don't care about leads to fluent speakers.

TSCC has very few helpful answers to the problems people face (Health problems? Live the Word of Wisdom! Financial problems? Give us 10% of your money!). It seems like they don't have any real answers to their own problems either (Can't get young people to care about the church? Force it on them!).

I agree. All of the talks have been pretty generic and forgettable. I was with my TBM family last night after PH session. They usually talk about their favorite talks, etc... None of them could even come up with anything memorable besides some 70 that told a bunch of jokes. That, and that Monson had subtitles up and looked like crap. TBM family member said, "Just let him die and be with his wife!"

My cousin Vinny would be proud.

Although I'll throw out there that when they finally let a woman speak, she seemed to address exactly what I was talking about (Joy D. Jones' "A Sin Resistant Generation).

You would have thought that one of them would have mentioned that the turd stains aren't going away until the members work harder when scrubbing toilets. A missed opportunity on the part of the Q15.

They could have done double duty with that one. Get it? I digress?

Seriously though, something like this, "My wife and I were visiting the primary near our Pleasant Grove home. The spirit that day was sweet and strong when I suddenly felt strong urges come upon me to use the restroom with every fiber of my being. As I opened the door to the bathroom stall, however, I was devastated to see that there were still dark and undelightsome poop stains on the otherwise pure and white porcelain. I was immediately reminded of the time my wife and I had spent serving in Western African. Though the members homes there were humble and poor, whenever we went to the local meetinghouse, their toilets were the cleanest and purest in all of Zion. These poor African Saints reminded me that, the Savior, thy Son, even Jesus Christ, is the master toilet cleaner, whose example we all must learn to follow."