Saturday, July 23, 2011
Lolita
Ahhh, Lolita. By Nabokov, of course. I am reading a series of essays by Stephen Jay Gould and one essay was about Nabokov. Gould talked up Nabokov's style of writing so much that I just had to grab it off the shelf. I read it in about a day. It wasn't exactly what I expected, but I must admit that is writing style is quite good. I must also admit I had to go get my dictionary of the shelf (for both Gould and Nabokov) but after a while, I just gave up and read through the words I didn't know. Nabokov also has a lot of French in the novel, too. And not the type that is commonly known or easily guessed at. I found that frustrating. As a global person, I got the big picture, and I love his quirky, sarcastic way of saying things, but meaning the opposite. Sorry, no passages to quote; the reader will just have to read on their own and either enjoy it or not. Quite the racy subject matter.
Friday, July 22, 2011
Lord of the Flies
by William Golding. Of course, I read this in high school, but just like 1984 I probably had no appreciation for it. I read it in an afternoon. I've been in a dystopian mood lately, so this goes along with that. I marked just a few passages:
The first time they go hunting: "He raised his arm in the air. There came a pause...The pause was only long enough for them to understand what an enormity the downward stroke would be...[he paused] because the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood."
Roger sneaks up on Henry and starts to throw stones: "The stone bounced five yards to Henry's right and fell in the water. roger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them. Yet there was a space round Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he dare not throw. Here, invisible, yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger's arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins."
In the afterward, Golding discusses his novel: "The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable."
I agree with Golding's views. The young boys follow Jack, even when he resorts to theft and murder. Just a few of them hold out and fight what they know is wrong. I see this in real life - people blindly follow religious and political ideologies, finding comfort in their numbers, and are unwilling to fight when their group does things that as individuals they would not do.
I also read a fiction book called "While England Sleeps" by David Leavitt. Interesting book, written as a memoir of someone looking back on a time years later. It is about class and sexuality issues in the years leading up to WWII in England.
The first time they go hunting: "He raised his arm in the air. There came a pause...The pause was only long enough for them to understand what an enormity the downward stroke would be...[he paused] because the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood."
Roger sneaks up on Henry and starts to throw stones: "The stone bounced five yards to Henry's right and fell in the water. roger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them. Yet there was a space round Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he dare not throw. Here, invisible, yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger's arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins."
In the afterward, Golding discusses his novel: "The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable."
I agree with Golding's views. The young boys follow Jack, even when he resorts to theft and murder. Just a few of them hold out and fight what they know is wrong. I see this in real life - people blindly follow religious and political ideologies, finding comfort in their numbers, and are unwilling to fight when their group does things that as individuals they would not do.
I also read a fiction book called "While England Sleeps" by David Leavitt. Interesting book, written as a memoir of someone looking back on a time years later. It is about class and sexuality issues in the years leading up to WWII in England.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Henry VIII
by Alison Weir. An amazing book - not romantacized, but packed full of facts - a little tedious at times even. But what I got from it was that Henry the VIII was an amazing king - he encouraged arts and learning, and raised people by merit. The story of his six wives, his court and the politics of the European world of the time is amazing. For an accurate historical account, this is a good book.
Another book I recently read was Global Climate Change: The Book of Essential Knowledge by Ernest Zebrowski Ph.D. I got this book as an 'Early Reviewer' on Librarything.com. Every month we can put in to request books, most are just coming out and you get a free copy if you win the request lottery. Anyway. This was my first book through that. Here is a copy of the review I posted on Librarything:
'I was discussing some scientific fact I learned from this book with someone and they asked me, "how do they know?" That is exactly what this book is so great at explaining. In an easy to understand (my science ed. consists of one biology and one geology class in college) and non-partisan (he keeps politics confined to the last chapter) way, Zebrowski helped me to understand the science behind what scientists already know about global climate change and why they have such a hard time predicting the exact future. Are you a citizen of planet earth? Then you should read this book'
Another book I recently read was Global Climate Change: The Book of Essential Knowledge by Ernest Zebrowski Ph.D. I got this book as an 'Early Reviewer' on Librarything.com. Every month we can put in to request books, most are just coming out and you get a free copy if you win the request lottery. Anyway. This was my first book through that. Here is a copy of the review I posted on Librarything:
'I was discussing some scientific fact I learned from this book with someone and they asked me, "how do they know?" That is exactly what this book is so great at explaining. In an easy to understand (my science ed. consists of one biology and one geology class in college) and non-partisan (he keeps politics confined to the last chapter) way, Zebrowski helped me to understand the science behind what scientists already know about global climate change and why they have such a hard time predicting the exact future. Are you a citizen of planet earth? Then you should read this book'
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury. An excellent classic that I finally read after it kept coming up in conversations. It's been a dystopian year for me since I have read 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, The Giver, and a few others that shout out warnings of how things might be if we're not careful.
I did mark a few passages, mostly for his unique descriptive metaphors and twisted logic.
Clarisse - on why she doesn't go to school - "I'm antisocial they say...I'm very social indeed, it all depends on what you mean by social. Social to me means...talking about how strange the world is...but I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk."
One night at work Montag is horrified when the owner of the books they are meant to burn is still at the residence and refuses to leave. "Always before it had been like snuffing a candle. The police went first and adhesive taped the victim's mouth and bandaged him off into their glittering beetle cars, so when you arrived you found an empty house. You weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only things! And since things couldn't really be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don't scream or whimper, as this woman might begin to scream and cry out, there was nothing to tease your conscience later. You were simply cleaning up. Janitorial work, essentially. Eveything to its proper place. Quick with the kerosene! Who's got a match!"
Later, discussing the incident with his wife, Millie, she says, "She's nothing to me; she shouldn't have had books. It was her responsibility, she should've thought of that. I hate her. She's got you going and next thing you know we'll be out, no house, no job, nothing." "You weren't there, you didn't see," He said. "There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."
"Let me alone,"said Mildred. "I didn't do anything."
"Let you alone!...we need not be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while."
"We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, like the constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy." (Beatty)
"Heredity and Environment are funny things. You can't rid yourself of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot of what you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle." (Beatty)
"If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such as thing as war...Give the people contests they win by remembering words to popular songs or the names of state capitals...cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damn full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. then they'll feel they're thinking." (Beatty)
"I don't talk things, sir, " said Faber. "I talk the meanings of things. I sit here and know I'm alive."
"He could hear Beatty's voice. 'Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page from the second, and so on, chain smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and timeworn philosophies."
"The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great tonload of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass. The people were pounded into submission; they did not run, there was no place to run."
"Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself." (Faber)
"Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us." (Faber)
"[Books] have quality...texture, pores...telling detail, fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre one run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies...People need leisure time to think...You can't argue with a four wall tv. Why? The tv is 'real.' It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and it blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest."
"My wife says books aren't 'real.'"
"Thank God for that. You can shut them out, say 'hold on a moment.' You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a tv parlor?. It grows you any shape it wishes!"
"Those who don't build, must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents." (Faber)
"Well," said Beatty, "the crisis is past and all is well, the sheep returns to the fold. We're all sheep who have strayed at times."
"But remember, the captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all ahve our harps to play. It's up to you to know with which ear you'll listen."
"All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there."
"You can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened, and why the world blew up under them."
"'I hate a Roman named Status Quo!' he said to me. 'Stuff your eye with wonder, ' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in 10 seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping it's life away"
I did mark a few passages, mostly for his unique descriptive metaphors and twisted logic.
Clarisse - on why she doesn't go to school - "I'm antisocial they say...I'm very social indeed, it all depends on what you mean by social. Social to me means...talking about how strange the world is...but I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk."
One night at work Montag is horrified when the owner of the books they are meant to burn is still at the residence and refuses to leave. "Always before it had been like snuffing a candle. The police went first and adhesive taped the victim's mouth and bandaged him off into their glittering beetle cars, so when you arrived you found an empty house. You weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only things! And since things couldn't really be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don't scream or whimper, as this woman might begin to scream and cry out, there was nothing to tease your conscience later. You were simply cleaning up. Janitorial work, essentially. Eveything to its proper place. Quick with the kerosene! Who's got a match!"
Later, discussing the incident with his wife, Millie, she says, "She's nothing to me; she shouldn't have had books. It was her responsibility, she should've thought of that. I hate her. She's got you going and next thing you know we'll be out, no house, no job, nothing." "You weren't there, you didn't see," He said. "There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."
"Let me alone,"said Mildred. "I didn't do anything."
"Let you alone!...we need not be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while."
"We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, like the constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy." (Beatty)
"Heredity and Environment are funny things. You can't rid yourself of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot of what you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle." (Beatty)
"If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such as thing as war...Give the people contests they win by remembering words to popular songs or the names of state capitals...cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damn full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. then they'll feel they're thinking." (Beatty)
"I don't talk things, sir, " said Faber. "I talk the meanings of things. I sit here and know I'm alive."
"He could hear Beatty's voice. 'Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page from the second, and so on, chain smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and timeworn philosophies."
"The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great tonload of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass. The people were pounded into submission; they did not run, there was no place to run."
"Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself." (Faber)
"Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us." (Faber)
"[Books] have quality...texture, pores...telling detail, fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre one run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies...People need leisure time to think...You can't argue with a four wall tv. Why? The tv is 'real.' It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and it blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest."
"My wife says books aren't 'real.'"
"Thank God for that. You can shut them out, say 'hold on a moment.' You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a tv parlor?. It grows you any shape it wishes!"
"Those who don't build, must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents." (Faber)
"Well," said Beatty, "the crisis is past and all is well, the sheep returns to the fold. We're all sheep who have strayed at times."
"But remember, the captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all ahve our harps to play. It's up to you to know with which ear you'll listen."
"All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there."
"You can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened, and why the world blew up under them."
"'I hate a Roman named Status Quo!' he said to me. 'Stuff your eye with wonder, ' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in 10 seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping it's life away"
The Wal-Mart Effect
by Charles Fishman. This was a very interesting read. One of those books that should be required reading for every American, whether they shop at Wal-mart or not, because it really lays out how Walmart's business practices affect us all. I marked quite a few passages, but the whole story is really only understood in the book with examples and in the order he constructs things.
'At the end of 1990, WM hadjust nine supercenters (where they sell groceries). Ten years later, at the end of 2000, they had 888 supercenters - an average of 7 supercenters a month for 120 months in a row - and WM was the number-one food retailer in the US...In that same decade, 31 supermarket chains have sought bankruptcy protection; 27 of them site competition from WM as a factor.'
'WM isn't just a store, it shapes where we shop, the products we buy, and the prices we pay - even for people who never shop there. It reaches deep inside the operations of the companies that supply it and changes not only what they sell, but also changes how those products are packaged and presented, what the lives of the factory workers who make the products are like- it even sometimes changes the country where the factories are located.'
'WM has changed the way we think about ourselves as shoppers and consumers. It has changed our sense of quality, our sense of what a good deal is. WM's low prices routinely reset our expectations about what things should cost. WM has changed the lens through which we see the world.'
'"The Wal-Mart economy" describes the nagging sense that there might be some unseen but terrible cost to be paid for "always low prices." The WM economy is a place where the jobs are traps: low wages, miserly benefits, stultifying work, no respect, no future. In the WM economy, we as consumers often buy too much because it's cheap. We are slaves to our impulse for a bargain.'
'The most potent, least public least well-understood power of the WM effect: the impact WM has in shaping the operations, the choices, the product mix of it's suppliers. Many suppliers hesitate to talk to WM about price increases, even when completely justified.'
'"Every time you see the WM smiley-face, whistling and knocking down the prices, somewhere there's a factory worker being kicked in the stomach."'
'WM's focus on pricing and it's ability to hold a supplier's business hostage to its own agenda, distorts markets in ways that consumers don't see, and ways that suppliers can't effectively counter. WM is so large that it can often defy the laws of supply, demand, and competition... The market didn't create the $2.97 gallon of pickles, nor did waning customer demand or a wild abundance of cucumbers. WM created the $2.97 gallon jar of pickles. The price - the number that is a critical piece of information to buyers, sellers, and competitors about the state of the pickle market - the price was a lie. It was unrelated either to the supply of cucumbers or the demand for pickles. The price was a fiction imposed on the pickle market in Bentonville.'
'There's the yellow smiley face price slasher bouncing through TV commercials, slashing prices with a rapier. Sometimes the price slasher is dressed like Robin Hood - an audacious costume for the world's most powerful company.'
'What almost no one outside the world of WM and its suppliers sees and understands is the high cost of those low prices. WM has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from suppliers, many of whom are willing to do almost anything to keep the retailer happy, in part because WM now dominates consumer markets so thoroughly that they have no choice. The results can be dramatic or subtle, immediate or insidiously corrosive. Decisions made in Bentonville routinely close factories as well as open them. WM's way of doing business can hollow out companies, gradually transforming full-fledged consumer products companies who design and manufacture their own products into little more than importers. WM's price pressure can leave so little profit that there is little left for innovation.'
'They've lowered the price of TVs to the point where they can't afford to pay $1 or $2 an hour that they have to pay in Mexico. The production isn't poor quality, the products are. they are reducing the costs of the products by compromising the designs. They are designing the costs out by making poorer designs.'
'How can it be bad to have a bargain at WM? You can't buy anything if you're not employed. We are shopping ourselves out of jobs. The manufactured goods coming to the United States so cheaply are made under factory conditions that would not only not be tolerated in the US, they likely wouldn't even be legal. We want clean air, clear water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world, yet we aren't willing to pay for anything manufactured under those restrictions.'
'While WM added 480,000 new jobs between 1997 and 2004, US manufacturing jobs fell by 3.1 million, a loss of 37,000 jobs a month, on average, for 84 straight months. We find the abandonment of US manufacturing jobs unnerving, we find cheaper stuff on more shelves addictive. We don't connect the two.
'At the end of 1990, WM hadjust nine supercenters (where they sell groceries). Ten years later, at the end of 2000, they had 888 supercenters - an average of 7 supercenters a month for 120 months in a row - and WM was the number-one food retailer in the US...In that same decade, 31 supermarket chains have sought bankruptcy protection; 27 of them site competition from WM as a factor.'
'WM isn't just a store, it shapes where we shop, the products we buy, and the prices we pay - even for people who never shop there. It reaches deep inside the operations of the companies that supply it and changes not only what they sell, but also changes how those products are packaged and presented, what the lives of the factory workers who make the products are like- it even sometimes changes the country where the factories are located.'
'WM has changed the way we think about ourselves as shoppers and consumers. It has changed our sense of quality, our sense of what a good deal is. WM's low prices routinely reset our expectations about what things should cost. WM has changed the lens through which we see the world.'
'"The Wal-Mart economy" describes the nagging sense that there might be some unseen but terrible cost to be paid for "always low prices." The WM economy is a place where the jobs are traps: low wages, miserly benefits, stultifying work, no respect, no future. In the WM economy, we as consumers often buy too much because it's cheap. We are slaves to our impulse for a bargain.'
'The most potent, least public least well-understood power of the WM effect: the impact WM has in shaping the operations, the choices, the product mix of it's suppliers. Many suppliers hesitate to talk to WM about price increases, even when completely justified.'
'"Every time you see the WM smiley-face, whistling and knocking down the prices, somewhere there's a factory worker being kicked in the stomach."'
'WM's focus on pricing and it's ability to hold a supplier's business hostage to its own agenda, distorts markets in ways that consumers don't see, and ways that suppliers can't effectively counter. WM is so large that it can often defy the laws of supply, demand, and competition... The market didn't create the $2.97 gallon of pickles, nor did waning customer demand or a wild abundance of cucumbers. WM created the $2.97 gallon jar of pickles. The price - the number that is a critical piece of information to buyers, sellers, and competitors about the state of the pickle market - the price was a lie. It was unrelated either to the supply of cucumbers or the demand for pickles. The price was a fiction imposed on the pickle market in Bentonville.'
'There's the yellow smiley face price slasher bouncing through TV commercials, slashing prices with a rapier. Sometimes the price slasher is dressed like Robin Hood - an audacious costume for the world's most powerful company.'
'What almost no one outside the world of WM and its suppliers sees and understands is the high cost of those low prices. WM has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from suppliers, many of whom are willing to do almost anything to keep the retailer happy, in part because WM now dominates consumer markets so thoroughly that they have no choice. The results can be dramatic or subtle, immediate or insidiously corrosive. Decisions made in Bentonville routinely close factories as well as open them. WM's way of doing business can hollow out companies, gradually transforming full-fledged consumer products companies who design and manufacture their own products into little more than importers. WM's price pressure can leave so little profit that there is little left for innovation.'
'They've lowered the price of TVs to the point where they can't afford to pay $1 or $2 an hour that they have to pay in Mexico. The production isn't poor quality, the products are. they are reducing the costs of the products by compromising the designs. They are designing the costs out by making poorer designs.'
'How can it be bad to have a bargain at WM? You can't buy anything if you're not employed. We are shopping ourselves out of jobs. The manufactured goods coming to the United States so cheaply are made under factory conditions that would not only not be tolerated in the US, they likely wouldn't even be legal. We want clean air, clear water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world, yet we aren't willing to pay for anything manufactured under those restrictions.'
'While WM added 480,000 new jobs between 1997 and 2004, US manufacturing jobs fell by 3.1 million, a loss of 37,000 jobs a month, on average, for 84 straight months. We find the abandonment of US manufacturing jobs unnerving, we find cheaper stuff on more shelves addictive. We don't connect the two.
Friday, June 10, 2011
The Anglo Files
By Sarah Lyall. This was a funny and insightful book written by an American journalist who married a Brit and moved there. Each chapter has a theme about different aspects of British life. I didn't highlight any bits from it, just an overall entertaining book, and I learned a lot about life in the UK. Could be useful someday, you never know...
She ends with a section called "further reading." I'm just going to list some books here for future reference.
G Orwell essay England, Your England from The Lion and the Unicorn
Jeremy Paxman, The English: Portrait of a People.
A. A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the British
Julian Barnes, England, England
Kate Fox, Watching the English
Roger Scruton, England: an Elegy
Marion Mainwaring, The Buccaneers
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
I also finished reading the first Percy Jackson and the Olympians book (with Max, before bed each night) and a A&E Biography of J.K. Rowling I picked up at the library. Very interesting to read about authors and how the work.
She ends with a section called "further reading." I'm just going to list some books here for future reference.
G Orwell essay England, Your England from The Lion and the Unicorn
Jeremy Paxman, The English: Portrait of a People.
A. A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the British
Julian Barnes, England, England
Kate Fox, Watching the English
Roger Scruton, England: an Elegy
Marion Mainwaring, The Buccaneers
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
I also finished reading the first Percy Jackson and the Olympians book (with Max, before bed each night) and a A&E Biography of J.K. Rowling I picked up at the library. Very interesting to read about authors and how the work.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Driving Mr. Albert
: A trip across America with Einstein's Brain by Michael Paterniti
This gem caught my eye because it is a true story and just so strange.
The story is, when Einstein died in 1955, the man who did the autopsy on him, Thomas Harvey, took Einstein's brain out, took it home and kept it. The author heard this story, contacted him, etc. Anyway, it ends up they are to drive the brain (which floats in pieces in a tupperware) across the country to Einstein's granddaughter. So it is a travelogue, but he wanders off on tangents and talks about Einstein, Dr. Harvey, the controversies with the brain, etc.
Here are just a few good highlights (most of them Einstein quotes):
"According to Einstein, he abandoned the Jewish faith at the age of twelve, when his science training revealed to him that "much in the stories of the Bible could not be true."
"In an instant, Einstein was world-famous. His mysterious smile beamed from the front pages of newspapers around the world - a genius, a guru-mystic who had unlocked the secrets of God's own mind."
(Einstein Reflecting on a friend's death) "Now he has preceded me a little by parting from this strange world. This means nothing. To us believing physicists the distinction between past, present and future has only the significance of a stubborn illusion."
"One of the themes of my earlier life, as I recall it now, is that I was forever projecting myself forward and backward at the same time, negating the present moment, changing my mind with alarming frequency. A master of vicissitudes, I fell in and out of love with certain ideas and certain rock bands and certain girlfriends who, in the end, must have been glad to see me go. After all, I couldn't name my longing, and yet it was there, always driving me away from the place where I stood."
"In photographs near the end of his life...Einstein looks benevolent, mild-mannered, and bemused. As if he's an old man in an oversized child's body, quickly growing out of his ill-fitting clothes and yet still has that pajamas-in-the-morning lightness, a certain gaiety and pokiness in the crinkles crow's feet at his eyes as he smiles."
"Marriage is the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident" Einstein
"FBI files compiled during Einstein's twenty-two-year American sojourn reveal that a slew of federal agents exhaustively followed up on any number of outrageous claims made against Einstein during the 1940s and 1950s. At various times, agents reported that the great scientist was allegedly building robots that could read the minds of our top military leaders, seriously plotting with the Hollywood glitterati to overthrow the US government, or working as a secret agent for Stalin with plans to emigrate to the Soviet Union."
"(Einstein) kept pictures of Michaelangelo and Schopenhauer hanging in his study, because, as he said, both men had escaped an everyday life of raw monotony and taken 'refuge in a world crowded with images of their own creation.' "
"Harvey appeared from the darkness with a big cardboard box in his hands. He set it down, and one at a time pulled out two large glass cookie jars full of what looked to be chunks of chicken in a golden broth: Einstein's brain chopped into pieces ranging in size from a turkey neck to a dime. A swirling universe unto itself: galaxies, suns, and planets. It seemed to glow."
"A confession: I want Harvey to sleep. I want him to fall into a deep, blurry, Rip Van Winkle daze, and I want to park the Skylark mother ship and walk around to the trunk and open it. I want Harvey snoring loudly as I unzip the duffel bag and reach my hands inside, and I want to - what? - touch Einstein's brain. I want to touch the brain. Yes, I've admitted it. I want to hold it, coddle it, measure it's weight in my palm, handle some of its one hundred billion now-dormant neurons. Does it feel like tofu, sea urchin, bologna? What, exactly? And what does such a desire make me? One of the legion of relic freaks? Or something worse?
The more the idea persists in my head, the more towns slip past outside the window as Harvey gazes into the distant living rooms of happy families, the more I wonder what, in fact, I'd be holding if I held the brain. I mean, it's not really Einstein and it's not really a brain, but disconnected pieces of brain, just as the passing farms are not really America but parts of a whole, symbol of the thing itself, which is everything and nothing at once."
(A man named Abrams kept Einstein's eyes) "Now, once or twice a year, when he opens the safe deposit box in a Philadelphia vault where he keeps Einstein's eyes, when he gazes upon two white planets, each set with the most remarkable orb of brown, he's filled with warm memories and a 'deep connection' to the professor."
"On the back seat are some of my books. This is a habit of mine, to bring along monster tomes like Moby Dick or Ulysses but then never so much as crack open one of them."
(Einstein near the end of his life said,) "I am truly a lone traveler and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family with my whole heart...I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude."
"Without the world knowing it yet - let alone the day's leading scientists - Einstein had single-handedly bombed the sacred hall of science, took a sledge to Newton, created a new language for understanding a new universe that seemed intricately and irretrievably different from the one humankind supposed for itself. It was all encoded in arcane equations and seemingly random flights of thought, tangled in scientific jargon that by bit seemed illogical, but added up to something hypersoherent and mind-bending."
"Years later when asked by reporters to explain the theory, Einstein jokingly summed it up like this 'An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.'"
"At that, her eyes flash white, as if a thousand snow-geese of recognition have suddenly taken flight from some hidden lake in her pupil."
"Einstein once noted, 'Americans are collossally bored.'"
In 1922 Einstein toured Japan: "He lectures to packed houses, in one instance speaking through a translator before two thousand people, pontificating for almost six hours on relativity. One theory about Einstein's popularity lay in a bit of confusion: the Japanese characters for 'relativity principal' were quite similar to those for 'love' and 'sex,' and so apparently some felt that a shaggy Tantric guru had landed in their midst.
'
In a 1931 statement to War Resisters International Einstein wrote: "I appeal to all men and women to declare that they will refuse to give any further assistance to war or the preparation to war."
In another letter he wrote: "My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of people is disgusting. my attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred."
Later, in 1952, when questioned about his participation in the war effort and creation of the atomic bomb: "You are mistaken in regarding me as a kind of chieftain of those scientists who abuse science for military purposes. I have never worked in the field of applied science, let alone for the military. I condemn the military mentality of our time just as you do. Indeed, I have been a pacifist all my life and regard Gandhi as the only truly great political figure of our age."
This gem caught my eye because it is a true story and just so strange.
The story is, when Einstein died in 1955, the man who did the autopsy on him, Thomas Harvey, took Einstein's brain out, took it home and kept it. The author heard this story, contacted him, etc. Anyway, it ends up they are to drive the brain (which floats in pieces in a tupperware) across the country to Einstein's granddaughter. So it is a travelogue, but he wanders off on tangents and talks about Einstein, Dr. Harvey, the controversies with the brain, etc.
Here are just a few good highlights (most of them Einstein quotes):
"According to Einstein, he abandoned the Jewish faith at the age of twelve, when his science training revealed to him that "much in the stories of the Bible could not be true."
"In an instant, Einstein was world-famous. His mysterious smile beamed from the front pages of newspapers around the world - a genius, a guru-mystic who had unlocked the secrets of God's own mind."
(Einstein Reflecting on a friend's death) "Now he has preceded me a little by parting from this strange world. This means nothing. To us believing physicists the distinction between past, present and future has only the significance of a stubborn illusion."
"One of the themes of my earlier life, as I recall it now, is that I was forever projecting myself forward and backward at the same time, negating the present moment, changing my mind with alarming frequency. A master of vicissitudes, I fell in and out of love with certain ideas and certain rock bands and certain girlfriends who, in the end, must have been glad to see me go. After all, I couldn't name my longing, and yet it was there, always driving me away from the place where I stood."
"In photographs near the end of his life...Einstein looks benevolent, mild-mannered, and bemused. As if he's an old man in an oversized child's body, quickly growing out of his ill-fitting clothes and yet still has that pajamas-in-the-morning lightness, a certain gaiety and pokiness in the crinkles crow's feet at his eyes as he smiles."
"Marriage is the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident" Einstein
"FBI files compiled during Einstein's twenty-two-year American sojourn reveal that a slew of federal agents exhaustively followed up on any number of outrageous claims made against Einstein during the 1940s and 1950s. At various times, agents reported that the great scientist was allegedly building robots that could read the minds of our top military leaders, seriously plotting with the Hollywood glitterati to overthrow the US government, or working as a secret agent for Stalin with plans to emigrate to the Soviet Union."
"(Einstein) kept pictures of Michaelangelo and Schopenhauer hanging in his study, because, as he said, both men had escaped an everyday life of raw monotony and taken 'refuge in a world crowded with images of their own creation.' "
"Harvey appeared from the darkness with a big cardboard box in his hands. He set it down, and one at a time pulled out two large glass cookie jars full of what looked to be chunks of chicken in a golden broth: Einstein's brain chopped into pieces ranging in size from a turkey neck to a dime. A swirling universe unto itself: galaxies, suns, and planets. It seemed to glow."
"A confession: I want Harvey to sleep. I want him to fall into a deep, blurry, Rip Van Winkle daze, and I want to park the Skylark mother ship and walk around to the trunk and open it. I want Harvey snoring loudly as I unzip the duffel bag and reach my hands inside, and I want to - what? - touch Einstein's brain. I want to touch the brain. Yes, I've admitted it. I want to hold it, coddle it, measure it's weight in my palm, handle some of its one hundred billion now-dormant neurons. Does it feel like tofu, sea urchin, bologna? What, exactly? And what does such a desire make me? One of the legion of relic freaks? Or something worse?
The more the idea persists in my head, the more towns slip past outside the window as Harvey gazes into the distant living rooms of happy families, the more I wonder what, in fact, I'd be holding if I held the brain. I mean, it's not really Einstein and it's not really a brain, but disconnected pieces of brain, just as the passing farms are not really America but parts of a whole, symbol of the thing itself, which is everything and nothing at once."
(A man named Abrams kept Einstein's eyes) "Now, once or twice a year, when he opens the safe deposit box in a Philadelphia vault where he keeps Einstein's eyes, when he gazes upon two white planets, each set with the most remarkable orb of brown, he's filled with warm memories and a 'deep connection' to the professor."
"On the back seat are some of my books. This is a habit of mine, to bring along monster tomes like Moby Dick or Ulysses but then never so much as crack open one of them."
(Einstein near the end of his life said,) "I am truly a lone traveler and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family with my whole heart...I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude."
"Without the world knowing it yet - let alone the day's leading scientists - Einstein had single-handedly bombed the sacred hall of science, took a sledge to Newton, created a new language for understanding a new universe that seemed intricately and irretrievably different from the one humankind supposed for itself. It was all encoded in arcane equations and seemingly random flights of thought, tangled in scientific jargon that by bit seemed illogical, but added up to something hypersoherent and mind-bending."
"Years later when asked by reporters to explain the theory, Einstein jokingly summed it up like this 'An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.'"
"At that, her eyes flash white, as if a thousand snow-geese of recognition have suddenly taken flight from some hidden lake in her pupil."
"Einstein once noted, 'Americans are collossally bored.'"
In 1922 Einstein toured Japan: "He lectures to packed houses, in one instance speaking through a translator before two thousand people, pontificating for almost six hours on relativity. One theory about Einstein's popularity lay in a bit of confusion: the Japanese characters for 'relativity principal' were quite similar to those for 'love' and 'sex,' and so apparently some felt that a shaggy Tantric guru had landed in their midst.
'
In a 1931 statement to War Resisters International Einstein wrote: "I appeal to all men and women to declare that they will refuse to give any further assistance to war or the preparation to war."
In another letter he wrote: "My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of people is disgusting. my attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred."
Later, in 1952, when questioned about his participation in the war effort and creation of the atomic bomb: "You are mistaken in regarding me as a kind of chieftain of those scientists who abuse science for military purposes. I have never worked in the field of applied science, let alone for the military. I condemn the military mentality of our time just as you do. Indeed, I have been a pacifist all my life and regard Gandhi as the only truly great political figure of our age."
Sunday, May 15, 2011
A sampler
This is funny and worth it, but I don't want it public. Please feel free to email me and if I know you, I will send you a copy.
Wendy
Wendy
Friday, May 13, 2011
The Handmaid's Tale
I know I'm a decade and a half behind. I've always wanted to read this book, but never got around to it. Must excellent, I must say. I marked just a few passages...
"There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it."
Personally, I like "freedom to".
"I stop walking. Ofglen stops beside me and I know that she too cannot take her eyes off these (Japanese tourist) women. We are fascinated, but also repelled. They seem undressed. It has taken so little time to change our minds about things like this."
Just a little statement about how quickly those in control can change our minds about things.
"Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."
"In reduced circumstances you have to believe all kinds of things."
"The first egg is white. I move the eggcup a little, so it's now in the watery sunlight that comes through the window and falls, brightening, waning, brightening again, on the tray. The shell of the egg is smooth, but also grained; small pebbles of calcium are defined by the sunlight, like craters on the moon. It's a barren landscape, yet perfect; it's the sort of desert the saints went into, so their minds would not be distracted by profusion. I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside. The egg is glowing now, as if it had an energy of it's own. To look at the egg gives me intense pleasure... The minimalist life. Pleasure is an egg. Blessings that can be counted on the fingers of one hand. But possibly this is how I am expected to react. If I have an egg, what more could I want? In reduced circumstances the desire to live attaches itself to strange objects."
That's all I'm going to share. I have some other books by her and I can't wait to read them.
"There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it."
Personally, I like "freedom to".
"I stop walking. Ofglen stops beside me and I know that she too cannot take her eyes off these (Japanese tourist) women. We are fascinated, but also repelled. They seem undressed. It has taken so little time to change our minds about things like this."
Just a little statement about how quickly those in control can change our minds about things.
"Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."
"In reduced circumstances you have to believe all kinds of things."
"The first egg is white. I move the eggcup a little, so it's now in the watery sunlight that comes through the window and falls, brightening, waning, brightening again, on the tray. The shell of the egg is smooth, but also grained; small pebbles of calcium are defined by the sunlight, like craters on the moon. It's a barren landscape, yet perfect; it's the sort of desert the saints went into, so their minds would not be distracted by profusion. I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside. The egg is glowing now, as if it had an energy of it's own. To look at the egg gives me intense pleasure... The minimalist life. Pleasure is an egg. Blessings that can be counted on the fingers of one hand. But possibly this is how I am expected to react. If I have an egg, what more could I want? In reduced circumstances the desire to live attaches itself to strange objects."
That's all I'm going to share. I have some other books by her and I can't wait to read them.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Birth of Venus
By Sarah Dunant
A beautiful and clever novel set in 1490s Florence. I will definitely read more by this author (someday). There were many clever lines, but I didn't mark them because I was reading fast. There was one that I took the time to stop and mark and will share...
"I was one of the crowd who spread the rumor around the square that day. And thus did I learn something of how history is written: that while it is not always accurate, One can still be a part of the making of it."
So true.
A beautiful and clever novel set in 1490s Florence. I will definitely read more by this author (someday). There were many clever lines, but I didn't mark them because I was reading fast. There was one that I took the time to stop and mark and will share...
"I was one of the crowd who spread the rumor around the square that day. And thus did I learn something of how history is written: that while it is not always accurate, One can still be a part of the making of it."
So true.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Eleanor Roosevelt: 1884 - 1933
By Blanche Wiesen Cook. This was an amazing book. Before reading it, I knew very little about ER, women's suffrage, or that era of history. There were so many amazing quotes. Most of them I will list here without explanation. They usually speak for themselves.
"Even when young people became disrespectful and started using foul language, ER remained completely unruffled. She used to say, 'There are only two unacceptable four-letter words, Hate and Wars.'"
"J. Edgar Hoover kept a running record of ER's every word and activity from 1924 until her death. Indeed, ER's vast FBI file is one of the wonders of modern history."
"She never gave up on life; she never stopped learning and changing. She worked to transform our world in behalf of greater dignity and more security for all people, for women and men in equal measure."
"There is no more liberating, no more exhilarating experience than to determine one's position, state it bravely, and then act boldly...Action creates it's own courage; and courage is as contagious as fear."
"Learning and living. But they are really the same thing, aren't they? There is no experience from which you can't learn something... and the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge based on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life...I honor the human race. When it faces life head-on, it can almost remake itself."
"What would happen if one woman told the truth about herself? The world would split open." Muriel Rukeyser
"The issue of sex and power is assumed to be central to the lives of great men. When looking at the lives of great women, we continue to divide the world into saints and sinners, and we make assumptions based on race and class, even looks."
"When a subject is highly controversial - and any question about sex is that - One cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold." Virginia Woolf.
"'If you have to compromise, compromise up!' ER personally carried her commitment to liberty, individual freedom, equal rights, civil rights, and human dignity into tiny villages and hamlets as well as into the citadels of government authority."
"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?"
"Where after all do human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual persons; the neighborhood, the school or college, the factory, farm, or office. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."
"It has always seemed to me that we never present our case to the smaller nations in either a persuasive or interesting way. I think most people will acknowledge that we have given far more military aid to these nations than economic aid. It is not very pleasant to palm off this military equipment on people who are not really looking for it. In view of this, why don't we offer them something they really want? For one thing, most of them would like food. Many of them know that wider training of their people is essential and hence a primary need is aid to their education system."
"One must never turn one's back on life. There is so much to do, so many engrossing challenges, so many heartbreaking and pressing needs."
"The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get, but what you give."
"Every child should read the translations of Chinese and Indian poetry. We know too little of the thought of these far distant races and the beauty of imagery in which they hide their precious kernels of thought and philosophy."
"Patriarchal Victorian society was a time when education was, in more mundane circles, considered dangerous to a woman's mental health, the pathway to madness and sterility. Independent and creative education for women was also thought to be dangerous to society. It would lead to votes for women, public activity, socialism, agnosticism, utopianism, opposition to war, the dissolution of empire. It was positively subversive. Marie Souvestre entertained it all."
"A passionate humanist committed to social justice, Marie Souvestre inspired young women to think about leadership, to think for themselves, and above all, to think about a nobler, more decent future. To her mind, nothing was dull, no subject irrelevant. Everything creative and imaginative was encouraged. She would not, however, abide dull thoughts, dull thinkers, lazy or boorish girls who wasted their talents and abused their dreams."
"Father always wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral." Alice Roosevelt about her father Teddy.
"I was not a snob, largely because I never really thought about the question of why you asked people to your house or claimed them as friends. I found that almost everyone had something interesting to contribute to my education."
"I think I learned then that practically no one in the world is entirely bad or entirely good, and that motives are often more important than actions... I have gradually come to believe that human beings that try to judge other human beings are undertaking a somewhat difficult job."
"Revolution was met by counterrevolution and reaction. Repression greeted every movement for social change. In the US, a year of tyranny and violence, of Red scare and race riots, called America's constitutional precepts into question. Freedom of speech, press, and assembly was buried in an avalanche of super-patriotism led by vigilante missionaries of a new "Americanism." (Check out more on Palmer Raids, Espionage Act of 1917, Sedition act of 1918)
"Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. The master class has always declared the wars, and the subject class has always fought the battles." Eugene Debs
Not until poverty and injustice are dealt with will the revolutionary threat disappear.
"Let us consecrate ourselves to put war out of this world...Men were born by instinct to slay. It seems to me God is giving a call to the women of the world to come forward, to stay the hand of men, to say: 'No, you shall no longer kill your fellow man!'" (Carrie Chapman Catt)
(read more about the Bok peace award)
"If anyone were to ask me what I want out of life I would say - the opportunity for doing something useful, for in no other way, I am convinced, true happiness be obtained."
"Education only ends with death"
"To bring children up with a conception that their own particular lives are typical of the whole world is to bring up extraordinarily narrow people."
"A state is civilized which has the greatest proportion of happy, healthy, wise and gentle people... In a community of one-hundred every one counts, but none too much; thus each girl begins to appreciate her importance not only as an individual but also as a member of a group. Because she has a responsibility, the way she lives becomes important, what she is doing is significant not only for herself but for others." Todhunter School statement of purpose (ER taught there)
"ER believed that a good teacher started with her students' own interests and led them 'into an enlivened understanding of every possible phase of the world into which they are going.' It was the teacher's 'function to manage this relating process, to seize all opportunities, however unpromising, to make history and literature and the seemingly barren study of the machinery of government somehow akin to the things the pupils are doing in their daily life.'"
"ER persuaded her students to develop their talents, to be responsible for their lives, to seek opportunity and achieve success, to care about and work for their communities."
"It is nice to hand out milk and bread. It gives you a comfortable feeling inside. But fundamentally you are not relieving the reasons why you have a charity."
"A state ruled wholly by the self-interest of a few cannot be just."
"I'm a middle-aged woman. It's good to be middle-aged. Things don't matter so much. You don't take it so hard when things happen to you that you don't like."
"Even when young people became disrespectful and started using foul language, ER remained completely unruffled. She used to say, 'There are only two unacceptable four-letter words, Hate and Wars.'"
"J. Edgar Hoover kept a running record of ER's every word and activity from 1924 until her death. Indeed, ER's vast FBI file is one of the wonders of modern history."
"She never gave up on life; she never stopped learning and changing. She worked to transform our world in behalf of greater dignity and more security for all people, for women and men in equal measure."
"There is no more liberating, no more exhilarating experience than to determine one's position, state it bravely, and then act boldly...Action creates it's own courage; and courage is as contagious as fear."
"Learning and living. But they are really the same thing, aren't they? There is no experience from which you can't learn something... and the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge based on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life...I honor the human race. When it faces life head-on, it can almost remake itself."
"What would happen if one woman told the truth about herself? The world would split open." Muriel Rukeyser
"The issue of sex and power is assumed to be central to the lives of great men. When looking at the lives of great women, we continue to divide the world into saints and sinners, and we make assumptions based on race and class, even looks."
"When a subject is highly controversial - and any question about sex is that - One cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold." Virginia Woolf.
"'If you have to compromise, compromise up!' ER personally carried her commitment to liberty, individual freedom, equal rights, civil rights, and human dignity into tiny villages and hamlets as well as into the citadels of government authority."
"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?"
"Where after all do human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual persons; the neighborhood, the school or college, the factory, farm, or office. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."
"It has always seemed to me that we never present our case to the smaller nations in either a persuasive or interesting way. I think most people will acknowledge that we have given far more military aid to these nations than economic aid. It is not very pleasant to palm off this military equipment on people who are not really looking for it. In view of this, why don't we offer them something they really want? For one thing, most of them would like food. Many of them know that wider training of their people is essential and hence a primary need is aid to their education system."
"One must never turn one's back on life. There is so much to do, so many engrossing challenges, so many heartbreaking and pressing needs."
"The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get, but what you give."
"Every child should read the translations of Chinese and Indian poetry. We know too little of the thought of these far distant races and the beauty of imagery in which they hide their precious kernels of thought and philosophy."
"Patriarchal Victorian society was a time when education was, in more mundane circles, considered dangerous to a woman's mental health, the pathway to madness and sterility. Independent and creative education for women was also thought to be dangerous to society. It would lead to votes for women, public activity, socialism, agnosticism, utopianism, opposition to war, the dissolution of empire. It was positively subversive. Marie Souvestre entertained it all."
"A passionate humanist committed to social justice, Marie Souvestre inspired young women to think about leadership, to think for themselves, and above all, to think about a nobler, more decent future. To her mind, nothing was dull, no subject irrelevant. Everything creative and imaginative was encouraged. She would not, however, abide dull thoughts, dull thinkers, lazy or boorish girls who wasted their talents and abused their dreams."
"Father always wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral." Alice Roosevelt about her father Teddy.
"I was not a snob, largely because I never really thought about the question of why you asked people to your house or claimed them as friends. I found that almost everyone had something interesting to contribute to my education."
"I think I learned then that practically no one in the world is entirely bad or entirely good, and that motives are often more important than actions... I have gradually come to believe that human beings that try to judge other human beings are undertaking a somewhat difficult job."
"Revolution was met by counterrevolution and reaction. Repression greeted every movement for social change. In the US, a year of tyranny and violence, of Red scare and race riots, called America's constitutional precepts into question. Freedom of speech, press, and assembly was buried in an avalanche of super-patriotism led by vigilante missionaries of a new "Americanism." (Check out more on Palmer Raids, Espionage Act of 1917, Sedition act of 1918)
"Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. The master class has always declared the wars, and the subject class has always fought the battles." Eugene Debs
Not until poverty and injustice are dealt with will the revolutionary threat disappear.
"Let us consecrate ourselves to put war out of this world...Men were born by instinct to slay. It seems to me God is giving a call to the women of the world to come forward, to stay the hand of men, to say: 'No, you shall no longer kill your fellow man!'" (Carrie Chapman Catt)
(read more about the Bok peace award)
"If anyone were to ask me what I want out of life I would say - the opportunity for doing something useful, for in no other way, I am convinced, true happiness be obtained."
"Education only ends with death"
"To bring children up with a conception that their own particular lives are typical of the whole world is to bring up extraordinarily narrow people."
"A state is civilized which has the greatest proportion of happy, healthy, wise and gentle people... In a community of one-hundred every one counts, but none too much; thus each girl begins to appreciate her importance not only as an individual but also as a member of a group. Because she has a responsibility, the way she lives becomes important, what she is doing is significant not only for herself but for others." Todhunter School statement of purpose (ER taught there)
"ER believed that a good teacher started with her students' own interests and led them 'into an enlivened understanding of every possible phase of the world into which they are going.' It was the teacher's 'function to manage this relating process, to seize all opportunities, however unpromising, to make history and literature and the seemingly barren study of the machinery of government somehow akin to the things the pupils are doing in their daily life.'"
"ER persuaded her students to develop their talents, to be responsible for their lives, to seek opportunity and achieve success, to care about and work for their communities."
"It is nice to hand out milk and bread. It gives you a comfortable feeling inside. But fundamentally you are not relieving the reasons why you have a charity."
"A state ruled wholly by the self-interest of a few cannot be just."
"I'm a middle-aged woman. It's good to be middle-aged. Things don't matter so much. You don't take it so hard when things happen to you that you don't like."
Sunday, March 20, 2011
The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Culture
I picked up this book at Hamline library because it sounds like it would be related to my research. It is a typical academic collection of essays related to some subject. Frankly, I didn't read about 75% of it because it was about a mile above my head - I had no idea what they were talking about most of the time. The first essay that interested me was called Linguistic Utopias by Mary Louise Pratt. She started the selection with a few quotes from Margaret Mead in Redbook 1966:
"We are in the process of creating a new civilization in which, for the first time, people everywhere are beginning to take part in the events that are shaping our common future. The realization of the dream of world-wide communication and the growing belief that men can plan for change are opening new potential for human relationships."
"A language that works has been shaped by men and women, old people and little children, intelligent people and dunces, people with good memories and people with poor memories, those who pay attention to form, and those who pay attention to sound, and people with all the diversity of interests present in their culture over generations. This very multiplicity of speakers creates the redundancy that makes a language flexible and intelligible to all different kinds of people who are its speakers at any time."
"On the occasion of the original dedication of the statue of liberty, a sizable number of male dignitaries and two or three of their wives gathered round the base of the statue to perform the original dedication, while members of the New York City Women's Suffrage Association circled the island in a rented boat protesting the event. In a statement issued separately, the suffragists declared themselves amused that the statue of a woman should be raised to symbolize liberty in a country where women lacked even the most minimal political rights."
(check out Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities and read up on Gellner)
"Here are a list of verbal practices which have been associated with women. They can be readily associated with women's relative powerlessness or with the domestic sphere.
1. Planting suggestions in the minds of other people so that they think they thought of it themselves.
2. Speaking to one person in such a way that another might hear and be affected in the desired fashion.
3. In academic writing, gradually building up evidence toward the main point rather than stating it at the beginning and then backing it up.
4. Storytelling as a way of communicating values (to children, for example).
5. Gossip as a way of supporting and surveilling each other, and as a form of power over men, who fear this secret network.
6. Talking often repeatedly with one another for the purpose of maintaining a shared world (small talk).
7. Talking to subjects who don't know language at all (babies, animals, TV sets, walls).
[These practices are in fact NOT used more often by women.] What is of interest is the fact that they are associated with women, and that in mainstream pragmatics, they often fall outside what is labelled normal, straightforward communication. (Gossip violates Maxim of relevance, in storytelling, rules are not followed, etc,)
Another interesting essay was called Language and the Order of Nature by M. A. K. Halliday.
(to read: Order out of chaos: man's new dialogue with nature by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers)
"Language is as much a product of evolution as we are ourselves; we did not manufacture it. It is an evolved system, not a designed system: not something separate from humanity, but an essential part of the condition of being a human... It is just within the last hundred generations or so that some element of design has come into natural language; language has come to be written down. Writing has been an inherent part of the process. The dialogue with nature has begun to take on new forms; we have learnt to measure and to experiment; and to accompany these new semiotic modes, our languages have spawned various metalanguages - the languages of mathematics and science. These are extensions of natural languages, not totally new creations; and they remain in touch...Now and again some part of the dialogue breaks down, and then it becomes news - like London Bridge; as long as it stays up, its not news. Yet what is really noteworthy about language is how rarely it does fall down. The demands that we make on the system are quite colossal; how is it that it so seldom gets overloaded?"
"It is often objected that language is letting us down; and this especially at certain times in history, when the pace of the dialogue is quickening and knowledge is accumulating very fast. At such times there arise proposals for improving language... (shorthand, universal script, calculus). De Broglie observed that "physics is in suspense because we do not have the words or the images that are essential to us." ... David Bohm devotes a whole chapter to language, in which he objects that, "language divides things into separate entities" and so distorts the reality of undivided wholeness in flowing movement."
"Despite the shortcomings of the language they had to work with, science has continued to progress... Languages have not given way beneath its weight, nor are there any obvious signs of overload...You do not need to keep engineering a language in order to change it; it will change anyway."
"Lemke has pointed out that many human systems, including all social-semiotic systems, are of a particular kind known as 'dynamic open systems.' Dynamic open systems have the property that they are metastable: that is, they persist only through constant change; and this change takes place through interactive exchanges with their environment. In the course of such interaction, the system exports disorder; and in the process of exporting disorder, and so increasing the entropy of its environment, the system renews itself, gains information, imports or rather creates order, and in this way continues to function. Natural language is certainly a system of this general type."
"A semiotic system is one that is characterized by redundancy between its subsystems (meta-redundancy)." A stoplight example: the lights have a set of colors, messages of stop/go, people that react to it: "In other words, what the system 'says' redounds with what it 'means', which in turn redounds with what it 'does'."
"Language is a dynamic open system, meta-redundant... Such a system is good for thinking with and good for doing with, these being the two complementary facets of all human semiosis. When either of these facets comes under pressure, the system responds by creating varieties of itself to meet the new demands. These new forms of language are both created by and also create new forms of knowledge."
"When logicians and philosophers complain about language, their usual complaint is that it is too vague. When scientists find language letting them down, it is generally because it is too precise, too determinant."
"The wealth of reality overflows any single language, any single logical structure. Each language can express only part of reality."
"The act of reflecting on language transforms it into something alien, something different from itself."
"writing provided a new mode of expression - which could realise the pre-existing content patterns without disrupting them. At the same time it provided a new interface through which changes in the system could take place. Writing evolved in the immediate context of the need for documentation and recording. But it opened the way for an alternate theory of reality. The effect of a writing system is to anchor language to a shallower level of consciousness...Written language is corpuscular and gains power by its density, while spoken language is wavelike and gains power by its intricacy. (Meaning the forms of discourse that arise as a result of the medium) Writing puts language in chains; it freezes it so that it becomes a thing to be reflected on...Writing created the potential to structure, categorize, discipline...Technicality in language depends on, not writing as such, but the kind of organization of meaning that writing brings with it - (allows language to be packaged [with ideas] so that preceding arguments can be taken for granted."
"Writing and speaking are different grammars which therefore constitute different ways of knowing, such that any theory of knowledge, and of learning, must encompass both."
(check out The Language Makers by Roy Harris)
"We are in the process of creating a new civilization in which, for the first time, people everywhere are beginning to take part in the events that are shaping our common future. The realization of the dream of world-wide communication and the growing belief that men can plan for change are opening new potential for human relationships."
"A language that works has been shaped by men and women, old people and little children, intelligent people and dunces, people with good memories and people with poor memories, those who pay attention to form, and those who pay attention to sound, and people with all the diversity of interests present in their culture over generations. This very multiplicity of speakers creates the redundancy that makes a language flexible and intelligible to all different kinds of people who are its speakers at any time."
"On the occasion of the original dedication of the statue of liberty, a sizable number of male dignitaries and two or three of their wives gathered round the base of the statue to perform the original dedication, while members of the New York City Women's Suffrage Association circled the island in a rented boat protesting the event. In a statement issued separately, the suffragists declared themselves amused that the statue of a woman should be raised to symbolize liberty in a country where women lacked even the most minimal political rights."
(check out Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities and read up on Gellner)
"Here are a list of verbal practices which have been associated with women. They can be readily associated with women's relative powerlessness or with the domestic sphere.
1. Planting suggestions in the minds of other people so that they think they thought of it themselves.
2. Speaking to one person in such a way that another might hear and be affected in the desired fashion.
3. In academic writing, gradually building up evidence toward the main point rather than stating it at the beginning and then backing it up.
4. Storytelling as a way of communicating values (to children, for example).
5. Gossip as a way of supporting and surveilling each other, and as a form of power over men, who fear this secret network.
6. Talking often repeatedly with one another for the purpose of maintaining a shared world (small talk).
7. Talking to subjects who don't know language at all (babies, animals, TV sets, walls).
[These practices are in fact NOT used more often by women.] What is of interest is the fact that they are associated with women, and that in mainstream pragmatics, they often fall outside what is labelled normal, straightforward communication. (Gossip violates Maxim of relevance, in storytelling, rules are not followed, etc,)
Another interesting essay was called Language and the Order of Nature by M. A. K. Halliday.
(to read: Order out of chaos: man's new dialogue with nature by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers)
"Language is as much a product of evolution as we are ourselves; we did not manufacture it. It is an evolved system, not a designed system: not something separate from humanity, but an essential part of the condition of being a human... It is just within the last hundred generations or so that some element of design has come into natural language; language has come to be written down. Writing has been an inherent part of the process. The dialogue with nature has begun to take on new forms; we have learnt to measure and to experiment; and to accompany these new semiotic modes, our languages have spawned various metalanguages - the languages of mathematics and science. These are extensions of natural languages, not totally new creations; and they remain in touch...Now and again some part of the dialogue breaks down, and then it becomes news - like London Bridge; as long as it stays up, its not news. Yet what is really noteworthy about language is how rarely it does fall down. The demands that we make on the system are quite colossal; how is it that it so seldom gets overloaded?"
"It is often objected that language is letting us down; and this especially at certain times in history, when the pace of the dialogue is quickening and knowledge is accumulating very fast. At such times there arise proposals for improving language... (shorthand, universal script, calculus). De Broglie observed that "physics is in suspense because we do not have the words or the images that are essential to us." ... David Bohm devotes a whole chapter to language, in which he objects that, "language divides things into separate entities" and so distorts the reality of undivided wholeness in flowing movement."
"Despite the shortcomings of the language they had to work with, science has continued to progress... Languages have not given way beneath its weight, nor are there any obvious signs of overload...You do not need to keep engineering a language in order to change it; it will change anyway."
"Lemke has pointed out that many human systems, including all social-semiotic systems, are of a particular kind known as 'dynamic open systems.' Dynamic open systems have the property that they are metastable: that is, they persist only through constant change; and this change takes place through interactive exchanges with their environment. In the course of such interaction, the system exports disorder; and in the process of exporting disorder, and so increasing the entropy of its environment, the system renews itself, gains information, imports or rather creates order, and in this way continues to function. Natural language is certainly a system of this general type."
"A semiotic system is one that is characterized by redundancy between its subsystems (meta-redundancy)." A stoplight example: the lights have a set of colors, messages of stop/go, people that react to it: "In other words, what the system 'says' redounds with what it 'means', which in turn redounds with what it 'does'."
"Language is a dynamic open system, meta-redundant... Such a system is good for thinking with and good for doing with, these being the two complementary facets of all human semiosis. When either of these facets comes under pressure, the system responds by creating varieties of itself to meet the new demands. These new forms of language are both created by and also create new forms of knowledge."
"When logicians and philosophers complain about language, their usual complaint is that it is too vague. When scientists find language letting them down, it is generally because it is too precise, too determinant."
"The wealth of reality overflows any single language, any single logical structure. Each language can express only part of reality."
"The act of reflecting on language transforms it into something alien, something different from itself."
"writing provided a new mode of expression - which could realise the pre-existing content patterns without disrupting them. At the same time it provided a new interface through which changes in the system could take place. Writing evolved in the immediate context of the need for documentation and recording. But it opened the way for an alternate theory of reality. The effect of a writing system is to anchor language to a shallower level of consciousness...Written language is corpuscular and gains power by its density, while spoken language is wavelike and gains power by its intricacy. (Meaning the forms of discourse that arise as a result of the medium) Writing puts language in chains; it freezes it so that it becomes a thing to be reflected on...Writing created the potential to structure, categorize, discipline...Technicality in language depends on, not writing as such, but the kind of organization of meaning that writing brings with it - (allows language to be packaged [with ideas] so that preceding arguments can be taken for granted."
"Writing and speaking are different grammars which therefore constitute different ways of knowing, such that any theory of knowledge, and of learning, must encompass both."
(check out The Language Makers by Roy Harris)
Sunday, March 6, 2011
First Bryson book
I just read my first Bill Bryson book; he Mother Tongue: English and how it got that way. It was good; not the best book I've ever read on the subject. It would be a very good book on the history of English for non-linguists. I kept thinking to myself that some chapters and sections would be good for my future advanced ESL learners.
A few interesting tidbits from the book:
In the chapter "Good English and Bad" He is discussing language academies, "Such actions underline the one almost inevitable shortcoming of national academies. However progressive and far-seeing they may be to begin with, they almost always exert over time a depressive effect on change." He quotes Joseph Priestley in 1761, "We need make no doubt but that the best forms of speech will, in time, establish themselves by their own superior excellence: and in all controversies, it is better to wait the decisions of time, which are slow and sure, than to take those of synods, which are often hasty and injudicious."
He quotes Otto Jesperson, in regards to English's lack of authority ruling over it, "(English is like a garden) laid out seemingly without any definite plan, and in which you are allowed to walk everywhere according to your own fancy without having to fear a stern keeper enforcing rigorous regulations."
Bryson goes on to say that English "has long relied on self-appointed authorities."
A great quote about Pres Bush Sr., "The day after he was elected president in 1988, George Bush told a television reporter he couldn't believe the enormity of what had happened. Had president-elect Bush known that the primary meaning of enormity is wickidness or evilness, he would doubtless had selected a more apt term."
"One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will push new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl themselves into the path of change."
He ends the chapter with this great tidbit:
"Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarian's work is never done when he turned to those gathered loyally around him and whispered, 'I am about to - or I am going to - die; either expression is used.'"
The next chapter is titled, "Order out of chaos" and it is about dictionaries. "By virtue of their brevity, dictionary definitions often fail to convey the nuances of English. Rank and rancid mean roughly the same thing, but, as Aitchison notes, we would never talk about eating rank butter, or wearing rancid socks. A dictionary will tell you that tall and high mean much the same thing, but it won't explain to you that while you can apply either term to a building, you can apply only tall to a person."
The next chapter is "Old World, New World" Here he discusses the origin of OK. "Of all new words to issue from the New World, the quintessential Americanism without any doubt was O.K. Arguable America's single greatest gift to international discourse, OK is the most grammatically versatile of words, able to serve as an adjective (lunch was ok), verb (can you ok this for me?), noun (I need your ok on this), interjection (ok, I heard you), and adverb (we did ok). It can carry shades of meaning that range from casual assent (shall we go? ok.) to great enthusiasm (OK!), to lukewarm endorsement (the party was ok) to a more or less meaningless filler of space (ok, can I have your attention?)."
He mentions US westward expansion an the words settlers came up with to describe their lives and words including hornswoggle, rambunctious, and kick the bucket. Some words made up by them didn't last: monstracious, teetoticiously, helliferocious, conbobberation, obflisticate, and others.
About the founding fathers adopting English as a national or official language: "The founding fathers were so little exercised by the question of an official language for the United States that they made no mention of it in the Constitution."
In another chapter, "English as a world language" he discusses borrowing back and forth between languages.
"What really rankles the French is not that they are borrowing so many words from the rest of the world but that the rest of the world is no longer borrowing so many from them. As the magazine Le Point put it: 'Our technical contribution stopped with the word chauffeur.'"
Using obfuscation (unclear language): an airline referred to a crash as an "involuntary conversion of a 727". Hospitals call patient deaths "negative patient-care outcomes." The pentagon described toothpicks as "wooden interdental stimulators" and tents as "frame-supported tension structures"
On computers' inability to "get" human language, "a computer was instructed to translate the expression out of sight, out of mind out of English and back in again and came up with blind insanity. It is curious to reflect that we have computers that effortlessly compute pi to 5000 places and yet cannot be made to understand that there is a difference between time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana or that in the English speaking world to make up a story, make up one's face and to make up after a fight are all quite separate things."
An ortheopist is a professional pronouncer (as in one hired by the BBC to help broadcasters with pronunciaton of strange and foreign names).
On a chapter called "Names"
The names of Britain's 70,000 or so pubs cover a broad range, running from the inspired to the probable, from the deft to the daft. Almost any name will do so long as it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing or enjoying oneself. At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners - this is a basic requirement of most British institutions - and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal."
The English name Smith has equivalents (in meaning) in other languages: Schmidt (German), Ferrier (French), Ferraro (Italian), Herrero (Spanish), Kovacs (Hungarian), Kusnetzov (Russian).
In regards to place names in Britain: "Occasionally the spellings seem to defy pronunciation...but more often it is the other way around: The spellings look simple and straightforward, so that the innocent traveler is lulled into a sense of security, little realizing what treacheries they hide."
There is another chapter titled "swearing" which is predictably entertaining.
"Swearing seems to have some near-universal qualities. In almost all cultures, swearing involves one or more of the following: filth, the forbidden (incest), sacred, and usually all three. Most cultures have two levels of swearing - relatively mild and highly profane."
"English is unusual in including the impossible and the pleasurable in its litany of profanities. It is a strange and little noted idiosyncrasy of our tongue that when we wish to express extreme fury we entreat the object of our rage to undertake an anatomical impossibility, or stranger still, to engage in the one activity that is bound to give him more pleasure than almost anything else. Can there be, when you think about it, a more improbable sentiment than "Get fucked!" We might as well snarl, "Make a lot of money!" or "Have a nice day!"
"After Ok, fuck must be about the most versatile of all English words. It can be used to describe a multitude of conditions and phenomena, from making a mess of something (fuck up), to being casual or provocative (fuck around), to inviting or announcing a departure (fuck off), to being estimable (fucking-A), to being baffled (fuck if I know), to being disgusted (fuck this), and on and on."
"Fuck probably reached its zenith during WWII" snafu (situation normal - all fucked up), fubar (fucked up beyond all recognition), fubb (fucked up beyond belief).
"This tendency to transform profanities into harmless expressions is a particular characteristic of English swearing. Most languages employ euphemism in some measure...but no other language approaches English for the number of delicate expletives of the sort that you could safely say in front of a maiden aunt: darn, durn, drat, gosh, golly, goodness gracious, gee whiz, jeepers, shucks, and so on. We have scores, if not hundreds, of these terms."
There is a chapter called "wordplay" where he lists lots of cool anagram, palindromes, etc
anagrams:
carthorse - orchestra
contaminated - no admittance
emigrants - streaming
old testament - most talented
world cup team - talcum powder
ronald wilson reagan - insane anglo warlord
spiro agnew - grow a penis
two plus eleven - one plus twelve
western union - no wire unsent
circumstantial evidence - can ruin a selected victim
a stitch in time saves nine - this is meant as incentive
william shakespeare - i am a weakish speller (or) i like mr w h as a pal see (or) we all make his praise
the morse code - here come dots
victoria englands queen - rules a nice quiet land
parishioners - i hate parsons
intoxicate - excitation
schoolmaster - the classroom
mother in law - woman hitler
palindromes:
a man a plan a canal panama
norma is a selfless as i am ron
was it eliots toilet i saw
too far edna we wander afoot
madam im adam
sex at noon taxes
are we not drawn onward we few drawn onward to new era
able was i ere i saw elba
sums are not set a test on erasmus
satan oscillate my metallic sonatas
amphibology - intentionally ambiguous statements
"customers who think our waiters are rude should see the manager"
"Thank you so much for the book, I shall lose no time in reading it" (Disraeli)
A few interesting tidbits from the book:
In the chapter "Good English and Bad" He is discussing language academies, "Such actions underline the one almost inevitable shortcoming of national academies. However progressive and far-seeing they may be to begin with, they almost always exert over time a depressive effect on change." He quotes Joseph Priestley in 1761, "We need make no doubt but that the best forms of speech will, in time, establish themselves by their own superior excellence: and in all controversies, it is better to wait the decisions of time, which are slow and sure, than to take those of synods, which are often hasty and injudicious."
He quotes Otto Jesperson, in regards to English's lack of authority ruling over it, "(English is like a garden) laid out seemingly without any definite plan, and in which you are allowed to walk everywhere according to your own fancy without having to fear a stern keeper enforcing rigorous regulations."
Bryson goes on to say that English "has long relied on self-appointed authorities."
A great quote about Pres Bush Sr., "The day after he was elected president in 1988, George Bush told a television reporter he couldn't believe the enormity of what had happened. Had president-elect Bush known that the primary meaning of enormity is wickidness or evilness, he would doubtless had selected a more apt term."
"One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will push new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl themselves into the path of change."
He ends the chapter with this great tidbit:
"Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarian's work is never done when he turned to those gathered loyally around him and whispered, 'I am about to - or I am going to - die; either expression is used.'"
The next chapter is titled, "Order out of chaos" and it is about dictionaries. "By virtue of their brevity, dictionary definitions often fail to convey the nuances of English. Rank and rancid mean roughly the same thing, but, as Aitchison notes, we would never talk about eating rank butter, or wearing rancid socks. A dictionary will tell you that tall and high mean much the same thing, but it won't explain to you that while you can apply either term to a building, you can apply only tall to a person."
The next chapter is "Old World, New World" Here he discusses the origin of OK. "Of all new words to issue from the New World, the quintessential Americanism without any doubt was O.K. Arguable America's single greatest gift to international discourse, OK is the most grammatically versatile of words, able to serve as an adjective (lunch was ok), verb (can you ok this for me?), noun (I need your ok on this), interjection (ok, I heard you), and adverb (we did ok). It can carry shades of meaning that range from casual assent (shall we go? ok.) to great enthusiasm (OK!), to lukewarm endorsement (the party was ok) to a more or less meaningless filler of space (ok, can I have your attention?)."
He mentions US westward expansion an the words settlers came up with to describe their lives and words including hornswoggle, rambunctious, and kick the bucket. Some words made up by them didn't last: monstracious, teetoticiously, helliferocious, conbobberation, obflisticate, and others.
About the founding fathers adopting English as a national or official language: "The founding fathers were so little exercised by the question of an official language for the United States that they made no mention of it in the Constitution."
In another chapter, "English as a world language" he discusses borrowing back and forth between languages.
"What really rankles the French is not that they are borrowing so many words from the rest of the world but that the rest of the world is no longer borrowing so many from them. As the magazine Le Point put it: 'Our technical contribution stopped with the word chauffeur.'"
Using obfuscation (unclear language): an airline referred to a crash as an "involuntary conversion of a 727". Hospitals call patient deaths "negative patient-care outcomes." The pentagon described toothpicks as "wooden interdental stimulators" and tents as "frame-supported tension structures"
On computers' inability to "get" human language, "a computer was instructed to translate the expression out of sight, out of mind out of English and back in again and came up with blind insanity. It is curious to reflect that we have computers that effortlessly compute pi to 5000 places and yet cannot be made to understand that there is a difference between time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana or that in the English speaking world to make up a story, make up one's face and to make up after a fight are all quite separate things."
An ortheopist is a professional pronouncer (as in one hired by the BBC to help broadcasters with pronunciaton of strange and foreign names).
On a chapter called "Names"
The names of Britain's 70,000 or so pubs cover a broad range, running from the inspired to the probable, from the deft to the daft. Almost any name will do so long as it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing or enjoying oneself. At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners - this is a basic requirement of most British institutions - and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal."
The English name Smith has equivalents (in meaning) in other languages: Schmidt (German), Ferrier (French), Ferraro (Italian), Herrero (Spanish), Kovacs (Hungarian), Kusnetzov (Russian).
In regards to place names in Britain: "Occasionally the spellings seem to defy pronunciation...but more often it is the other way around: The spellings look simple and straightforward, so that the innocent traveler is lulled into a sense of security, little realizing what treacheries they hide."
There is another chapter titled "swearing" which is predictably entertaining.
"Swearing seems to have some near-universal qualities. In almost all cultures, swearing involves one or more of the following: filth, the forbidden (incest), sacred, and usually all three. Most cultures have two levels of swearing - relatively mild and highly profane."
"English is unusual in including the impossible and the pleasurable in its litany of profanities. It is a strange and little noted idiosyncrasy of our tongue that when we wish to express extreme fury we entreat the object of our rage to undertake an anatomical impossibility, or stranger still, to engage in the one activity that is bound to give him more pleasure than almost anything else. Can there be, when you think about it, a more improbable sentiment than "Get fucked!" We might as well snarl, "Make a lot of money!" or "Have a nice day!"
"After Ok, fuck must be about the most versatile of all English words. It can be used to describe a multitude of conditions and phenomena, from making a mess of something (fuck up), to being casual or provocative (fuck around), to inviting or announcing a departure (fuck off), to being estimable (fucking-A), to being baffled (fuck if I know), to being disgusted (fuck this), and on and on."
"Fuck probably reached its zenith during WWII" snafu (situation normal - all fucked up), fubar (fucked up beyond all recognition), fubb (fucked up beyond belief).
"This tendency to transform profanities into harmless expressions is a particular characteristic of English swearing. Most languages employ euphemism in some measure...but no other language approaches English for the number of delicate expletives of the sort that you could safely say in front of a maiden aunt: darn, durn, drat, gosh, golly, goodness gracious, gee whiz, jeepers, shucks, and so on. We have scores, if not hundreds, of these terms."
There is a chapter called "wordplay" where he lists lots of cool anagram, palindromes, etc
anagrams:
carthorse - orchestra
contaminated - no admittance
emigrants - streaming
old testament - most talented
world cup team - talcum powder
ronald wilson reagan - insane anglo warlord
spiro agnew - grow a penis
two plus eleven - one plus twelve
western union - no wire unsent
circumstantial evidence - can ruin a selected victim
a stitch in time saves nine - this is meant as incentive
william shakespeare - i am a weakish speller (or) i like mr w h as a pal see (or) we all make his praise
the morse code - here come dots
victoria englands queen - rules a nice quiet land
parishioners - i hate parsons
intoxicate - excitation
schoolmaster - the classroom
mother in law - woman hitler
palindromes:
a man a plan a canal panama
norma is a selfless as i am ron
was it eliots toilet i saw
too far edna we wander afoot
madam im adam
sex at noon taxes
are we not drawn onward we few drawn onward to new era
able was i ere i saw elba
sums are not set a test on erasmus
satan oscillate my metallic sonatas
amphibology - intentionally ambiguous statements
"customers who think our waiters are rude should see the manager"
"Thank you so much for the book, I shall lose no time in reading it" (Disraeli)
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue
by John McWhorter. Finally finished - it's really not that long, I was just interrupted. It is full of all sorts of arguments about the formation of the English language. He makes some good points, but his arguments are a little too strong, which makes me hedge and pull back a little and say, "Ok, it's possible, but..."
There are just a few quotes I would like to cite:
"Linguists savor articulateness in speech and fine composition in writing as much as anyone else. Our position is not that we should chuck standards of graceful composition. All of us are agreed that there is a usefulness in a standard variety of a language, whose artful and effective usage requires tutelage."
"Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years."
"All of this (the history of change of the English language through time) is seen as noble, historical, a matter of our mighty and open language coming to be. But somehow, there seems to be an idea that the process had an inherent end point, beyond which we are not to go. It's as if somebody, somewhere had been endeavoring to meld a chunky Germanic tongue spoken by some restless warrior tribes into precisely the English we have right now, that they officially declared themselves finished sometime not long ago, and that from now on, we are not to mess up their creation."
"No language makes perfect sense. That's another way of saying: there is no known language that does not have wrinkles of illogicality here and there."
"There is a canny objection one sometimes hears out there that English is easy at first, but hard to master the details of, while other languages are hard at first but easy to master the details of."
There are just a few quotes I would like to cite:
"Linguists savor articulateness in speech and fine composition in writing as much as anyone else. Our position is not that we should chuck standards of graceful composition. All of us are agreed that there is a usefulness in a standard variety of a language, whose artful and effective usage requires tutelage."
"Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years."
"All of this (the history of change of the English language through time) is seen as noble, historical, a matter of our mighty and open language coming to be. But somehow, there seems to be an idea that the process had an inherent end point, beyond which we are not to go. It's as if somebody, somewhere had been endeavoring to meld a chunky Germanic tongue spoken by some restless warrior tribes into precisely the English we have right now, that they officially declared themselves finished sometime not long ago, and that from now on, we are not to mess up their creation."
"No language makes perfect sense. That's another way of saying: there is no known language that does not have wrinkles of illogicality here and there."
"There is a canny objection one sometimes hears out there that English is easy at first, but hard to master the details of, while other languages are hard at first but easy to master the details of."
The first three
I couldn't wait anymore. I drew the first three book names from the box. The winners are:
1. Eleanor Roosevelt volume 1
2. A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women 1764 to the present
3. Best American Essays: Fifth college edition
I started this post but never published it. I read 2 and 3 already, and I drew another 3 because I couldn't wait; it was so much fun!
4. 2012 The Return of Quetzalcoatl
5. Henry VIII
6. Mexico and Peru Myths and Legends
So now 1, 4, 5, 6 are sitting on my bedside table along with Gabaldon's Breath of Snow in Ashes, Lonely Planet's How to Write Travel Writing, Tales to Tremble by, The 3am Epiphany, Reading Like a Writer, and a whole stack of books for my capstone research and class.
#3, Best American Essays: Fifth college edition, was an excellent book. I could have excerpted every other page. It was such an interesting mix of great writing on all different subjects. I highly recommend the Best American Series. This one is the best of the best intended for use in college classes as a good collection of writing in many styles for their students.
#2, A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women 1764 to the present, sat on my shelves for years - and what a treasure. It is a colection of excerpts from diaries of common American women. Some of the writing and stories were amazing! I ordered two of the books from Amazon so I can read the whole thing. Here are a few of the highlights:
One woman, writing in 1788 in New Hampshire, describes a change in her husband toward their daughter - how he begins to sexually molest her and the mother can do nothing about it since women had absolutely no rights back then.
Several women give first hand accounts of the Revolutionary War, the Oregon Trail and the Civil War. I was continually surprised that some women were allowed to speak their minds so freely at these times.
Elizabeth ashe went to France at the end of WWI to work in a hospital. She writes of French woman named Mlle. L'Hotellier who worked in a hospital, hid French troops from the Germans and helped their escape, was finally caught, arrested, tortured and starved. Later she escaped and made her way back to the hospital. Mlle. says of her experience: "No one knows what freedom is that has not been deprived of it; that she is now free from everything; that she realizes that before she was a slave to certain habits, slave to her clothes and to her possessions, but that now that she is free she realizes how little all of these are worth if we are deprived of the freedom of body or soul."
One excerpt was by a Juanita Harrison - a Mississippi born black woman (b. 1891) who worked her way around the world finding jobs as ladies' maids to support her travels. She finally retired on the island of Hawaii in a tent. I am currently waiting for this book in the mail. I really need to read the whole thing.
The next diarist is Eslanda Goode Robeson. She is another black woman (b. 1896) who went to Columbia University. Her book is called African Journey and is currently in the mail on its way to me. It was such an amazing story I just had to get the book. Here are a few bits of her writing:
She and her 8 y o son are traveling through Africa in 1936. This was an era of rampant and unhidden racism. The colonial era is still in full swing and modern conveniences are not common.
In Kenya she remarks in regards to the public segregation: "It always strikes me as amusing, pathetic and a bit silly when I see Europeans taking so much trouble to segregate themselves in public places, when i know these same Europeans fill their homes with all kinds of native servants, who come into the most intimate contact with their food, clothing, and especially their children."
"This morning we drove through a locust storm. Pauli said it was like the movies. (It is strange when one comes to think of it, that natural phenomena should seem like fiction or films, and not vice versa, to city-bred or highly civilized people.)"
As she worked with some native women one day, "They wanted to know what kind of work women did 'outside,' how they brought up their children, how their men treated them,how they dressed, whether they went to school with the men. They wanted to know if I thought our black children will have a place in the world, a real place, or will 'they only be told what to do?' "We are tired of being told what to do. Our children will be more tired of it.'"
Crossing the Mediterranean on a boat, she conversed with an older white "colonial" man. The man said her son was intelligent, "pity he's got that handicap, he's black, pity, he could go far." The author responded, "He'll go far because he's black. His color, his background, his rich history are part of his wealth. We consider it an asset, not a handicap." Later she contemplated, "This poor man doesn't know what it's all about. He has no important or useful knowledge about more than a billion of his fellow men - Negroes, Africans, Indians, Chinese, probably Jews, and probably Russians. Most likely he has simply dismissed them contemptuously as "primitive," "oriental," or "red." He has built himself into a very small, very limited world of his own, behind a towering formidable wall of ignorance, prejudice and "superiority."
1. Eleanor Roosevelt volume 1
2. A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women 1764 to the present
3. Best American Essays: Fifth college edition
I started this post but never published it. I read 2 and 3 already, and I drew another 3 because I couldn't wait; it was so much fun!
4. 2012 The Return of Quetzalcoatl
5. Henry VIII
6. Mexico and Peru Myths and Legends
So now 1, 4, 5, 6 are sitting on my bedside table along with Gabaldon's Breath of Snow in Ashes, Lonely Planet's How to Write Travel Writing, Tales to Tremble by, The 3am Epiphany, Reading Like a Writer, and a whole stack of books for my capstone research and class.
#3, Best American Essays: Fifth college edition, was an excellent book. I could have excerpted every other page. It was such an interesting mix of great writing on all different subjects. I highly recommend the Best American Series. This one is the best of the best intended for use in college classes as a good collection of writing in many styles for their students.
#2, A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women 1764 to the present, sat on my shelves for years - and what a treasure. It is a colection of excerpts from diaries of common American women. Some of the writing and stories were amazing! I ordered two of the books from Amazon so I can read the whole thing. Here are a few of the highlights:
One woman, writing in 1788 in New Hampshire, describes a change in her husband toward their daughter - how he begins to sexually molest her and the mother can do nothing about it since women had absolutely no rights back then.
Several women give first hand accounts of the Revolutionary War, the Oregon Trail and the Civil War. I was continually surprised that some women were allowed to speak their minds so freely at these times.
Elizabeth ashe went to France at the end of WWI to work in a hospital. She writes of French woman named Mlle. L'Hotellier who worked in a hospital, hid French troops from the Germans and helped their escape, was finally caught, arrested, tortured and starved. Later she escaped and made her way back to the hospital. Mlle. says of her experience: "No one knows what freedom is that has not been deprived of it; that she is now free from everything; that she realizes that before she was a slave to certain habits, slave to her clothes and to her possessions, but that now that she is free she realizes how little all of these are worth if we are deprived of the freedom of body or soul."
One excerpt was by a Juanita Harrison - a Mississippi born black woman (b. 1891) who worked her way around the world finding jobs as ladies' maids to support her travels. She finally retired on the island of Hawaii in a tent. I am currently waiting for this book in the mail. I really need to read the whole thing.
The next diarist is Eslanda Goode Robeson. She is another black woman (b. 1896) who went to Columbia University. Her book is called African Journey and is currently in the mail on its way to me. It was such an amazing story I just had to get the book. Here are a few bits of her writing:
She and her 8 y o son are traveling through Africa in 1936. This was an era of rampant and unhidden racism. The colonial era is still in full swing and modern conveniences are not common.
In Kenya she remarks in regards to the public segregation: "It always strikes me as amusing, pathetic and a bit silly when I see Europeans taking so much trouble to segregate themselves in public places, when i know these same Europeans fill their homes with all kinds of native servants, who come into the most intimate contact with their food, clothing, and especially their children."
"This morning we drove through a locust storm. Pauli said it was like the movies. (It is strange when one comes to think of it, that natural phenomena should seem like fiction or films, and not vice versa, to city-bred or highly civilized people.)"
As she worked with some native women one day, "They wanted to know what kind of work women did 'outside,' how they brought up their children, how their men treated them,how they dressed, whether they went to school with the men. They wanted to know if I thought our black children will have a place in the world, a real place, or will 'they only be told what to do?' "We are tired of being told what to do. Our children will be more tired of it.'"
Crossing the Mediterranean on a boat, she conversed with an older white "colonial" man. The man said her son was intelligent, "pity he's got that handicap, he's black, pity, he could go far." The author responded, "He'll go far because he's black. His color, his background, his rich history are part of his wealth. We consider it an asset, not a handicap." Later she contemplated, "This poor man doesn't know what it's all about. He has no important or useful knowledge about more than a billion of his fellow men - Negroes, Africans, Indians, Chinese, probably Jews, and probably Russians. Most likely he has simply dismissed them contemptuously as "primitive," "oriental," or "red." He has built himself into a very small, very limited world of his own, behind a towering formidable wall of ignorance, prejudice and "superiority."
a quote from Derek Bickerton
From Adam's Tongue: How Humans made language, how language made humans.
"What makes interdisciplinary work so hard is that any academic discipline acts like a straitjacket, forcing you to look only in certain directions, blocking other perspectives from view. It takes a good deal of conscious effort, plus a lot of soaking yourself in other people's literature, to overcome this state of affairs."
I actually didn't finish this book because he just kept driving at his point like a salesman and I decided I wasn't interested in it. But I do like this quote and the idea of the restrictions your academic discipline puts on you.
"What makes interdisciplinary work so hard is that any academic discipline acts like a straitjacket, forcing you to look only in certain directions, blocking other perspectives from view. It takes a good deal of conscious effort, plus a lot of soaking yourself in other people's literature, to overcome this state of affairs."
I actually didn't finish this book because he just kept driving at his point like a salesman and I decided I wasn't interested in it. But I do like this quote and the idea of the restrictions your academic discipline puts on you.
The Art of Readable Writing
This little gem caught my eye on the shelves of Hamline library. The Art of Readable Writing by Rudolf Flesch, Ph.D. (1949). I was curious what kind of writing advice he would give back in 1949. I actually found some very interesting guidance.
He talks about simplifying your vocabulary: "Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that most people are morons... If a person doesn't know much, that doesn't necessarily mean he's unintelligent.After all, intelligence is the ability to learn...'We often overestimate the stock of information readers have, and underestimate their intelligence.' (Glenn Frank)"
"There's hardly anything more important for readable writing: the more you know about the kind of person you are writing for, the better you'll write." I ask myself, "who am I writing this blog for?" I have no idea. Actually, I think it is for me and my future students. I mainly see this blog as a place to store snippets of interesting things I've read.
Lee De Forest said of the radio: "What have you gentlemen done with my child? He was conceived as a potent instrumentality for culture, fine music, the uplifting of America's mass intelligence. You have debased this child. You have made him a laughing stock to the intelligence."
"This goes for movies, books, magazines, newspapers too. Never mind writing what the public wants - or what you suppose the public wants. (Or what you want the public to think they want.) Study your audience and then write what you want to say in the form that is most likely to appeal to them."
"The first rule of good style is to have something to say...but having something to say also means having a good stock of facts...At the same time as you gather your facts, you must also get hold of two more things: first, your framework, and second, your verbal illustrations. Your reader will need a firm framework and colorful verbal illustrations to enjoy and remember what you have written."
Next he discusses how to get inspired - by doing nothing for a while. "Every professional writer knows that this period of just-sitting-and-thinking between legwork and outline is the most important part of the whole writing process."
"In your writing you must first go over your material in your mind, trying to find the focus, the perspective, the angle of vision that will make you see clearly the shape of whatever it is you are writing about. There has to be one point that is sharply in focus, and a clear grouping of everything else around it. Once you see this clearly, your reader will too. And that, the shape of your ideas, is usually all he is going to carry away from his reading." So true - ggod point to remember and pass to my students.
"The most widely used device for getting ideas into shape is to buttonhole some unsuspecting victim...and to rehearse your ideas aloud. This has two advantages: first, it forces you to funnel your ideas into a limited number of words; and second, the other person will tell you what your idea looks like from where he sits."
"Theoretical insights work best when the thinker is apparently wasting time." J. Robert Oppenheimer
In the next section he talks about where inspiration comes from. "Bright new ideas are always combinations of old ones; they usually come to us after our mind has had a rest after a concentrated effort; and if we do it right, we can sometimes coax them to the surface."
"have a large number of ideas and experiences on hand; put them together; stir vigorously."
"If you keep your mind always in apple-pie order, you'll probably never have that (bright idea). Your combinations will always be the old, well-established ones; your mind will always run in fixed grooves. That's why there is such a thing as a too strict classification or a too orderly outline... If you are used to starting every writing job by making an outline, don't. Wait until you have felt the click. Before that, any outline will tie your ideas down." I love that! More great ideas to pass along...
"Get your facts, think hard of the best way of presenting them, and then "think aside." Let the matter drop for a while until you suddenly hit upon a striking combination of ideas." Some people struggle with the "getting the facts" part, but that's a different problem. Once they figure that out, they can do this.
On intros and conclusions:
"An effective piece of writing should start with something that points to its main theme. In other words, you must put your reader in the right frame of mind; you must start by getting him interested in what's going to come...prepare his mind for what's going to come, but not give away the show"
"A good ending should echo the main theme, just as a good opening should sound it in advance...petering out is the most common fault"
"If you don't follow the natural order of your subject, the result is invariably confusion...compelling the reader to spend time in trifling detective work."
In the next section he suggests writing a story around a character. "There's nothing on earth that cannot be told through a hero - or heroine - who's trying to solve a problem in spite of a series of obstacles. It's the classic formula; and it's the only one you can rely on to interest the average reader...If there is no story to tell, you'll have to invent one."
"An excess of summary and an insufficiency of scene in a novel makes the story seem remote, without bite, second hand"
Use dialogue to include the reader. Dialogue means not just direst quotes, but also questions, commands, exclamations, incomplete sentences, or sentences addressed directly to the audience. Percentages of these types of sentences in fiction will be over fifty percent, in popular (magazine) writing 12 to 15 percent, in technical writing - zero.
"Spoken language is the primary phenomenon, and writing is only a more or less imperfect reflection of it." E. H. Sturtevant
In regards to the rule of not repeating words (which he says should be broken), "Sentences in which the writer has carefully not repeated a word set readers wondering what the significance of the change is, only to conclude disappointingly that it has none.
About grammar rules - "...rules of English usage are not immutable natural laws, but simply conventions among educated English-speaking people. If enough educated people insist on making a "mistake," then it isn't a mistake any more and the teachers might as well stop wasting their time correcting it."
"There's hardly a rule in English usage that holds good in all possible situations; in fact, wherever there is a choice, the mechanical application of a rule-of-thumb will be more often bad than good."
In the next section he talks about sentence length and how it has been shrinking over time. He lays out an example of a long, convoluted and confusing sentence, then says, "The cure for this type of sentence elephantiasis is very simple. All you need to do is stop being stuffy and talk like a human being, and that's that." He quotes a law professor, "casting all conditions and requirements into a single sentence will often compel the unfortunate reader to take the sentence apart so that he can obtain an understanding. His task would have been much easier if the author had broken the sentence down into several sentences." Another tip for students - they often write sentences that are too long.
A great quote about truth from John Horne Tooke, "Truth supposes mankind: for whom and by whom alone the word is formed, and to whom only it is applicable. If no man, no truth. There is therefore no such thing as eternal, immutable, everlasting truth; unless mankind be also eternal, immutable, and everlasting. Two persons may contradict each other, and yet both speak truth: for the truth of one person may be opposite the truth of another."
Tooke says, "language goes through a continuous process of condensation and abbreviation; through the centuries, people manage to cram more and more meaning into fewer and fewer words. What once took a whole sentence or clause to express, can now be compressed into a single word; and language is full of clever devices that make for more and more speed."
"We shouldn't stuff our sentences with tightly packed bundles of abstractions without ever choosing a simpler way of expressing the same idea...Pompousness is often funny, but it has its serious side. Long words are hard to read; sometimes they are actually unintelligible...The trouble is the terrific density of the language. The things being said come too thick and fast for the ordinary reader...In fact if someone cannot understand a piece of writing, the trouble is rarely that his vocabulary is too small; usually he simply cannot cope with the way words are used." In other words, once again, simplify your writing.
"Vocabulary building as a major industry dates back to some intelligence tests that were given to various occupational groups years back. It turns out that big executives topped everybody else in the range of their vocabulary. The (false) logic is simple: top executives have top vocabulary; hence: vocabulary means success. And so the battle cry was born: 'Build up your vocabulary for quick advancement.'...The trouble is that all the hullabaloo about vocabulary building gives the ordinary citizen the notion that there's a premium on rare and unfamiliar words. Instead he ought to realize that they work like a drug - harmless in small doses, but dangerous if used too much."
"First - make sure you know for whom you are writing. Find out what they know, what they don't know, and what they want to know. Write for your readers and nobody else...Now, collect your material. Get all the information you need. Pay special attention to the little things that will add color and human interest... Then, when you have all the stuff you need, stop for a while and do something else... (when you write) Start with something interesting and promising; wind up with something the reader will remember."
"The trouble with most current writing is that it consists of nothing but nouns and adjectives, glued together with prepositions or with be verbs."
Winston Churchill in regards to the "don't end a sentence with a preposition" rule: "This is the kind of arrant pedantry, up with which I shall not put."
"Everyone hears but what he understands." Goethe
In regards to the meanings of words: "One of the basic facts about language is that no word ever means exactly the same to two different people... Your background and experience with a word can never exactly duplicate mine. The basic meaning of the word will usually be the same, but the connotations, the overtones, the feel around the fringes cannot possibly be alike. You can never tell just what a seemingly innocuous word will conjure up in another person's mind... Words are, by definition, unpredictable. That's a fascinating and exasperating fact anyone who writes has to face. Ordinarily we take these differences in connotation for granted. Our language is, and always will be, an imperfect tool of communication and we just have to make the best of it. By and large, people do understand each other even if there may be some amount of misunderstanding around the fringes of practically every word they use."
"When it comes to translation from one language to another, it becomes almost impossible to find words whose meaning matches exactly that of the original. Behind each word in a language is the history of all the uses of the word in that language - and that history is always untranslatable...It's the abstract words that are most apt to be translated in different ways."
"the true source of word meanings is not the dictionary but the people who use the language."
"You can guide a reader's interpretation of the more abstract words - which are the most dangerous - by using as many concrete cases, illustrations and examples as possible."
When we read: "If you think you just pick up on the meanings of words one after the other, you are wrong. Language is not as simple as that. What you do is this: Your eyes move along the printed lines in rhythmic jumps. After each jump they rest for a short while, focus on a word or two, and move on. From time to time, when you unconsciously feel the need of checking back, your eyes move back. And that's the pattern. At about 250 words per minute (average). But that's not the whole story. Words don't mean anything by themselves, or even in groups of two or three. Words get their meaning from the context. So after your eyes have seen the words, your mind assigns to these words a provisional meaning. When the end of the phrase, sentence, or paragraph is reached, your mind rethinks the words in the light of what came after. Reading is really a miracle: your eyes pick up groups of words in split second time and your mind keeps these words in delicate balance until it gets around to a point where they make sense. What all this means to a writer is obvious. A writer must know how people read, what are the main sources of reading errors, and what can be done to forestall them... Don't use unfamiliar spellings or strange words, people's eyes will refuse to read them. Another source of trouble is little words. We ordinarily don't read them at all, but simply assume they are where they belong."
"Nothing is self-explanatory - it's up to you to explain it. And you'll have to do it in words."
"Language is the most democratic institution in the world. Its basis is majority rule; its final authority is the people. If the people decide that they don't want the subjunctive anymore, out goes the subjunctive. If the people adopt okay as a word, in comes okay. In the realm of language, everybody has the right to vote; and everybody does vote, every day of the year. The way you talk and write makes a difference in the English language that is being talked and written today. There is no fixed set of rules: you are making the rules. To be sure, there are limits to what you can do with your language, but they are wide limits, and there is lots of elbow room for everybody. In one way or another, your language differs from that of anybody else. It's part of your own unique personality. It has traces of the family you grew up in, the place where you came from, the people you have associated with, the jobs you have had, the schools you went to, the books you have read, your hobbies, your sports, your philosophy, your religion, your politics, your prejudices, your memories, your ambitions, your dreams, and your love life. The way you form your sentences shows your outlook on life; the words you choose shows your temperament and your aspirations."
"English is a great language; it is perhaps the one that gives the individual greatest freedom. It is poetic and practical at the same time; it is tremendously rich; it's a sort of all-purpose language."
"Language is a social affair; we use it according to the social situation we are in. Our rhetoric is keyed to our place in society - either the one we have or the one we'd like to have. We write stilted English because we unconsciously assume that this is expected of us in the position we happen to fill or the organization we belong to. We have formed a set of habits. and in our speaking and writing we simply piece together the ready-made bits of language that are handy wherever we happen to be. Most of the time we keep our personality out of our language. The easiest thing is to conform."
These last quotes speak for themselves. I love this guy - he writes exactly what I want to express.
He talks about simplifying your vocabulary: "Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that most people are morons... If a person doesn't know much, that doesn't necessarily mean he's unintelligent.After all, intelligence is the ability to learn...'We often overestimate the stock of information readers have, and underestimate their intelligence.' (Glenn Frank)"
"There's hardly anything more important for readable writing: the more you know about the kind of person you are writing for, the better you'll write." I ask myself, "who am I writing this blog for?" I have no idea. Actually, I think it is for me and my future students. I mainly see this blog as a place to store snippets of interesting things I've read.
Lee De Forest said of the radio: "What have you gentlemen done with my child? He was conceived as a potent instrumentality for culture, fine music, the uplifting of America's mass intelligence. You have debased this child. You have made him a laughing stock to the intelligence."
"This goes for movies, books, magazines, newspapers too. Never mind writing what the public wants - or what you suppose the public wants. (Or what you want the public to think they want.) Study your audience and then write what you want to say in the form that is most likely to appeal to them."
"The first rule of good style is to have something to say...but having something to say also means having a good stock of facts...At the same time as you gather your facts, you must also get hold of two more things: first, your framework, and second, your verbal illustrations. Your reader will need a firm framework and colorful verbal illustrations to enjoy and remember what you have written."
Next he discusses how to get inspired - by doing nothing for a while. "Every professional writer knows that this period of just-sitting-and-thinking between legwork and outline is the most important part of the whole writing process."
"In your writing you must first go over your material in your mind, trying to find the focus, the perspective, the angle of vision that will make you see clearly the shape of whatever it is you are writing about. There has to be one point that is sharply in focus, and a clear grouping of everything else around it. Once you see this clearly, your reader will too. And that, the shape of your ideas, is usually all he is going to carry away from his reading." So true - ggod point to remember and pass to my students.
"The most widely used device for getting ideas into shape is to buttonhole some unsuspecting victim...and to rehearse your ideas aloud. This has two advantages: first, it forces you to funnel your ideas into a limited number of words; and second, the other person will tell you what your idea looks like from where he sits."
"Theoretical insights work best when the thinker is apparently wasting time." J. Robert Oppenheimer
In the next section he talks about where inspiration comes from. "Bright new ideas are always combinations of old ones; they usually come to us after our mind has had a rest after a concentrated effort; and if we do it right, we can sometimes coax them to the surface."
"have a large number of ideas and experiences on hand; put them together; stir vigorously."
"If you keep your mind always in apple-pie order, you'll probably never have that (bright idea). Your combinations will always be the old, well-established ones; your mind will always run in fixed grooves. That's why there is such a thing as a too strict classification or a too orderly outline... If you are used to starting every writing job by making an outline, don't. Wait until you have felt the click. Before that, any outline will tie your ideas down." I love that! More great ideas to pass along...
"Get your facts, think hard of the best way of presenting them, and then "think aside." Let the matter drop for a while until you suddenly hit upon a striking combination of ideas." Some people struggle with the "getting the facts" part, but that's a different problem. Once they figure that out, they can do this.
On intros and conclusions:
"An effective piece of writing should start with something that points to its main theme. In other words, you must put your reader in the right frame of mind; you must start by getting him interested in what's going to come...prepare his mind for what's going to come, but not give away the show"
"A good ending should echo the main theme, just as a good opening should sound it in advance...petering out is the most common fault"
"If you don't follow the natural order of your subject, the result is invariably confusion...compelling the reader to spend time in trifling detective work."
In the next section he suggests writing a story around a character. "There's nothing on earth that cannot be told through a hero - or heroine - who's trying to solve a problem in spite of a series of obstacles. It's the classic formula; and it's the only one you can rely on to interest the average reader...If there is no story to tell, you'll have to invent one."
"An excess of summary and an insufficiency of scene in a novel makes the story seem remote, without bite, second hand"
Use dialogue to include the reader. Dialogue means not just direst quotes, but also questions, commands, exclamations, incomplete sentences, or sentences addressed directly to the audience. Percentages of these types of sentences in fiction will be over fifty percent, in popular (magazine) writing 12 to 15 percent, in technical writing - zero.
"Spoken language is the primary phenomenon, and writing is only a more or less imperfect reflection of it." E. H. Sturtevant
In regards to the rule of not repeating words (which he says should be broken), "Sentences in which the writer has carefully not repeated a word set readers wondering what the significance of the change is, only to conclude disappointingly that it has none.
About grammar rules - "...rules of English usage are not immutable natural laws, but simply conventions among educated English-speaking people. If enough educated people insist on making a "mistake," then it isn't a mistake any more and the teachers might as well stop wasting their time correcting it."
"There's hardly a rule in English usage that holds good in all possible situations; in fact, wherever there is a choice, the mechanical application of a rule-of-thumb will be more often bad than good."
In the next section he talks about sentence length and how it has been shrinking over time. He lays out an example of a long, convoluted and confusing sentence, then says, "The cure for this type of sentence elephantiasis is very simple. All you need to do is stop being stuffy and talk like a human being, and that's that." He quotes a law professor, "casting all conditions and requirements into a single sentence will often compel the unfortunate reader to take the sentence apart so that he can obtain an understanding. His task would have been much easier if the author had broken the sentence down into several sentences." Another tip for students - they often write sentences that are too long.
A great quote about truth from John Horne Tooke, "Truth supposes mankind: for whom and by whom alone the word is formed, and to whom only it is applicable. If no man, no truth. There is therefore no such thing as eternal, immutable, everlasting truth; unless mankind be also eternal, immutable, and everlasting. Two persons may contradict each other, and yet both speak truth: for the truth of one person may be opposite the truth of another."
Tooke says, "language goes through a continuous process of condensation and abbreviation; through the centuries, people manage to cram more and more meaning into fewer and fewer words. What once took a whole sentence or clause to express, can now be compressed into a single word; and language is full of clever devices that make for more and more speed."
"We shouldn't stuff our sentences with tightly packed bundles of abstractions without ever choosing a simpler way of expressing the same idea...Pompousness is often funny, but it has its serious side. Long words are hard to read; sometimes they are actually unintelligible...The trouble is the terrific density of the language. The things being said come too thick and fast for the ordinary reader...In fact if someone cannot understand a piece of writing, the trouble is rarely that his vocabulary is too small; usually he simply cannot cope with the way words are used." In other words, once again, simplify your writing.
"Vocabulary building as a major industry dates back to some intelligence tests that were given to various occupational groups years back. It turns out that big executives topped everybody else in the range of their vocabulary. The (false) logic is simple: top executives have top vocabulary; hence: vocabulary means success. And so the battle cry was born: 'Build up your vocabulary for quick advancement.'...The trouble is that all the hullabaloo about vocabulary building gives the ordinary citizen the notion that there's a premium on rare and unfamiliar words. Instead he ought to realize that they work like a drug - harmless in small doses, but dangerous if used too much."
"First - make sure you know for whom you are writing. Find out what they know, what they don't know, and what they want to know. Write for your readers and nobody else...Now, collect your material. Get all the information you need. Pay special attention to the little things that will add color and human interest... Then, when you have all the stuff you need, stop for a while and do something else... (when you write) Start with something interesting and promising; wind up with something the reader will remember."
"The trouble with most current writing is that it consists of nothing but nouns and adjectives, glued together with prepositions or with be verbs."
Winston Churchill in regards to the "don't end a sentence with a preposition" rule: "This is the kind of arrant pedantry, up with which I shall not put."
"Everyone hears but what he understands." Goethe
In regards to the meanings of words: "One of the basic facts about language is that no word ever means exactly the same to two different people... Your background and experience with a word can never exactly duplicate mine. The basic meaning of the word will usually be the same, but the connotations, the overtones, the feel around the fringes cannot possibly be alike. You can never tell just what a seemingly innocuous word will conjure up in another person's mind... Words are, by definition, unpredictable. That's a fascinating and exasperating fact anyone who writes has to face. Ordinarily we take these differences in connotation for granted. Our language is, and always will be, an imperfect tool of communication and we just have to make the best of it. By and large, people do understand each other even if there may be some amount of misunderstanding around the fringes of practically every word they use."
"When it comes to translation from one language to another, it becomes almost impossible to find words whose meaning matches exactly that of the original. Behind each word in a language is the history of all the uses of the word in that language - and that history is always untranslatable...It's the abstract words that are most apt to be translated in different ways."
"the true source of word meanings is not the dictionary but the people who use the language."
"You can guide a reader's interpretation of the more abstract words - which are the most dangerous - by using as many concrete cases, illustrations and examples as possible."
When we read: "If you think you just pick up on the meanings of words one after the other, you are wrong. Language is not as simple as that. What you do is this: Your eyes move along the printed lines in rhythmic jumps. After each jump they rest for a short while, focus on a word or two, and move on. From time to time, when you unconsciously feel the need of checking back, your eyes move back. And that's the pattern. At about 250 words per minute (average). But that's not the whole story. Words don't mean anything by themselves, or even in groups of two or three. Words get their meaning from the context. So after your eyes have seen the words, your mind assigns to these words a provisional meaning. When the end of the phrase, sentence, or paragraph is reached, your mind rethinks the words in the light of what came after. Reading is really a miracle: your eyes pick up groups of words in split second time and your mind keeps these words in delicate balance until it gets around to a point where they make sense. What all this means to a writer is obvious. A writer must know how people read, what are the main sources of reading errors, and what can be done to forestall them... Don't use unfamiliar spellings or strange words, people's eyes will refuse to read them. Another source of trouble is little words. We ordinarily don't read them at all, but simply assume they are where they belong."
"Nothing is self-explanatory - it's up to you to explain it. And you'll have to do it in words."
"Language is the most democratic institution in the world. Its basis is majority rule; its final authority is the people. If the people decide that they don't want the subjunctive anymore, out goes the subjunctive. If the people adopt okay as a word, in comes okay. In the realm of language, everybody has the right to vote; and everybody does vote, every day of the year. The way you talk and write makes a difference in the English language that is being talked and written today. There is no fixed set of rules: you are making the rules. To be sure, there are limits to what you can do with your language, but they are wide limits, and there is lots of elbow room for everybody. In one way or another, your language differs from that of anybody else. It's part of your own unique personality. It has traces of the family you grew up in, the place where you came from, the people you have associated with, the jobs you have had, the schools you went to, the books you have read, your hobbies, your sports, your philosophy, your religion, your politics, your prejudices, your memories, your ambitions, your dreams, and your love life. The way you form your sentences shows your outlook on life; the words you choose shows your temperament and your aspirations."
"English is a great language; it is perhaps the one that gives the individual greatest freedom. It is poetic and practical at the same time; it is tremendously rich; it's a sort of all-purpose language."
"Language is a social affair; we use it according to the social situation we are in. Our rhetoric is keyed to our place in society - either the one we have or the one we'd like to have. We write stilted English because we unconsciously assume that this is expected of us in the position we happen to fill or the organization we belong to. We have formed a set of habits. and in our speaking and writing we simply piece together the ready-made bits of language that are handy wherever we happen to be. Most of the time we keep our personality out of our language. The easiest thing is to conform."
These last quotes speak for themselves. I love this guy - he writes exactly what I want to express.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Spoken Here
This post is about a book I read last summer called Spoken Here: Travels among threatened languages by Mark Abley. I have been going through my books and posting them for sale on Amazon. Since I already read this book, I'm getting rid of it, and I want to blog about it before I do. I highly recommend this book - he's not a linguist, so you don't need to be one to understand him. I made notes as I read it. It is about disappearing languages. In one chapter he addresses the idea that one language is not "better" than another. "Languages evolve, of course, but they evolve toward simplicity." Our world has become more complicated, but our languages have gotten simpler.
"No language merits extinction by reason of incompetence." When native languages give in to English or Spanish it is not because those native languages were worthless or lesser than the world language that won out over them.
I love this quote: "Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand."
I learned some interesting U. S. history that they didn't teach us in school: "Andrew Jackson ordered the expulsion of all Indians in the southeastern states. It didn't matter whether a people had been friendly or hostile to the whites: they had to leave. (The next president) Van Buren declared, 'No state can achieve proper culture, civilization and progress as long as Indians are permitted to remain.' Through the 1830s, the US Army forced tens of thousands of Indians to abandon their homes at gunpoint and walk westward. untold thousands died along the way." Sounds like the Nazi death marches that Americans are so quick to proclaim as horrible. Its different when we do it, though.
Language is a "constant struggle for maximum communication, with minimal effort." People are always shortening things - sounds assimilate, syllables disappear - due to this lazy tendency in language.
"The knowledge that a language is disappearing can make its last speakers perpetually anxious to say it right. Yet languages depend on noisy use, not silent perfection."
"Indigenous languages might benefit from a gift of energy, money, and outside expertise. Even so, for the purposes of language reproduction, no external gift matters as much as self-belief. If mothers, fathers, and grandparents want to speak a language with their children, that language will survive. But if mothers, fathers, and grandparents are constantly told that their language is an old-fashioned relic, unfit to be uttered in a classroom or a factory, and useless for their children's future, then few of them are likely to keep up the struggle."
Overall, a great book.
"No language merits extinction by reason of incompetence." When native languages give in to English or Spanish it is not because those native languages were worthless or lesser than the world language that won out over them.
I love this quote: "Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand."
I learned some interesting U. S. history that they didn't teach us in school: "Andrew Jackson ordered the expulsion of all Indians in the southeastern states. It didn't matter whether a people had been friendly or hostile to the whites: they had to leave. (The next president) Van Buren declared, 'No state can achieve proper culture, civilization and progress as long as Indians are permitted to remain.' Through the 1830s, the US Army forced tens of thousands of Indians to abandon their homes at gunpoint and walk westward. untold thousands died along the way." Sounds like the Nazi death marches that Americans are so quick to proclaim as horrible. Its different when we do it, though.
Language is a "constant struggle for maximum communication, with minimal effort." People are always shortening things - sounds assimilate, syllables disappear - due to this lazy tendency in language.
"The knowledge that a language is disappearing can make its last speakers perpetually anxious to say it right. Yet languages depend on noisy use, not silent perfection."
"Indigenous languages might benefit from a gift of energy, money, and outside expertise. Even so, for the purposes of language reproduction, no external gift matters as much as self-belief. If mothers, fathers, and grandparents want to speak a language with their children, that language will survive. But if mothers, fathers, and grandparents are constantly told that their language is an old-fashioned relic, unfit to be uttered in a classroom or a factory, and useless for their children's future, then few of them are likely to keep up the struggle."
Overall, a great book.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
850 books in the box
Ok, so I discussed a few blogs back that I put some author's names in a container and I will draw a name when it's time to read the next book. Well, I expanded on the idea. I organized my books in Librarything and put all of the books that I want to read in one category. Then I printed out that category list, cut them up and folded each one and put them in a box. As I folded them a few thoughts came to mind. First, if I die tomorrow and my family finds this box of folded up book titles, they are going to think I was slightly insane. Maybe they'll think it was cute, or creative. I don't care. I can't think of any other way to fairly and randomly pick the next book. As I folded them, I looked at the titles and I would think to myself, "I hope I get this one first," or "I hope I don't draw this one." For the ones I hoped not to get, I would say, "If you don't want to read this book, why do you own it?" So then I would reconcile myself to fate. Then I started imagining weird combinations of three such as Bertrand Russel, Jean Auel, and Roots. Well. there's about 5000 pages to get through. SO I laid out some mental rules for myself:
1. If I really don't want to read a book, I can put it back into the pot.
2. If I start reading a book, and I just hate it, I will stop.
3. If I get the second (or third) of a series, I will read them in order.
Whatever, it's just my own casual book fate challenge.
Besides, I have a bunch of books on my bedside to finish before I draw my first one. There are 850 books in the box. What will my first book be???
1. If I really don't want to read a book, I can put it back into the pot.
2. If I start reading a book, and I just hate it, I will stop.
3. If I get the second (or third) of a series, I will read them in order.
Whatever, it's just my own casual book fate challenge.
Besides, I have a bunch of books on my bedside to finish before I draw my first one. There are 850 books in the box. What will my first book be???
Studies in Words finished
I have to admit I skipped the middle 7 chapters of this book. They were the actual meat of what Mr. Lewis wanted to discuss. Each of those chapters took a word and discussed its meaning through time and the Latin and Greek equivalents of those words and discussed how they were the same or different. I tried to read a few, but I was really not interested. His final chapter, however, was much more interesting. It is called "On the Fringe of Language." In it he discusses how we use words as insults, or just emotional expression, and they have lost meaning.
"Another limitation of language is that it cannot, unlike music or gesture, do more than one thing at once. However, the words in a great poet's phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind as a quasi-instantaneous chord, yet, strictly speaking, each word must be read or heard before the next. That way, language is as unilinear as time."
"One of the first things we have to say to a beginner (writer) ... is 'avoid all epithets which are merely emotional. It is no use telling us that something was "mysterious" or "loathsome" or "awe-inspiring" or "voluptuous." Do you think your readers will believe you just because you say so? You must go quite a different way to work. By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, readers, not you, exclaim, "How mysterious!" or "How loathsome!" Let me taste for myself and you'll have no need to tell me how I should react to the flavor.'
I love this paragraph because he states precisely what I feel, but cannot put into words, especially as eloquently as he does. Great advice as a tutor.
He goes on to tell us that there are exceptions...
'Which, to the boundaries of space and time,
Of melancholy space and doleful time,
He points out that in this poem, Donne reverses the process. "The object (space and time) is in one way so familiar to our imaginations, and in another so unimaginable - we have read so many tedious attempts to exalt or over-awe us with mere superlatives or even with simple arithmetic - That nothing can be made of it. This time...the poet appeals directly to our emotions; and not obvious ones." So true when those simple overused adjectives don't do something justice. Melancholy and doleful.
Next he discusses words that are merely emotional and have lost meaning (remember verbicide?)
He cites damn as an example, "historically the whole Christian eschatology lies behind them. If no one had ever consigned his enemy to the eternal fires and believed that there were eternal fires to receive him, these ejaculations would never have existed. But inflation, the spontaneous hyperboles of ill-temper, and the decay of religion, have long since emptied them of that lurid content. Those who have no belief in damnation - and some who have - now damn inanimate objects which would on any view be ineligible for it. The word is no longer an imprecation. It is hardly, in the full sense, a word at all when so used. Its popularity probably owes as much to its resounding phonetic virtues as to any, even fanciful, association with hell. It has ceased to be profane. It has also become very much less forceful."
Here he discusses calling someone names, such as swine or pig. "But his language as such has very little power to do the only thing it is intended to do. It would have been far more wounding to be called swine when the word still carried some whiff of the sty and some echo of a grunt; far more wounding to be called a villain when this still conjured up an image of the unwashed, malodorous, ineducable, gross, belching, close-fisted and surly boor. Now, who cares? Language meant solely to hurt hurts strangely little."
I love the way he writes. I must admit I am surprised, as I often have been, that people felt this way, even way back then (1960).
"When words of abuse have hurting the enemy as their direct and only object, they do not hurt him much."
"As words become exclusively emotional they cease to be words and therefore cease to perform any strictly linguistic function. They operate as growls, or barks, or tears."
"The function of criticism is to get ourselves out of the way and let humanity decide. Not to discharge our hatred, but to expose the grounds for it; not to vilify faults, but to diagnose and exhibit them. Unfortunately to express our hatred and to revenge ourselves is easier and more agreeable. Hence, there is a tendency to select our pejorative epithets with a view not to their accuracy, but to their power of hurting." Do we want to "inform the reader or annoy the author?"
He talks about a book critic: "In the first hundred words the critic had revealed his passions. What happened to me after that is, I think, what must happen to anybody in such circumstances. Automatically, without thinking about it, willy-nilly, one's mind discounts everything he says, as it does when we are listening to a drunk or delirious man. Indeed we cannot even think about the book under discussion. The critic rivets our attention on himself."
This could be applied to other situations such as political pundits, or any time someone is offering up an opinion about a subject.
The lesson? "The very occasions on which we should most like to write a slashing review are precisely those on which we had much better hold our tongues. The very desire is a danger signal."
And that's it for that book. I'll just go and erase my pencil marks and return this dusty old tome to the library.
"Another limitation of language is that it cannot, unlike music or gesture, do more than one thing at once. However, the words in a great poet's phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind as a quasi-instantaneous chord, yet, strictly speaking, each word must be read or heard before the next. That way, language is as unilinear as time."
"One of the first things we have to say to a beginner (writer) ... is 'avoid all epithets which are merely emotional. It is no use telling us that something was "mysterious" or "loathsome" or "awe-inspiring" or "voluptuous." Do you think your readers will believe you just because you say so? You must go quite a different way to work. By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, readers, not you, exclaim, "How mysterious!" or "How loathsome!" Let me taste for myself and you'll have no need to tell me how I should react to the flavor.'
I love this paragraph because he states precisely what I feel, but cannot put into words, especially as eloquently as he does. Great advice as a tutor.
He goes on to tell us that there are exceptions...
'Which, to the boundaries of space and time,
Of melancholy space and doleful time,
He points out that in this poem, Donne reverses the process. "The object (space and time) is in one way so familiar to our imaginations, and in another so unimaginable - we have read so many tedious attempts to exalt or over-awe us with mere superlatives or even with simple arithmetic - That nothing can be made of it. This time...the poet appeals directly to our emotions; and not obvious ones." So true when those simple overused adjectives don't do something justice. Melancholy and doleful.
Next he discusses words that are merely emotional and have lost meaning (remember verbicide?)
He cites damn as an example, "historically the whole Christian eschatology lies behind them. If no one had ever consigned his enemy to the eternal fires and believed that there were eternal fires to receive him, these ejaculations would never have existed. But inflation, the spontaneous hyperboles of ill-temper, and the decay of religion, have long since emptied them of that lurid content. Those who have no belief in damnation - and some who have - now damn inanimate objects which would on any view be ineligible for it. The word is no longer an imprecation. It is hardly, in the full sense, a word at all when so used. Its popularity probably owes as much to its resounding phonetic virtues as to any, even fanciful, association with hell. It has ceased to be profane. It has also become very much less forceful."
Here he discusses calling someone names, such as swine or pig. "But his language as such has very little power to do the only thing it is intended to do. It would have been far more wounding to be called swine when the word still carried some whiff of the sty and some echo of a grunt; far more wounding to be called a villain when this still conjured up an image of the unwashed, malodorous, ineducable, gross, belching, close-fisted and surly boor. Now, who cares? Language meant solely to hurt hurts strangely little."
I love the way he writes. I must admit I am surprised, as I often have been, that people felt this way, even way back then (1960).
"When words of abuse have hurting the enemy as their direct and only object, they do not hurt him much."
"As words become exclusively emotional they cease to be words and therefore cease to perform any strictly linguistic function. They operate as growls, or barks, or tears."
"The function of criticism is to get ourselves out of the way and let humanity decide. Not to discharge our hatred, but to expose the grounds for it; not to vilify faults, but to diagnose and exhibit them. Unfortunately to express our hatred and to revenge ourselves is easier and more agreeable. Hence, there is a tendency to select our pejorative epithets with a view not to their accuracy, but to their power of hurting." Do we want to "inform the reader or annoy the author?"
He talks about a book critic: "In the first hundred words the critic had revealed his passions. What happened to me after that is, I think, what must happen to anybody in such circumstances. Automatically, without thinking about it, willy-nilly, one's mind discounts everything he says, as it does when we are listening to a drunk or delirious man. Indeed we cannot even think about the book under discussion. The critic rivets our attention on himself."
This could be applied to other situations such as political pundits, or any time someone is offering up an opinion about a subject.
The lesson? "The very occasions on which we should most like to write a slashing review are precisely those on which we had much better hold our tongues. The very desire is a danger signal."
And that's it for that book. I'll just go and erase my pencil marks and return this dusty old tome to the library.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
a few more finished...
Well, I've been out for a few days and I have finished a few books, along with some reading for my research. I conquered Harry Potter 5 (finally).I also finished off the second Sookie novel Living Dead in Dallas. The rest of the books mentioned a few posts back are still on by bedside table. I even got a few more on sale at B & N with my gift card. The other day on Facebook, NPR books posted a thread asking the public for ideas for books that are "intelligent fiction with a strong, independent female main character—one who doesn't succumb to the stereotypical tragedies of her gender. Optimism, adventure, and overcoming are words that come to mind." There were dozens of great ideas, so I copy and pasted them into a word document.
I finished reading 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived. It was entertaining and I learned some things about characters who I had heard of but didn't know a lot about. Just a few quotes from the book (their goal was entertainment, not profundity).
"Myth is a seductive, poetic enterprise by which we express our deepest wishes, as well as our most profound anxieties."
they trash Cinderella: "She has earned nothing. She deserves nothing, except perhaps back wages at home. And, yet, she gets the prince to marry her. This is not the lesson we should teach our children. There are more important values than good looks, fine clothes, and expensive trappings - intelligence, independence, self-esteem, responsibility and self-motivation - none of which characterize Cinderella."
I am too tired to comment on these quotes. I will just let them speak for themselves. One less book on my shelves and one more in the "to be sold" pile.
goodnight.
I finished reading 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived. It was entertaining and I learned some things about characters who I had heard of but didn't know a lot about. Just a few quotes from the book (their goal was entertainment, not profundity).
"Myth is a seductive, poetic enterprise by which we express our deepest wishes, as well as our most profound anxieties."
they trash Cinderella: "She has earned nothing. She deserves nothing, except perhaps back wages at home. And, yet, she gets the prince to marry her. This is not the lesson we should teach our children. There are more important values than good looks, fine clothes, and expensive trappings - intelligence, independence, self-esteem, responsibility and self-motivation - none of which characterize Cinderella."
I am too tired to comment on these quotes. I will just let them speak for themselves. One less book on my shelves and one more in the "to be sold" pile.
goodnight.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Studies in Words
Wow, I should get a prize for blogging so many days in a row.
The title for today's excerpt comes from a book. I was at Hamline Library in the PE section trying to find some language books for my research. The author of this particular book caught my eye - C. S. Lewis. I thought, "what's he doing here in the linguistics section of an academic library? Isn't he the author of kids adventure stories?" Goes to show you how much I know...
I love these old books that sit and collect dust on library shelves. This one was published in 1960 and still has the library check out card in the back cover. Eleven people checked it out between 1961 and 1978. After that, who knows? Reading habits became much more private with the invention of computerized card catalogs.
So I checked this book out - because I don't have enough books at home to read - and started to read it this evening. Each chapter is about one word and its meanings. The introduction is very interesting with useful ideas when it comes to teaching vocabulary to ESL students. He is very quotable; he opens each paragraph with main ideas, then examples, then summary in the classic style.
From the introduction:
"One understands a word much better if one has met it alive, in its native habitat. So far as is possible, our knowledge should be checked and supplemented, not derived, from the dictionary." What is the difference between reading one of his chapters and looking the meaning of the word up in the dictionary? "I have been able to say more about the history of thought and sentiment which underlies the semantic biography of a word than would have been possible or proper in a dictionary."
His inspiration for this book was to be able to understand older texts better; to understand what an author in 1880 really meant when he used a word. Our modern definition has probably changed. What he's doing in this book is providing a model of how to investigate and understand the meaning or "semantic biography" of a word.
"If we read an old poem with insufficient regard for change in the overtones, and even the dictionary meanings, of words since its date - if, in fact, we are content with whatever effect the words accidentally produce in our modern minds - then of course we do not read the poem the old writer intended. What we get may still be, in our opinion, a poem; but it will be our poem, not his. If we call this 'reading' the old poet, we are deceiving ourselves."
This is true for every language interaction - my choice of words when I say or write something will provoke different images inside the listener/reader's head.
"Knowledge is necessary. Intelligence and sensibility are not enough...(The intelligent and sensitive reader without knowledge) has ready to hand un-thought-of metaphors, highly individual shades of meaning, subtle associations, ambiguities - every manner of semantic gymnastics - which he can attribute to his author. Where the duller reader simply does not understand, (the first reader) misunderstands - triumphantly, brilliantly." For the wise reader, on the other hand, "the smallest semantic discomfort rouses his suspicions. He notes the key word and watches for its recurrence in other texts. Often they will explain the whole puzzle." I love this - semantic gymnastics, semantic discomfort - these are things that people today still take part in and suffer from.
Just note that it is 1960 and "he" is overused a bit - as if women never read or think. I'm not even going there...
"Prolonged thought about the words which we ordinarily use to think with can produce a momentary aphasia. I think it is to be welcomed. It is well we should become aware of what we are doing when we speak, of the ancient, fragile, and (well used) immensely potent instruments that words are."
Wow! Kapow! Jab! Love it. I just posted that as my Facebook status. Nobody commented.
This next quote reveals a bit of snobbery on his part, but hey, nobody's perfect. He's talking about when words start to change meaning, or lose their edge, (I think he means by general public overuse), we (those of us "in the know") might want to consider doing something about it. "Our conversation will have little effect, but if we get into print... we can help to strengthen or weaken some disastrous vogue word; can encourage a good, or resist a bad, gallicism or Americanism. For many things the press prints today will be taken up by the great mass of speakers in a few years." Ok, so I would not want to encourage censorship, and I hate those organizations that try to control a language. As a linguist, I know that a language is created and formed by the common people who speak it. If the masses like a word or phrase, they will use it no matter who tells them not to. However, I like the positive side of his idea - about encouraging good words. There is really too much use of some words like 'good,' 'bad,' 'thing,' 'pretty,' etc. I have tutored students whose composition teachers prohibit the use of general terms such as these. In the end the students are encouraged to find a word that fits more precisely with what they want to express. I find myself using these words, and I think it is laziness, at least on my part. For my ESL students it is either lack of confidence or lack of vocabulary. In the end, they are always able to come up with something. One of my personal goals as a writer is to use a broader vocabulary. English has the largest in the world, and I need to take advantage more. However - I don't want to sound snooty. Its like walking a tightrope.
In the next section he gets all gory and starts talking about verbicide - the murder of a word (any word, not just a verb). He says there are many ways it happens; inflation, verbiage ("the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of."). I just went to the New York Times website and put the word significant in the search. This word is definitely used in an "all that it implies" way, but we are not often told exactly why something is significant. ("After significant accounting problems," "recovered a significant measure of its previous robustness," "...regard as the most significant literary achievement"). All opinions expressed by an author about a statistic or performance. Anyway - back to Lewis - "Men (and women?) often commit verbicide because they want to snatch a word as a party banner, to appropriate its 'selling quality.'" Wow this political word twisting has been going on for some time. Here I thought it was a modern phenomena. How come we don't catch on????
"But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then to become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative - useless synonyms for good or for bad." I am suddenly self conscious. Am I evaluating or describing. They teach us to do both in college. I guess a good balance, as with all things.
In the next section he brings in the good old tree metaphor. I wonder if anyone has ever written a book about the way that tree metaphor (analogy?) can be used to describe just about anything? "Words constantly take on new meanings. We should picture this process not on the analogy of an insect undergoing metamorphoses, but rather on that of a tree throwing out new branches, which themselves throw out subordinate branches...The new branches sometimes overshadow and kill the old ones but by no means always...The overwhelming majority of those who use the word neither know nor care anything about the tree." I like this analogy. I may use it with ESL learners somehow.
"A child may construct imaginary semantic trees for itself." Or an ESL learner. This is an interesting idea. Maybe help the learners to construct the tree?
The next section is about the "power of context." "It is this most important principal that enables speakers to give half a dozen different meaning to a single word with very little danger of confusion...If ambiguity were not balanced by this power (of context), communication would become almost impossible." Many L2 learners think they can memorize a list of vocabulary words to learn a language, but this is why that doesn't work.
"What seems to me certain is that in ordinary language the sense of a word is governed by the context and this sense normally excludes all others from the mind. The proof of this is that the sudden intrusion of any irrelevant sense - in other words, the voluntary or involuntary pun - is funny. There is a semantic explosion because the two meanings rush together from a great distance; one of them was not in our consciousness at all till that moment. If it had been, there would be no detonation" This is why things are funny. This is why humor is so hard to get in another language. I love the explosion analogy.
"It is the insulating power of context which enables old senses (meanings) to persist, uncontaminated by newer ones. They live happily by keeping out of each other's way." It is because of context that words have many meanings. literal becomes abstract.
"When a word has several meanings historical circumstances often make one of them dominant during a particular period...The dominant sense of any word lies uppermost in our minds...I call such senses dangerous senses because they lure us into misreadings." Good thing to keep in mind when reading.
"If you want to discover how a man pronounces a word it is no use asking him. Many people will produce in reply the pronunciation which their snobbery of anti-snobbery makes them think the most desirable. honest and self-critical people will often be reduced to saying, 'Well, now you ask me, I don't really know.'Anyway, with the best will in the world, it is extraordinarily difficult to sound a word - thus produced cold and without context for inspection - exactly as one would sound it in real conversation." I have distinct memories of sitting in linguistics classes and we are all trying to produce the 'natural' pronunciation of some sound. Your consciousness of it changes it.
"We define our words only because we are in some measure departing from their real current sense (meaning). One must understand that such definitions are purely tactical. They are attempts to appropriate for one side, and deny to the other, a potent word. You can see the same 'war of positions' going on today. A certain type of writer begins 'The essence of poetry is' or 'All vulgarity may be defined as,' and then produces a definition which no one ever thought of since the world began, which conforms to no one's actual usage, and which he himself will probably have forgotten by the end of the month." I will now be reading and listening closely for people doing this. I love when smart people put things into words for me.
The title for today's excerpt comes from a book. I was at Hamline Library in the PE section trying to find some language books for my research. The author of this particular book caught my eye - C. S. Lewis. I thought, "what's he doing here in the linguistics section of an academic library? Isn't he the author of kids adventure stories?" Goes to show you how much I know...
I love these old books that sit and collect dust on library shelves. This one was published in 1960 and still has the library check out card in the back cover. Eleven people checked it out between 1961 and 1978. After that, who knows? Reading habits became much more private with the invention of computerized card catalogs.
So I checked this book out - because I don't have enough books at home to read - and started to read it this evening. Each chapter is about one word and its meanings. The introduction is very interesting with useful ideas when it comes to teaching vocabulary to ESL students. He is very quotable; he opens each paragraph with main ideas, then examples, then summary in the classic style.
From the introduction:
"One understands a word much better if one has met it alive, in its native habitat. So far as is possible, our knowledge should be checked and supplemented, not derived, from the dictionary." What is the difference between reading one of his chapters and looking the meaning of the word up in the dictionary? "I have been able to say more about the history of thought and sentiment which underlies the semantic biography of a word than would have been possible or proper in a dictionary."
His inspiration for this book was to be able to understand older texts better; to understand what an author in 1880 really meant when he used a word. Our modern definition has probably changed. What he's doing in this book is providing a model of how to investigate and understand the meaning or "semantic biography" of a word.
"If we read an old poem with insufficient regard for change in the overtones, and even the dictionary meanings, of words since its date - if, in fact, we are content with whatever effect the words accidentally produce in our modern minds - then of course we do not read the poem the old writer intended. What we get may still be, in our opinion, a poem; but it will be our poem, not his. If we call this 'reading' the old poet, we are deceiving ourselves."
This is true for every language interaction - my choice of words when I say or write something will provoke different images inside the listener/reader's head.
"Knowledge is necessary. Intelligence and sensibility are not enough...(The intelligent and sensitive reader without knowledge) has ready to hand un-thought-of metaphors, highly individual shades of meaning, subtle associations, ambiguities - every manner of semantic gymnastics - which he can attribute to his author. Where the duller reader simply does not understand, (the first reader) misunderstands - triumphantly, brilliantly." For the wise reader, on the other hand, "the smallest semantic discomfort rouses his suspicions. He notes the key word and watches for its recurrence in other texts. Often they will explain the whole puzzle." I love this - semantic gymnastics, semantic discomfort - these are things that people today still take part in and suffer from.
Just note that it is 1960 and "he" is overused a bit - as if women never read or think. I'm not even going there...
"Prolonged thought about the words which we ordinarily use to think with can produce a momentary aphasia. I think it is to be welcomed. It is well we should become aware of what we are doing when we speak, of the ancient, fragile, and (well used) immensely potent instruments that words are."
Wow! Kapow! Jab! Love it. I just posted that as my Facebook status. Nobody commented.
This next quote reveals a bit of snobbery on his part, but hey, nobody's perfect. He's talking about when words start to change meaning, or lose their edge, (I think he means by general public overuse), we (those of us "in the know") might want to consider doing something about it. "Our conversation will have little effect, but if we get into print... we can help to strengthen or weaken some disastrous vogue word; can encourage a good, or resist a bad, gallicism or Americanism. For many things the press prints today will be taken up by the great mass of speakers in a few years." Ok, so I would not want to encourage censorship, and I hate those organizations that try to control a language. As a linguist, I know that a language is created and formed by the common people who speak it. If the masses like a word or phrase, they will use it no matter who tells them not to. However, I like the positive side of his idea - about encouraging good words. There is really too much use of some words like 'good,' 'bad,' 'thing,' 'pretty,' etc. I have tutored students whose composition teachers prohibit the use of general terms such as these. In the end the students are encouraged to find a word that fits more precisely with what they want to express. I find myself using these words, and I think it is laziness, at least on my part. For my ESL students it is either lack of confidence or lack of vocabulary. In the end, they are always able to come up with something. One of my personal goals as a writer is to use a broader vocabulary. English has the largest in the world, and I need to take advantage more. However - I don't want to sound snooty. Its like walking a tightrope.
In the next section he gets all gory and starts talking about verbicide - the murder of a word (any word, not just a verb). He says there are many ways it happens; inflation, verbiage ("the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of."). I just went to the New York Times website and put the word significant in the search. This word is definitely used in an "all that it implies" way, but we are not often told exactly why something is significant. ("After significant accounting problems," "recovered a significant measure of its previous robustness," "...regard as the most significant literary achievement"). All opinions expressed by an author about a statistic or performance. Anyway - back to Lewis - "Men (and women?) often commit verbicide because they want to snatch a word as a party banner, to appropriate its 'selling quality.'" Wow this political word twisting has been going on for some time. Here I thought it was a modern phenomena. How come we don't catch on????
"But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then to become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative - useless synonyms for good or for bad." I am suddenly self conscious. Am I evaluating or describing. They teach us to do both in college. I guess a good balance, as with all things.
In the next section he brings in the good old tree metaphor. I wonder if anyone has ever written a book about the way that tree metaphor (analogy?) can be used to describe just about anything? "Words constantly take on new meanings. We should picture this process not on the analogy of an insect undergoing metamorphoses, but rather on that of a tree throwing out new branches, which themselves throw out subordinate branches...The new branches sometimes overshadow and kill the old ones but by no means always...The overwhelming majority of those who use the word neither know nor care anything about the tree." I like this analogy. I may use it with ESL learners somehow.
"A child may construct imaginary semantic trees for itself." Or an ESL learner. This is an interesting idea. Maybe help the learners to construct the tree?
The next section is about the "power of context." "It is this most important principal that enables speakers to give half a dozen different meaning to a single word with very little danger of confusion...If ambiguity were not balanced by this power (of context), communication would become almost impossible." Many L2 learners think they can memorize a list of vocabulary words to learn a language, but this is why that doesn't work.
"What seems to me certain is that in ordinary language the sense of a word is governed by the context and this sense normally excludes all others from the mind. The proof of this is that the sudden intrusion of any irrelevant sense - in other words, the voluntary or involuntary pun - is funny. There is a semantic explosion because the two meanings rush together from a great distance; one of them was not in our consciousness at all till that moment. If it had been, there would be no detonation" This is why things are funny. This is why humor is so hard to get in another language. I love the explosion analogy.
"It is the insulating power of context which enables old senses (meanings) to persist, uncontaminated by newer ones. They live happily by keeping out of each other's way." It is because of context that words have many meanings. literal becomes abstract.
"When a word has several meanings historical circumstances often make one of them dominant during a particular period...The dominant sense of any word lies uppermost in our minds...I call such senses dangerous senses because they lure us into misreadings." Good thing to keep in mind when reading.
"If you want to discover how a man pronounces a word it is no use asking him. Many people will produce in reply the pronunciation which their snobbery of anti-snobbery makes them think the most desirable. honest and self-critical people will often be reduced to saying, 'Well, now you ask me, I don't really know.'Anyway, with the best will in the world, it is extraordinarily difficult to sound a word - thus produced cold and without context for inspection - exactly as one would sound it in real conversation." I have distinct memories of sitting in linguistics classes and we are all trying to produce the 'natural' pronunciation of some sound. Your consciousness of it changes it.
"We define our words only because we are in some measure departing from their real current sense (meaning). One must understand that such definitions are purely tactical. They are attempts to appropriate for one side, and deny to the other, a potent word. You can see the same 'war of positions' going on today. A certain type of writer begins 'The essence of poetry is' or 'All vulgarity may be defined as,' and then produces a definition which no one ever thought of since the world began, which conforms to no one's actual usage, and which he himself will probably have forgotten by the end of the month." I will now be reading and listening closely for people doing this. I love when smart people put things into words for me.
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