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.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
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.
Friday, January 21, 2011
this is a record for me
Posting two days in a row. I finished a book and I am so proud of myself. The book is "The Genius of Language" that I blogged about yesterday. I found some great quotes in it:
I worry about the power of language: that if one says anything enough times – in any language – it might become true. Amy Tan
she was discussing how people make generalizations about ethnic groups from their language - There are no words for yes and no in Chinese, so they must be very wishy-washy people. She argued that they may not have these words, but Chinese has more exact sayings depending on the context.
Anyone who is not fluent in a strange language sheds about 30 to 40 IQ points; that’s quite a dive, which few intellects will be able to sustain without some damage to their underlying ego. Bert Keizer
this is so true; you feel like such an idiot when first learning a language.
There is a vast difference between showing someone the way to the railway station in English and showing him the way to Plato. This is often overlooked by city-map speakers. Bert Keizer
Once again very insightful from a non-linguist: the difference between being able to converse casually and carry on an academic conversation - and your awareness of the difference.
I believe there is genius in every language. It does not matter how many people speak it: the genius of a language is not dependent on the quantity of its speakers.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
This from a man who was actually jailed for simply writing in his native language.
Returning to Italian writing after gorging on this diet of English was like returning to milk toast after scones and clotted cream. I loved the accumulation of adjectives that a language so rich in words could indulge in, instead of the nuances in the repetition of the same adjectives that gives Italian its power. I loved the exaggeration of English, the curlicues of language, its baroque quality. Many of the churches, much of the painting, and people’s gesturing in Italy are baroque. But the language itself is severe: its beauty lies in elegant simplicity and the hypnotic power of its sound. And when it is distorted by the wrong rhetoric in an attempt to “enrich it,” it becomes impenetrable without gaining power. English has to work to be elegant and simple, because its sounds are rarely, if ever, as spellbinding as Italian, and so much of its nature is tortuous.
M. J. Fitzgerald
I like this description of the advantages and disadvantages of one language over another; English has a huge vocabulary which can be used to express slight nuance, but the sound, or music, of the language is maybe not its best feature.
And I live on, not feeling whole in Korean or in English. For me, one language is complementary to the other, one always lacking a capacity that the other has. And I have a fear, constantly, of not quite being understood in just one language: Do you know what I am trying to say? Do you know who I am?
Ha-Yun Jung
ah, the perils of bilingualism...
For a poet or a novelist the distinction between what was remembered and what was imagined and made up is shadowy and unimportant. What matters is the irresistible, magnetic force exerted by a place, by a language, and, I will add, by a literature.
Louis Begley
beautiful sentence (for English, anyway). When one writes about a place of their youth, is it important to get every detail right, or just make the story "magnetic?"
Ok, off to work on my research for my Capstone. If I come across any interesting quotes in my articles about articles, I'll let you know (but don't hold your breath....)
Thursday, January 20, 2011
the genius of language
That is the name of the book I am reading right now. Well, one of them, anyway. I haven't blogged much because I have been doing research for my Capstone. While doing research, I keep coming across books that look interesting. This one, The Genius of Language, is a collection of fifteen writers reflecting on their mother tongues. The second essay is by Amy Tan, who I always enjoy reading. She is of course musing on growing up bilingual Chinese and English. She says, " I tend to be suspicious of any comparisons between the two languages. Typically, one language - that of the person doing the comparing- is often used as the standard, the benchmark for a logical form of expression. And so the language being compared is always in danger of being judged deficient or superfluous, simplistic or unnecessarily complex, melodious or cacophonous." I like this quote because I hear people trying to compare languages all the time. However, there is no baseline or normal language - except the one the speaker knows.
On my bedside right now:
Harry Potter #5 - I'm on 711 of 870 - I just need to finish it!
Charlaine Harris - Living Dead in Dallas. Reading the books because I've watched all the videos and waiting for season 3 to come out and having withdrawls!
Gabaldon - breath of snow in ashes - I am determined to finish these most recent two books in the series - I miss Claire and Jamie et al
McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue - think I blogged about this a few back. Haven't gotten any farther in it - trying to juggle too much
More tales to Tremble By - Am I afraid?
Lonely Planet Guide to Travel Writing - in my spare time I will be creating wonderfully entertaining travel tales and publishing them for big profit. I just picked up this book at B & N with a gift card.
Francine Prose - Reading Like a Writer - another book that's gonna help me be a fancy writer. HAH - haven't started it yet
A.J. Jacobs the Know-it-all - I started this over a year ago and I want to finish
Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel - It looks sooooo interesting. People write books like this just for me! Can't wait to read it.
101 most influential people who never lived - started it over a year ago. Funny and entertaining.
There is also a stack of magazine articles and my Italian book.
Oh yeah - and the library books - Adam's Tongue and the Roots of Language by Bickerton (research related, of course)
Forgot to mention, the other day I read a book called English as a Second Language which sounds like one of my research books, but is actually a fiction book. It is the story of an American woman who goes to England to go to grad school. Took me one day to read. It was a delightful escape. It is now in the for sale pile.
Gotta go read!
On my bedside right now:
Harry Potter #5 - I'm on 711 of 870 - I just need to finish it!
Charlaine Harris - Living Dead in Dallas. Reading the books because I've watched all the videos and waiting for season 3 to come out and having withdrawls!
Gabaldon - breath of snow in ashes - I am determined to finish these most recent two books in the series - I miss Claire and Jamie et al
McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue - think I blogged about this a few back. Haven't gotten any farther in it - trying to juggle too much
More tales to Tremble By - Am I afraid?
Lonely Planet Guide to Travel Writing - in my spare time I will be creating wonderfully entertaining travel tales and publishing them for big profit. I just picked up this book at B & N with a gift card.
Francine Prose - Reading Like a Writer - another book that's gonna help me be a fancy writer. HAH - haven't started it yet
A.J. Jacobs the Know-it-all - I started this over a year ago and I want to finish
Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel - It looks sooooo interesting. People write books like this just for me! Can't wait to read it.
101 most influential people who never lived - started it over a year ago. Funny and entertaining.
There is also a stack of magazine articles and my Italian book.
Oh yeah - and the library books - Adam's Tongue and the Roots of Language by Bickerton (research related, of course)
Forgot to mention, the other day I read a book called English as a Second Language which sounds like one of my research books, but is actually a fiction book. It is the story of an American woman who goes to England to go to grad school. Took me one day to read. It was a delightful escape. It is now in the for sale pile.
Gotta go read!
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
and the winner is...
I hate the pressure of coming up with a title. Just want to get that off my chest.
It's been a while since I posted. I have been reading too much. Ha ha. Actually, I came up with a new system. I wrote the names of some authors, book styles, and other things I need to read on little slips of paper, folded them up and put them in a little container. Now, when I finish the Harry Potter series (currently nearing the end of #5) I will draw a slip and read all that I have from that author. Meanwhile of course I will be writing my thesis and working on pronunciation while doing this. I now have four bags of books in the hall to sell. I sold about 8 books on Amazon and brought the rest into Magers and Quinn to sell. They only bought a few for $17.00. I am proud of myself for taking the cash instead of store credit.
It's been a while since I posted. I have been reading too much. Ha ha. Actually, I came up with a new system. I wrote the names of some authors, book styles, and other things I need to read on little slips of paper, folded them up and put them in a little container. Now, when I finish the Harry Potter series (currently nearing the end of #5) I will draw a slip and read all that I have from that author. Meanwhile of course I will be writing my thesis and working on pronunciation while doing this. I now have four bags of books in the hall to sell. I sold about 8 books on Amazon and brought the rest into Magers and Quinn to sell. They only bought a few for $17.00. I am proud of myself for taking the cash instead of store credit.
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