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."
Monday, March 21, 2011
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)
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