disorientation...................

 

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

-Jonathan Haidt, as cut-and-pasted from this essay

Train yourself........................

Guard your speech.  Never speak of yourself, your affairs, or anything else in a discouraged or discouraging way.  Never admit the possibility of failure, or speak in a way that infers failure as a possibility.  Never speak of the times as being hard, or of business conditions being doubtful.  Times may be hard and business doubtful for those who are on the competitive plane, but they can never be so for you;  you can create what you want, and your are above fear.  When others are having hard times and poor business, you will find your greatest opportunities.

Train yourself to think of and to look upon the world as a something which is Becoming, which is growing; and to regard seeming evil as being only that which is undeveloped.  Always speak in terms of advancement;  to do otherwise is to deny your faith, and to deny your faith is to lose it.  Never allow yourself to feel disappointed.  You may expect a certain thing at a certain time, and not get it at that time;  and this will appear to you like failure.  But if you hold to your faith you will find that the failure is only apparent.  Go on in the certain way, and if you do not receive that thing, you will receive something so much better that you will see that the seeming failure was really a great success.

-Wallace D. Wattles,  The Science of Getting Rich

Messing with the language..................

I'm sure he would....................

...........have phrased it, "Unlearn you must..."

Thanks, I needed that...............................

"Don't deny that a problem is a problem.  People who say, 'I don't have problems;  I only have opportunities' are idiots.  Some problems are not opportunities - they are problems.  Recognize them as problems and deal with them appropriately.  Denial is stupid, and it doesn't do anything but prolong the pain of the problem."
-Larry Winget

Leadership, by George.............................

"Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory."
-George S. Patton

"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."
-George S. Patton

"Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all."
-George Washington

"Example, whether it be good or bad, has a powerful influence."
-George Washington

"My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity."
-George Bernard Shaw

"Political necessities sometimes turn out to be political mistakes."
-George Bernard Shaw

"Men are from Earth, women are from Earth.  Deal with it.
-George Carlin

"The thing that strikes me more and more—and it strikes a lot of other people, too—is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time.  I don't mean merely that controversies are acrimonious.  They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects.  I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point."
-George Orwell (1944)

"Being in Washington is more fictional than being in Hollywood."
-George Lucas

“Start where you are, with what you have. Make something of it and never be satisfied.” 
-George Washington Carver

On grasping the reality......................

But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.
-Niels Bohr

Language matters.........................

"The greatest discover of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind."
-William James

Hmmm..............................

via

A stack of projects........................

A problem might seem ominous or threatening, but if we call it "a project" instead, our approach to it changes;  we view it as something that has a solution - a solution we are engaged in finding.  In the same way, we can remind ourselves that our opportunities are often in exact proportion to our problems.   Polio was a problem worldwide, but to Dr. Jonas Salk and his fellow researchers it was a project on which they were working and which they were successful in solving ... When we have a pressing problem - and who is without one for long - I think we need to take this intelligent attitude toward it.  This is not a Pollyanna attitude, unless you want to call all the people who have been solving human problems for centuries Pollyannas.  It is, rather, a very human, intelligent attitude.
-Earl Nightingale

Cuttlefish...............................

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.  When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."
-George Orwell

(Ed. Note:  If faithful readers find this quote familiar, it may be because of this previous post)

Before movies and TV.............................

"In Rome reputations were made not only at public meetings and in the Senate but also in the law courts.  Ambitious young men in their early twenties often appeared as prosecutors in criminal trials in order to make a name for themselves, not just as lawyers but as potential future politicians.

     "Both rhetoric and the study of literature were also intended to give students an ethical grounding, a moral education which inculcated the virtues of fortitude, justice, and prudence.

     "Public speaking in this complex sense is extinct and it is difficult now to conceive of its power, immediacy and charm.  Just as Samuel Pepys in seventeenth-century England would spend a Sunday going for sermon to sermon for the sheer pleasure of it, so crowds of Romans would pack the Forum, where trials were held in the open air, to listen to and applaud the great advocates of the day as they presented their cases.  The 'Friends, Romans, countrymen' speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar gives a hint of how the real thing must have been."

-Anthony Everitt, as excerpted from Cicero:  The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician

Words..........................

The Execupundit has been entertaining and, in a sneaky fashion, educating us lately with his series "Language to Remember and Use" (a few samples are here, here, and here).

When I was a sophomore in  high school, I remember reading studies linking large vocabularies with higher paying jobs.  It seemed there was often a direct correlation between the number of words a person knew and could use correctly and appropriately and the amount of money they might be paid for their work.  Thinking that was a classic case of "knowledge is good,"  I purchased a paper-back copy of Funk and Lewis's 30 Days To A More Powerful Vocabulary. Can't say that I mastered the book (originally copyrighted in 1943), but I can say I still have a copy of it on my shelves.

A quick consultation with the Oracle Google did not turn up those old studies, probably too old.  It did turn up this essay on the importance of a large vocabulary, and the impact of educational philosophies on same, however.  Here is a wee excerpt:

"Later, another Cornell scholar, the sociologist Donald Hayes, showed that the decline of the verbal SAT scores was indeed correlated with a dumbing-down of American schoolbooks. Following the lead of the great literacy scholar Jeanne Chall, Hayes found that publishers, under the influence of progressive educational theories, had begun to use simplified language and smaller vocabularies. Hayes demonstrated that the dilution of knowledge and vocabulary, rather than poverty, explained most of the test-score drop."

If Michael doesn't mind,  I may copy him (again) and start a new series on "fun with the language."  If I did such a thing, I might start with the word "Simulacrum: noun:  an insubstantial form or semblance of something."

Not so true...............................

via

When words lose their meaning..........................

via

Happy Paraskevidekatriaphobia Day.....................

All you triskaidekaphobics out there may not enjoy today.  I choose to believe it is a lucky day, thank you.

Turn a blind eye...........................

"The phrase 'turn a blind eye' - often used to refer to a willful refusal to acknowledge a particular reality - dates back to a legendary chapter in the career of the British naval hero Horatio Nelson. During 1801’s Battle of Copenhagen, Nelson’s ships were pitted against a large Danish-Norwegian fleet. When his more conservative superior officer flagged for him to withdraw, the one-eyed Nelson supposedly brought his telescope to his bad eye and blithely proclaimed, 'I really do not see the signal.'  He went on to score a decisive victory. Some historians have since dismissed Nelson’s famous quip as merely a battlefield myth, but the phrase 'turn a blind eye' persists to this day."
-as excerpted from here

More from the good old days.............

Here is a list of things you don't hear parents say too often these days, including........

If you get a spanking in school and I find out about it, you’ll get another one when you get home.

Unctuously.............................

Anyone totally committed to a single pursuit almost always becomes a propagandist of his own effort.  As a nation of specialists, we have become a nation obsessed with self-justification.  When we don't have it, we make it.  And we are by now familiar enough with the make-work of manufacturers who need products, scholars who need projects, politicians who need issues, generals who need armies.  We speak the language of a people bent on justifying everything we do or want to do, whether it is justifiable or not.
      This preoccupation, with its consequent language of self-praise, is epidemic.  It is chronic at the highest levels of the government.  Much of the blame for the erosion of our idealism must be laid to the government, because the language of ideals has been so grossly misused by the propagandists.  The liars of policy and public relations are addicted to a rhetoric of high principle.  Our political ideals fill their mouths as unctuously, and with as little involvement of conscience or intelligence, as so many pieces of fat meat.
-Wendell Berry, circa 1968

I thought it was about time.........................

........to update my Webster's New World College Dictionary.
Victor Davis Hanson gets us off to an interesting start.