An important..........................

 

.........................................history lesson.

fun with the language..............

 

Somehow the word
allow is in the word
swallow and in swallow
two wholly different meanings:
one to take in through
the mouth and another
what we call the common
winged gnat hunter who
is, in all probability,
somewhere near us now.
Once, I thought
if I knew all the words
I would say the right thing
in the right way,
instead language became
more brutish: blink twice
for the bird, blink once
for tender annihilation. Who
knows what we are doing as
we go about our days lazily
choosing our languages. Some
days my life is held together
by definitions, some days
I read the word swallow
and all my feathers show.

-Ada Limon, the poem "Literary Theory" from Startlement: New and Selected Poems

a prisoner of words..............

 

Subject to these reservations, we must hope for a common rallying.  But first our Leftist intellectuals, who have swallowed so many insults and may well have to begin doing so again, would have to undertake a critique of the reasonings and ideologies to which they have hitherto subscribed, which have wreaked the havoc they have seen in our most recent history.  That will be the hardest thing.  We must admit that today conformity is on the Left.  To be sure, the Right is not brilliant.  But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws.  The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty.  Until such an effort at re-examination is well underway, any rallying will be useless and even harmful.

-Albert Camus, from his 1957 essay, "Socialism of the Gallows", found in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

A different sort..............................

 

.....................................of vocabulary.

In praise of crooked trees..........

 

We have convinced ourselves that being “smart” is the same thing as being useful. It's not.

Language is a tool used to shape reality. When we continue to culturally degrade language that once pointed toward something difficult and valuable, we devalue the very thing it pointed toward. We no longer have a reliable way to name genuine excellence because we have spent the word on light bulbs, algorithmic patterns, and passive-aggressive comebacks.

It is time to retire “smart” from this type of casual drivel.

Let it rest until we're able use it to describe a mind that sees the wonder others dismiss, holds conclusions lightly but courageously, changes its mind when the evidence demands it, and remains humble in the face of what it does not yet understand.

-Rob Firchau, from this post

Still..........................

 

.........one of the most powerful letters ever written.

The most important......................

 

......................................word for any day.

Reading with a dictionary at hand.............

 

     Bear in mind that equivocity is true to being only as one way of attending to and speaking of being.  It is true to being as relative to being and as relative to the other senses of being.  Against ironic postmodern truth-refusal and metamodern oscillations between sincerity and indifference at the expense of truth, Chesterton guides his readers to notice how preconceptions can warp attention and prevent clear perception.  This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his detective fiction, which draws attention to puzzlement and indefiniteness, as well as the unexplained intractabilities of reality.  Fitting the metaxological mode of attention at the heart of Chesterton's journalistic metaphysics, his interest is in restoring the adventurous side of life where the comfort of the overly familiar has caused us to lose our primal astonishment and foundational perplexity.  How can we feel at home if we have lost a sense of wonder?  That would not be home but a prison for the soul.  And how can we truly wonder if we have no place of refuge?  Without a safe haven, wonder turns into terror.

      Chesteronian defamiliarization may be misunderstood as an attempt to restore passivity to the perceiver, given that univocity tends to put people in an active relationship with reality, albeit still unconscious and devoid of reflective reasoning.  This is only part of the truth.  As suggested, Chesterton wants to resist the "worship of law," especially the worship of arbitrary human laws, by restoring difference.  But the deeper aim of this strategy is to restore the possibility of genuine consciousness and real choice; that means recovering participation in reality.

-Duncan Reyburn, The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton

an oppositional stance...................

 

Here then is a Peripatetic who is standing his ground, a man on a walkabout without real wanderlust, a man who is, in the Borgesian formula, the perfect reader - that is to say, someone who has re-read the same passage endlessly, someone who is prepared to privilege a quorum of old religious scrolls over the lazy, aphasic multitude of brisk paperback bulletins in our three-second timespan culture . . . There is something magnificent about his single-minded oppositional stance in our deconsecrated world; and to watch him perform his rain-dance on the astroturf is to witness an ecumenical invocation of all human spiritual authority.

-Aidan Carl Mathews, from his review of Moriarty's Dreamtime

On the importance of literature........

 

And literature conveys irrefutable condensed experience in yet another invaluable direction; namely, from generation to generation. Thus it becomes the living memory of the nation. Thus it preserves and kindles within itself the flame of her spent history, in a form which is safe from deformation and slander. In this way literature, together with language, protects the soul of the nation. . . . 

But woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against “freedom of print”, it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another. Silent generations grow old and die without ever having talked about themselves, either to each other or to their descendants. When writers such as Achmatova and Zamjatin – interred alive throughout their lives – are condemned to create in silence until they die, never hearing the echo of their written words, then that is not only their personal tragedy, but a sorrow to the whole nation, a danger to the whole nation.

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from this 1970 speech

fun with the language................

 Printers indeed should be very careful how they omit a Figure or a Letter: For by such Means sometimes a terrible Alteration is made in the Sense. I have heard, that once, in a new Edition of the Common Prayer, the following Sentence, We shall all be changed in a Moment, in the Twinkling of an Eye; by the Omission of a single Letter, became, We shall all be hanged in a Moment, &c. to the no small Surprize of the first Congregation it was read to.

-Richard Saunders, as being channeled by Ben Franklin

I love you..................

 

     Bob [Knight] was well-known for his fiery temper.  And he had an intense, imposing demeanor that made him seem very intimidating.  But over the years, I found a way to cut through all that.  If I wanted to stop him in his tracks, I just had to say, "Hey, Coach, I just want you to know one thing.  I love you, man. You changed my life."

     That would melt him right down.  As it does most people.  I've learned that it's hard for people, especially males, to tell other people, "I love you."  Even with my own son, for most of his early years, I noticed it was uncomfortable for him to say "I love you," back to me.  It's strange because each and every one of us has a thirst to be loved, to be appreciated, acknowledged, respected.  And yet, for some reason, there's a difficulty or discomfort in expressing to others, "I love you."  "I appreciate you."  "I respect you."  "I'm glad you're my friend."  "I know we have our differences, but I'm here for you."

     I think we would be surprised by how few people regularly hear these kinds of things.  I would wager that over half of the young people in America go to bed every night without hearing a single affirming word.

-George Raveling, What You're Made For: Powerful Life Lessons from My Career in Sports

individual effort......................

 

. . . words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.

-James Baldwin

Crack my head up..........................

Mamdani has also said that he’s intent on “seizing the means of production,” which sounds alarmingly like he wants to invade China.

-Martin Gurri,  It's Gurri, read the whole thing

spelling.....................

 

It is a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.

-attributed to Andrew Jackson, Mark Twain, and others

When the word "elite" is applied to......................

 

...........to current world-wide political leadership it feels like an abuse of our language. We should reserve the word for those who truly deserve it - our greatest professional athletes.

Full story here.  Money quote here:

These three skills – attention, memory and creativity – have technical names: inhibitory control, working memory and cognitive flexibility, respectively.   They are the three core executive functions used by the brain to execute complex tasks.

via

Fun with the language..................

Ostensibly, these “nuisance-protests” are carried out by distinct groups motivated by a particular cause, such as the environment, Palestine, trans-rights, or immigration. In reality, however, all are animated by the same, self-destructive ideology: neotoddlerism.

-as culled from here

Ah, democracy...................

 

A “democracy” where unelected bureaucrats have effective veto power is not a real democracy. 

-as cut-and-pasted from here

Ed. Note:  The history major in me bristles when I hear people talking about the U.S. as a democracy.  I suspect the Founding Fathers would share my bristles.  They created, and we should still be considered, a constitutional republic, which is a very different animal from a democracy.  Having said that, if you substitute "constitutional republic" for "democracy" in the above quote, the quote is still true.

redefinitions..................

 We need to redefine "problems" into opportunities.

Problems are an opportunity to create value.
Problems are an opportunity to strengthen relationships.
Problems are an opportunity to differentiate yourself from others.

Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.

-Farnam Street, from here

gaps.........................

       I've seen many people shy away from writing because it doesn't come naturally to them.  What they overlook is that writing is more than a vehicle for communicating—it is a tool for learning.  Writing exposes gaps in your knowledge and logic.  It pushes you to articulate assumptions and consider counterarguments.  Unclear writing is a sign of unclear thinking.  Or as Steve [Martin] himself quipped, "Some people have a way with words, and other people, uh . . . oh, not have a way."

-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things