Learning about how language changes overtime is fascinating. An excerpt from Lane Greene essay over at Aeon. “There is something odd about the vowels of English. Have you ever noticed that every language in Europe seems to use the letter A the same way? From latte to lager to tapas,
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Scripturient: The magic of reading
Can you make sense of those lines in the image to the right? Of course not. They’re deconstructed from the letters of a simple, one-syllable word and randomly re-arranged. It’s just four letters, but their component parts are not arranged in the proper order, so they seem like meaningless lines
Continue readingScripturient: Thoughts on reading Ulysses
Onomatopoeia. Odd, sometimes, entertaining too. Like speed bumps that make you slow down and silently mouth the letters. A slow smile at the sound it makes in your head. Alliteration. Anastrophe. Joycean wordplay. What is that word? A neologism? Or some Irish colloquialism? An anachronism? Another language? Or more playful
Continue readingThings Are Good: How to Have Better Conversations
Talking with others about certain issues can be challenging for you or the other person. You may leave such conversations feeling awkward or worse, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Social interaction and language researcher Elizabeth Stokoe, along with colleagues, looked into what we should say and how
Continue readingScripturient: The House on the Borderland
“But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality [it] would be a classic of the first water.” So said H. P. Lovecraft of the 1908 novel, The House on the Borderland, by William Hope Hodgson. But, Lovecraft admitted, the book was also a major influence on his own, later work.
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: He Who Controls Language, Controls Thought
“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness
Continue readingDented Blue Mercedes: Free Speech, When The “Debate” is You (and You’re Not Invited)
Shout: “Help, I’m being silenced!” There’s a duplicitous game of sleight-of-hand that is taking place in discussions about freedom of speech in academia and the public square. Here’s how it works: at first, a person fishes for controversy by saying several things that they know will offend people. If this
Continue readingThings Are Good: I Swear This is Good for You
An explicative can do way more than just add spice to your sentence, it can improve your life. Emma Byrne argues in her new book that swearing is a social good and we should be happy about it. In the book, Swearing Is Good For You: The Amazing Science of
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The DWR Quote of the Day – On Language – John Le Carré
“Clear language – lucid, rational language – to a man at war with both truth and reason, is an existential threat. Clear language to such a man is a direct assault on his obfuscations, contradictions and lies. To him, it is the voice of the enemy. To him, it is
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Untranslatable German Words
I do like the Germans and their language specific words, here is a list of some of them. 🙂 Engelsgeduld: (lit.: angel’s patience) great amount of patience Feierabend: (lit.: party-evening) the rest of the day that remains after work Fernweh: the desire/longing to travel to faraway places/ foreign countries
Continue readingScripturient: Cultural appropriation is the new gluten free
Like food fads, political fads wax and wane as the gnat-like attention span of their followers gets diverted by the Next Big Thing. Political Correctness has of late given birth to Cultural Appropriation just like the gluten-free food fad gave rise to lectin-free food fad. All such fads are fuelled
Continue readingScripturient: Square words
Writing has been described as the most significant human invention. We tend to think of inventions as mechanical things, like the wheel, or fire, or the printing press, the airplane, the internal combustion engine or cell phone. But without writing, few of them would exist. Writing allowed us to share
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Pronouns Aren’t Malicious – Gender Stereotypes, Different Story.
Auntie Wanda on the Pronoun Game. “Pronouns refer to visible sex and a man is referred to as a “he.” Not everyone has to play your word games.” “Pronouns aren’t malicious, they’re neutral words that refer to female people and male people respectively. The knowledge that our species has two
Continue readingDented Blue Mercedes: What the “Walk on the Wild Side” controversy says about trans* awareness and a changing social movement
A little over a week ago, a University of Guelph student union drew international ire for condemning Lou Reed’s 1972 song “Walk on the Wild Side” as transphobic. This occurred after the Central Student Association apologized on social media for playing the song at a campus event. Although this might
Continue readingIn This Corner: The Return of Stuff Happens, week 5: Horror hits home; Trudeau breaks a promise; Stupor Bowl ads
Events on Sunday in Quebec City served as a reminder, if we needed one, that Canada is not immune to madness. Last Sunday, a sad loser walked into a Quebec City mosque and opened fire on people who were praying. Yes, praying. He killed six, injuring many others; it could
Continue readingScripturient: Eheu fugaces, Postume…
Alas, Postumus, the swift years slip away. Those words are one translation of the opening line of the 14th Ode in the second book of Horace’s carminas, or songs: Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume/labuntur anni… * For me, it’s his most moving piece, a bittersweet acceptance of mortality; the inevitability of
Continue readingScripturient: Horace and him. And maybe me, too.
Horace and Me, subtitled Life lessons from an Ancient Poet, is a recent book by Harry Eyres (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2013) about his efforts to connect the dots of his modern life to meaning via the ancient circuitry of a classical Latin poet. It attracted me because these past few years I
Continue readingDented Blue Mercedes: Free speech, and the cruel shackles of empathy and mutual respect
In Canada, we tend to value freedom of speech very highly, and it’s often said that the best way to counter objectionable speech is with more speech. That’s the first thought that crosses my mind in the case of U of T professor Jordan Peterson, who declares in a series
Continue readingScripturient: Fowler for the 21st Century
On the desk of every writer, every reporter, every editor, every PR director and every communications officer is a small library of reference books. A good dictionary (Oxford, American Heritage, Merriam Webster, Random House but gods forbid, never a ge…
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