When my niece was a couple-three years old, she went through this engaging stretch of weeks, maybe months, during which she improvised neverending stories. For some reason these tended to involve creatures like the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, and so on. (That may have been attributable to my sister’s macabre sensibilities.)
For instance, a story (told, and [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Language'
Attach Imagination to Mouth. Turn Ignition. GO.
November 19th, 2008 · 5 Comments
Tags: Everyday Life · Family · Language · Looking Backward · The Online World
The Eloquent Silence of Two Hands Flapping
November 11th, 2008 · 6 Comments
Yesterday’s post about languages which lack one or more tenses brought a couple of interesting comments from Jules (of the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog). Among the other talents and skills and enthusiasms on ample display at the “7 Imp” site, Jules has worked as what she sometimes refers to in terms like a [...]
Knowing Only the Present
November 10th, 2008 · 6 Comments
Since history is on my mind anyway…
From Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days blog recently, by guest blogger Tero Ykspetäjä: the top five reasons “Why Finnish Is Cooler Than English.” Reason #5 (with slightly tongue-in-cheek coda):
There’s no future tense in the Finnish language. The present tense is used instead. “No future,” as the Tähtivaeltaja slogan says. This [...]
Tags: Art & Photography · Language · Reading · Ruminations · Running After My Hat
Surprising (But Welcome) (But SURPRISING) News
November 8th, 2008 · 5 Comments
Okay, okay. We could quibble with the wording. Shouldn’t that be “the average blogger’s“? Does “81% shorter than” mean “81% as long as” or does it mean “19% as long as”? And who knows how accurate this is, or how they calculate the average length of a blogger (or his/her posts)? Surely it can’t mean [...]
Tags: Language · Programming, Web Design, Databases · Running After My Hat · The Internet · The Online World
Words Enough, and Time
November 7th, 2008 · No Comments
[The clock above was designed by Caroline Lisfranc, replacing the numbers on the clock face with a dozen French verbs. The English translation (starting with one o'clock and moving, duh, clockwise) is to divide, to give, to listen, to work, to love, to dream, to reflect, to laugh, to tinker, to travel, to grow, and [...]
Tags: Language · Poetry · Ruminations
The Open-Heart-Surgery Theory of Writing
November 6th, 2008 · 6 Comments
For Halloween last week, in their contribution to the weekly around-the-Web Poetry Friday, the folks at the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog offered up Poe’s weird — and kind of forced — “Ulalume” (full title “To — – –. Ulalume: A Ballad”).
The ensuing discussion got me thinking once more about Poe — “once more” [...]
Tags: Language · Poetry · Reading · Ruminations · Short Fiction · Style and Craft · Writing
Happy Birthday, Lester Dent
October 12th, 2008 · 4 Comments
Today marks the 104th anniversary of the birth of Lester Dent, a/k/a Kenneth Robeson.
Not exactly a household name these days, eh? But in his time, which occupied a substantial chunk of the first half of the last century (he died young, in 1959), Dent was one of the most prolific and most successful writers on [...]
Tags: Books as Books · Language · Reading · Ruminations · Short Fiction · Writing
Fact, Fiction, and the Gray In-Between
October 3rd, 2008 · 2 Comments
In a college linguistics course, I first encountered the work of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), a pre-World War II organization — we’d probably call it a think tank, nowadays — which (per Wikipedia):
…formed with the general concern that increased amounts of propaganda were decreasing the public’s ability to develop their own critical thoughts. [...]
Tags: Language · Politics · Research/Resources
!?$%*#@!!
September 23rd, 2008 · 4 Comments
I’ve always liked punctuation; some would say I like it a little too much. For my junior-college newspaper, I wrote an opinion column called something melodramatic and “clever” like “The Outspeaker.” [...checking yearbook... yeah, that was it, all right] I was convinced that the only thing anyone would notice about the column was the eloquence [...]
Tags: Comics · In the News · Language · Research/Resources · The Internet
You Can Run but You Can’t Hide
September 12th, 2008 · 4 Comments
From whiskey river:
All you can do is this: Whatever you experience, whether tangible or intangible, look underneath the experience, like a child looking for a lizard under a stone. You’re not expecting anything to be there, but you’re always wondering if there might be.
(Richard Leviton)
Not from whiskey river:
One of life’s primal situations; the game of [...]
Tags: Cartoons · Language · Ruminations
