Category Archives: Americana

The Joy of Informal Language

Americana, Evolution, Psychological Musings

I started out titling this post "The Joy of Simple Language" but, in taking about it with Michele, she pointed out that I was really talking about Informal Language and, infact, what I was looking at as simple is actually complicated. I had it backwards.

I used to be in an men's group. We met every other week for years and we had all sorts of rules on how to be in our group. Among the rules was Anything the we say in the group stays in the group.  When one guy told us he and his wife were expecting a baby, none of us told our significant other. Rules were rules. Eventually, we dropped all the rules except To be in relationship to what we do in the group and to each other. With no rules to slavishly follow, being in the group became much more complicated.

Language is that way.

Intuitively, we all – I – think that the language of primitive people is simple. We all know that cave men said things like Uga or Ugh and not I want to tease out the real meaning in the cave being empty.  And that may be true, but earlier languages are simpler because they are more formal than our language. They have more and harder rules. Latin is almost impossibly complex but it is easy once you memorize the rules.

English – American English – is losing rules every day and it had a lot less to start with.  I think that is so thrilling.

It is easy to follow a rule like Never end a sentence with a preposition, but it results in a sentence like About what are you thinking? rather than What are you thinking about?  As English losses its rules, it becomes more complex as well as less formal. There is more room to play. To understand tease  above, we have to see it in context. We have to be in relationship and that is the Joy. 

 

 

The power and joy of a book

Americana, General U.S. Grant, Psychological Musings, War, What's a man?

One of the nice things about being in the hospital is having time to read. Several weeks ago, Richard Taylor sent me a list of books – he had run into – on the Civil War and that started me reading A Stillness at Appomattox.

Civil War blog

Reading this book has been painful at times, but – mostly – a joy. It is painful because it is paragraph after paragraph and page after page of General U. S. Grant sending men into the meat grinder of battle and a joy because it shows the slow change – with so many acts of grace and horror – of Grant’s Army transforming into a winner.

But the book is primarily a joy because of the power and beauty of the words. It is almost 400 pages of poetry. Here is a paragraph from page 213:

…There had been that dance for officers of the II Army Corps, in the raw pine pavilion above the Rapidan on Washington’s Birthday, and it had been a fine thing to see; and it had been a long good-by and a dreamy good night for the young men in bright uniforms and the women who tied their lives to them. Most of the men who danced at that ball were dead, now; dead or dragging themselves about hometown streets on crutches, or tapping their way along with a hickery cane to find the way instead of bright youthful eyes, or in hospitals where doctors with imperfect knowledge tried to patch them up enough to enable them to hope to get out of bed some day and sit in a chair by the window. There had been a romance to war once, or atleast some people said there was, and each one of these men had seen it, and they had touched the edge of it while the music played and the stacked flags swayed in the candlelight, and it all came down to this, with the drifting dust of the battlefields blowing from the imperfect mounds of hastily dug graves. 

 

 

 

I realized this evening – with some sadness – that I don’t know one person in the military.

Americana, Current Affairs, War

Mississippi-Flag-Memorial

I was in the Army for three years and all I knew were people in the army – and a few Air Force – now I don't know anybody. It is a shame and – in my humble opinion – a blot on our country that we – most people – have been able to take no no part in the carnage we want other people to do in our name.  Maybe, if we all had to take part, we wouldn't have as many wars.

Ask for Adenium obesum; Google will give you about 12,600 results in 0.12 seconds

Americana, Current Affairs, Evolution, Psychological Musings, Science

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Or Dorstenia foedita in 0.17 seconds with about 7,830 results*. We truly live in an an age of wonder.

My grandmother was born in the late 1880s – about 16 years, give or take 5, before Wilbur and Orville first flew the Flyer – and she died after John Glen orbited the earth.  I used to marvel at the change she went though, but it is nothing compared to the change we are going through.

True, from horse and buggy to orbit seems like a big jump.  But very, very, few people will ever go into orbit; it just isn't part of our life. But everybody – OK, maybe not everybody, but everybody with a small rounding error – has a computer and access to the World Wide Web. Really, access to an almost infinite well of knowledge.

With a smart phone – and we will all have smart phones soon – we have access everywhere, anytime. All the time.  Astounding! A huge percentage of the world's knowledge – maybe not knowledge, but facts, at least –  is at our fingertips. Literally, as Joe Biden would say. What do walruses eat? When was Hypatia murdered by religious fanatics? How far is the airport from a hotel – any hotel you want – in the downtown section of the capital of Paraguay?

We are living in a time of wonders that were inconceivable 20 years ago.

 * somehow I find it very amusing that Google can come up with results in 0.17 seconds but – apparently – doesn't have time to count the exact number of results