Great book about Old English, from roughly 500AD to 1150AD.
þ, "thorn", was pronounced as "th", so "the" was "þe". Scribes often used "y" instead of þ, to the point where printers would shorten "the" to "þe". This got forgotten, then strangely resurfaced when in the 17th century "ye olde"... became fake archaic English.
How "miniatures" that monks drew, have nothing to do with their size, but the "minium" colour that was used for them.
https://www.oed.com/discover/introduction-to-indian-english/?tl=true
In order to express scale or emphasis, words in adjectival positions can be reduplicated in Indian English. Some examples are:
little-little things ‘many things that are little’,
big-big problems ‘several sizeable problems’
chubby-chubby cheeks ‘very chubby cheeks’
Many verbs can take the particle off to give some emphasis or add a negative meaning, e.g. ‘Let’s finish it off’. The intended meaning is ‘Let’s finish it and be done with it’. ‘Let’s hide it off’ carries the extra meaning of conspiracy among the interlocutors.
whole blog quite interesting...
https://www.oldnorthwhale.com/p/why-modern-chinese-is-just-english
Traditional Chinese is a language of parataxis (意合, idea-joining). It is like a traditional landscape painting; elements are placed side by side, and the relationship between them is inferred by context, intuition, and white space. There are few connectors, no strict tenses, and subject-verb agreements are loose.
English, and other Indo-European languages, are languages of hypotaxis (形合, form-joining). They are architectural blueprints. They require conjunctions, prepositions, relative clauses, and tense markers to lock every piece of information into a precise, unshakeable hierarchy.
The linguistic update was installed in two waves. The first came from 19th-century missionaries. To translate the specific theology of The Pilgrim’s Progress (translated by William Chalmers Burns,《天路历程》), they forced the English plural “We” onto the character men (们), injecting mandatory number-specificity where context once sufficed.
The second, and larger, wave came via Japan. During the Meiji Restoration, Japan encoded Western concepts: democracy, science, economy, into Wasei-kango (和制汉语, Japanese-made Chinese words). These “returnee” words were Western souls in Hanzi shells. They flooded back into China, importing not just vocabulary, but the Indo-European logic of abstract nouns and categorization.
https://planktonvalhalla.com/20240227-boundaries-are-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/
human language gives you the impression of being able to categorize things with names
Consider, for example, the activities that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, athletic games, and so on. What is common to them all? — Don’t say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’ ” — but look and see whether there is anything common to all. — For if you look at them, you won’t see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! — Look, for example, at board-games, with their various affinities. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. — Are they all ‘entertaining’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball-games, there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck, and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of singing and dancing games; here we have the element of entertainment, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way, can see how similarities crop up and disappear.
And the upshot of these considerations is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing: similarities in the large and in the small.
the words we use define boundaries for things, giving us handy ways to tell things apart, but those boundaries are not universal. They’re not “in the world”, they’re practical shortcuts that exist only in human heads. If you look really closely, or if you look at the science, there is no strong reason to draw those lines one way or another.
First, the fact that they have their own names can’t be a reason to separate them in that unique manner. We could give a name to the whole subject of the picture, say, “gadorblk”, that from now on we can use to refer to woman-touching-flower-carrying robots whenever we see them. Not very useful, but not prohibited either. You hear of languages that have words for weirdly specific things like “the effect of sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees, creating a dappled pattern of light and shadow” (komorebi from Japanese) and “the roadlike reflection of moonlight on water” (mångata from Swedish). Why shouldn’t a language have a one-word noun for the content of this picture?
As for the idea that we need to count three entities because each of them—the robot, the flower, and the woman—independently has consistent properties (an “identity”) of its own, the question then arises: why not more than three, then? Why not count each panel and screw of the robot separately? You could distinguish each garment worn by the woman, and each petal of the flower, each with its own independent uses and properties. All these things are “attached” to each other by physical forces that, when you look closely, are the forces of atoms pushing or pulling at each other. Just like the atoms of the robot and of the woman’s hands are pushing and pulling at those of the flower.
https://aethermug.com/posts/is-there-anything-untranslatable
fitting native word simply doesn't exist that works as well as the foreign one in that situation. I often have conversations like this:
Marco: I'm looking for a date spot, have you been to that restaurant before?
Friend: yes, it's great.
M: nice and cozy?
F: yeah, especially very... shibui.
M: perfect, she'll love it then.
Shibui (渋い) means, in this context, quietly refined in an austere way, without pretenses, almost stoic. Saying shibui like that, in a mere second, conveys what would otherwise make a clunky and unnecessarily long digression.
Perhaps the most famous story about translation in Japan is an urban legend featuring Natsume Souseki, considered by many to be the greatest Japanese novelist of the early 20th century.
When he wasn't writing future classics, he worked as an English teacher. One day—the story goes—his students were trying to translate the English phrase "I love you" to Japanese. They knew the translation for each of those three words, so naturally they constructed a grammatically valid sentence with them. How hard can it be?
When they asked Souseki to check their translation, however, he told them they'd gotten it all wrong.
"Japanese lovers don't say things straight to each other's face like that," he said. "You'll do better to translate it as, isn't the moon beautiful tonight?"
The story itself may be apocryphal, but the message rings true. There is a side of translation that has less to do with the meaning of individual words than with the intention of the speaker. You forgo a literal translation in favor of one that uses different words, but achieves the intended meaning more closely. This approach—usually called "free translation"—exists for all languages, but it's especially important when the two languages in question are very different. Japanese (to/from) translators are forced to do this kind of work all the time.
When a surgeon turns to her assistant and says “Scalpel,” this one-word linguistic act—we might call it a command or a request—is, first and foremost, an instruction for mutual coordination. The key to understanding this is that when you use language, you are never just saying something. You are doing something. With words, you act on those around you, to help them, influence them, build affiliations with them.
— Language vs Reality, Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists, Nick Enfield
Translation is achieving the goals of the original text in a different language.
https://aethermug.com/posts/the-beautiful-dissociation-of-the-japanese-language
The Japanese scholars-aristocrats began repurposing the Chinese characters, which they called kanji (for, well, "Chinese characters"). Sometimes, instead of using them for their meaning, they used them for (gasp!) their pronunciation. By ignoring the original content of a kanji, they could string them together to form almost any sound.
Over the centuries those "sound-only" kanji, called man'yougana, evolved into something else entirely. They became simpler, more streamlined, and more standardized. Where the symbols were originally composed of many short strokes, they gradually lost detail and complexity. Where the scribes could choose between a slew of different kanji for any given sound (for instance, the sound pa could be represented by any of 20 characters), later the number of options dwindled and eventually settled to two.
That's how the two syllable-based alphabets in use today, hiragana and katakana, came about (collectively kana).
furigana. These are tiny kana characters showing you how to pronounce a difficult kanji.
My favorite are all the versions of the word "cousins" meant in a reciprocal sense, as in "she and I are cousins (of each other)". In spoken language, you just say itoko in all cases, and that's it. In written language, you use the appropriate combinations of the kanji 兄 (ani, older brother), 弟 (otouto, younger brother), 姉 (ane, older sister), and 妹 (imouto, younger sister), preceded by the kanji 従 (shitagau, accompany), to specify the exact genders in the relationship. (These are also jukujikun, come to think of it.)
Gikun is the replacement of a kanji's or word's normal pronunciation with something else through furigana. Novelists and manga-ka use it to inject an almost subliminal layer of meaning beyond what is afforded by the words and kanji. It achieves an effect similar to a textual voice over, at the same time as the actual text you're reading.
You see it a lot in manga: the actual kanji say something, but the furigana, instead of giving you the true pronunciation of the word, give you something else entirely. Sometimes it's a synonym of the word with a more pungent nuance
The author of the excellent gikun explanaton on japanesewithanime.com clarifies the context:
Todoroki Shouto 轟焦凍 has both cold and heat abilities, which come from the sides of his body: from the right comes cold, from the left comes heat.
Here Shouto, the protagonist, is telling the flame-y man "during combat, I won't use my heat power for any reason at all." Being a kids' comic, all kanji have furigana. But the kanji for "heat" (highlighted in red) comes with an unexpected reading. Instead of the official netsu, the furigana reads hidari, which means "left".
So the reader gets two messages at the same time: the character says "I won't use the left", but the text is saying "I won't use heat".
https://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
French has a number which means "arbitrarily many": 36, used just like English "umpteen", but it is fascinating that a number has meaning like that. Other numbers with particular meaning include 69, 666, 4711. The number 606 has been used to refer to arsphenamine, because it was the 606th compound tested by Paul Ehrlich to treat syphilis.
A reportedly Swiss saying goes: "A man with one clock knows the time. A man with two clocks does not."
https://www.noemamag.com/the-shrouded-sinister-history-of-the-bulldozer
According to an 1881 obituary in a Louisiana newspaper, the word "bulldozer" was coined by a German immigrant named Louis Albert Wagner, who later committed suicide by taking a hefty dose of opium dissolved in alcohol. Little else is recorded about Wagner, but his term became a viral sensation in late 1800s America, going from street slang to dictionary entry in just one year. It likely originated from a shortening of "bullwhip," the braided tool used to intimidate and control cattle, combined with "dose," as in quantity, with a "z" thrown in for good measure. To bulldoze was to unleash a dose of coercive violence.
If, like gods, we aspire to create machines in our own image, then it's fitting that the original bulldozers were humans. Leading up to the corrupted U.S. election of 1876, as the Southern states were being reconstructed following the Civil War, terrorist gangs of predominantly white Democrats roamed about, threatening or attacking Black men who they thought might vote for the Republican Party. The thugs were the bulldozers, and the acts they carried out were bulldozing.
It's not commonplace to associate bulldozers with war, and yet they were as important to the Allied victory as the aircraft engine, the radar or the atomic bomb. "Of all the weapons of war," wrote Colonel K.S. Andersson of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1944, "the bulldozer stands first. Airplanes and tanks may be more romantic, appeal more to the public imagination, but the Army's advance depends on the unromantic, unsung hero who drives the `cat.'" The war was largely defined by control of the air, and airplanes needed airfields within operating range of their targets. If dispatched from seafaring aircraft carriers, then those ships needed docks and dry docks. And those airfields, docks and dry docks needed bases and road systems. In essence, for airplanes to stay mobile as the front shifted across the planet, an entire network of ordinarily immobile infrastructure had to become mobile to. Bulldozers move wars.
The bulldozer in this view was a creator, not a destroyer. Yet the legacy of that period still scars Guam, where the rainforest has fallen silent. The ships that brought the machines during and after World War II may have also accidentally carried with them an invasive species: the brown tree snake. With no natural predators, its population exploded, turning Guam into one of the most snake-infested places on Earth, wiping out 10 of its 12 native forest bird species by the 1980s and nearly erasing the sound of wild birdsong. Those birds used to eat the spiders and now there are too many of them, too.
But "illegality" in the built environment is extremely common in India. In Delhi alone, estimates suggest that anywhere between 30% and 80% or more of properties could be considered illegal.
"For many marginalized groups around the world, heavy earthmoving equipment has often been the visible part of the faceless bureaucratic megamachine that runs roughshod through communities in the name of urban renewal, beautification or 'slum' clearance."
"It was clear that it was only Muslim houses being targeted," [Fahad] Zuberi told me. In the wake of the demolitions, BJP politicians publicly celebrated them as a form of "vigilante justice," and the phenomenon became known as "bulldozer raj" (rule by bulldozer). The anti-Muslim overtones were clear: in a now-deleted Twitter post from 2022, a BJP spokesperson equated the letters JCB with "jihadi control board."
Around the country that year, widespread glorification of the machine engulfed certain sections of society. Processions of JCB vehicles started appearing at BJP political rallies, adorned in flowers and carrying people in their buckets, while crowds of onlookers waved toy bulldozers in the air. Pop songs about the machines racked up millions of hits on YouTube. Grooms rode to weddings atop earthmovers, and shops sold "JCB Gorilla" condoms - further emphasis on the machine's enduring associations with a particular notion of hypermasculine heroism. At a mass wedding in March, newlywed couples were given toy bulldozers as gifts to "symbolize the victory of good over evil and also order in life," according to a guest at the event.
JCB, or J.C. Bamford Excavators Limited, is a U.K. company founded in 1945 by Joseph Cyril Bamford, who began by making agricultural machines from war surplus materials in a rented garage. Today, the company is among the world’s largest manufacturers of construction machinery [...] The company is now run by Bamford’s son, Lord Anthony Bamford. 2024 was a good year for Bamford and his family, one of the wealthiest in the U.K. [...] Renowned as both a flamboyant socialite and political kingmaker, he’s among the top donors to the U.K. Conservative Party and is close friends with former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose wedding he hosted in 2022. Bamford is also currently being investigated for hundreds of millions of pounds in tax avoidance. He and his wife, Lady Carole Bamford, live in the Cotswolds, a quaint pastoral utopia for the U.K.’s rich and famous, in a Georgian mansion once owned by a former British governor-general of India [...] The day after the destruction in Jahangirpuri, Lord Bamford happened to be in India with Johnson, who was still the U.K. prime minister. They were inaugurating a new JCB factory in Gujarat, the home state of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. At one point, Johnson climbed into the cab of a machine and leaned out to wave at photographers. Neither he nor Bamford made any comments to the press about the violence in Delhi.
A bomb is a clear and blatant act of violence, but a bulldozer can appear banal and bureaucratic. The violence the machine enacts is slow, rumbling, grinding, drawn out. Not an instantaneous vaporization.
In the spring of 2022, Russian soldiers looted 27 machines worth nearly $5 million from a John Deere dealership in Melitopol, Ukraine, and shipped them 700 miles back to Russia. But when they tried to turn the machines on, they had been remotely "kill-switched" by the dealership. What enabled this remote disabling was a practice known as "VIN-locking," which manufacturers use to prevent unauthorized repairs to their products, instead requiring a licensed or official company technician to do so. It is a controversial practice that has been at the heart of the "right-to-repair" debate in the U.S. and has resulted in widespread "tractor hacking" by farmers who wish to mend their own equipment. As the sci-fi author and tech journalist Cory Doctorow wrote in his analysis of the Melitopol story, "The technology was not invented to thwart Russian looters... [I]t was invented to thwart American farmers."
Ralph Waldo Emerson [in a book of essays "The Conduct of Life"], in one chapter titled "Fate," Emerson sought to address "the question of the times" - "How shall I live?" he wrote: "You have just dined, and, however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
Makom is een even cruciaal als wonderlijk begrip, een paradox in een woord. Het betekent zowel 'plek' als 'geen plek'. Je kunt er zowel de stad Jeruzalem mee aanduiden, een plek die je kunt bezoeken, maar ook God, een wezen waarvan niemand weet waar het huist. Het woord makom omvat tegelijk het verlangen naar een plek om thuis te zijn samen en het besef dat een thuisgevoel ongrijpbaar is. 'Mokum, de Jiddische benaming van Amsterdam, is een verbastering van makom'
https://magazine.catapult.co/column/stories/column-tokyo-journal-summer-in-tokyo-rain-women-cicadas-visits-from-the-dead
Before I came to Japan, I thought rain was just rain. I’ve since learned there’s shito-shito ame, a light, quiet rain—not to be confused with shobo-shobo, also a light, quiet rain, but in a slightly negative sense. Zaa-zaa is a torrential downpour, potsu-potsu is scattered drops when it’s starting to rain, and bota-bota is heavy drops as rain begins to fall.
If it starts raining while the sun is shining, that’s kitsune no yomeiri—a “fox’s wedding”—because the fox, a trickster, is associated with curious events. Ame onna, “rain woman,” is a woman who seems to bring rain wherever she goes. Aiai-gasa, “love-love umbrella,” means two people sharing an umbrella, a couple in love.
just as amazing as his first collection.
At some point, got a bit tired of the "Singularity" story, it dragged on a bit too much, but the later stories were great again.
Also, found out Netflix' Love Death + Robots, "Good Hunting" story was based on one of Liu's stories.
(Ghost Days)
"The character forms from the Zhou Dynasty were a bit different from later forms," his father said, as though William was still only a child being taught how to read and write. "So collectors from later ages would sometimes carve their interpretations of the script on the vessels. Like the patina, these interpretations also accumulate on the vessels in layers, build up over time."
宇 字
żólć
Refers to bile, but also symbolizes deep bitterness or resentment.
kilkanaście
refers to any number between 11 and 19
Nice book about languages etc
The Sumerians flavoured their meals with a sipce called gamun in Sumerian. In Akkadian, it was called kamunum, which we know from bilingual lists. We still use this spice, and still know it by an almost identical name, cumin. The Akkadians enjoyed the tasty, nourishing seeds and oil of the sesame plant, called šamaššammu. The name is thought to mean sun-oil, or sun-plant, and is the ancestor of our word, sesame.
[...]
From around 1000 CE, cumin is mentioned in Old English plant lists as cimen. Later, it would be known in England as comyn, or as cumin, the name still used for it today. In the Middle Ages, between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, English tenants even paid their rent in pepper and cumin.
[...]
It's a myth that spices were used to mask the taste of rotten meat. Spices were much more expensive than meat, and it wouldn't have made sense to waste them that way, especially when meat usually came from freshly slaughtered animals.
https://aeon.co/essays/in-the-beginning-was-the-word-and-the-word-was-embodied
amazing article. This seems to indirectly confirm my suspicion about names like "Mordor" and "Nazgul" sounding angry and dangerous!
Try to guess their meaning from the two available options:
1. nurunuru (a) dry or (b) slimy?
2. pikapika (a) bright or (b) dark?
3. wakuwaku (a) excited or (b) bored?
4. iraira (a) happy or (b) angry?
5. guzuguzu (a) moving quickly or (b) moving slowly?
6. kurukuru (a) spinning around or (b) moving up and down?
7. kosokoso (a) walking quietly or (b) walking loudly?
8. gochagocha (a) tidy or (b) messy?
9. garagara (a) crowded or (b) empty?
10. tsurutsuru (a) smooth or (b) rough?
The answers are: 1(b); 2(a); 3(a); 4(b); 5(b); 6(a); 7(a); 8(b); 9(b) 10(a).
If you think this exercise is futile, you’re in tune with traditional linguistic thinking. One of the founding axioms of linguistic theory, articulated by Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 19th century, is that any particular linguistic sign – a sound, a mark on the page, a gesture – is arbitrary, and dictated solely by social convention. Save those rare exceptions such as onomatopoeias, where a word mimics a noise – eg, ‘cuckoo’, ‘achoo’ or ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ – there should be no inherent link between the way a word sounds and the concept it represents; unless we have been socialised to think so, nurunuru shouldn’t feel more ‘slimy’ any more than it feels ‘dry’.
Yet many world languages contain a separate set of words that defies this principle. Known as ideophones, they are considered to be especially vivid and evocative of sensual experiences. Crucially, you do not need to know the language to grasp a hint of their meaning. Studies show that participants lacking any prior knowledge of Japanese, for example, often guess the meanings of the above words better than chance alone would allow. For many people, nurunuru really does feel ‘slimy’; wakuwaku evokes excitement, and kurukuru conjures visions of circular rather than vertical motion. That should simply not be possible, if the sound-meaning relationship was indeed arbitrary. (The experiment is best performed using real audio clips of native speakers.)
Yet Westermann’s later research found that there was also something special in ideophones’ phonological features. Comparing the ideophones of half a dozen West African languages, he noted that certain ‘front’ or ‘closed’ vowels – such as the [i] sound in the English word ‘cheese’ – tended to be used to represent concepts that were light, fine or bright, for instance; while ‘back’ or ‘open’ vowels – such as the [ɔ] sound in ‘talk’ or the [ɑ] in past – tended to be associated with a sense of slowness, heaviness and darkness. Meanwhile, voiced consonants such as ‘b’ or ‘g’ – so-called because they require the vocal cords to resonate – were associated with greater weight and softness, while voiceless consonants, such as ‘p’ or ‘k’, tended to be used to represent lighter weights and harsher surfaces. So, for example, in Ewe, someone kputukpluu is thinner than someone who is gbudugbluu.
He found similar relationships with linguistic tones. In many languages, the pitch at which a syllable is spoken can change a word’s meaning. Westermann found that words representing slowness, darkness and heaviness tended to have lower tones than those depicting speed, agility and brightness, which were formed of higher tones. Many also include the repetition of syllables, which can be used to signify number and a continuous action or state. So, for instance, in Ewe, kpata is used to denote one drop falling, but kpata kpata depicts many drops falling.
These patterns have now been observed in the ideophones of many other languages. To take a couple of examples from Basque – a language isolate that also has more than 4,000 ideophones – tiki taka, with its closed, frontal [i] sound, means taking quick, light steps, while taka taka, with a more open [a] sound, denotes taking heavier steps; tilin tilin means ‘small toll’, and tulun tulun ‘big toll’.
Meanwhile, in Japanese you have gorogoro, which, with its voiced ‘g’ sounds, represents a heavy object rolling continuously, while korokoro, with a voiceless ‘k’, represents a lighter rolling object. Similarly, bota means a ‘thick/much liquid hitting a solid surface’, while pota means a ‘thin/little liquid hitting a solid surface’. If you are a Pokémon fan, you might even notice these sound-meaning relationships in your favourite characters. Pikachu, for instance, is named after the Japanese ideophone pikapika, which means sparkle. As Westermann had noted, the voiceless consonants and front [i] vowels are often associated with brightness in a number of languages.
An early version of this experiment can be found in the writing of the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in the late 1920s, who tested participants in Tenerife. But the result has now been repeated many times, in many different cultures. In almost all cases, bouba is chosen to represent the shape on the right by the vast majority of participants, while kiki naturally seems to fit a spiky, pointed object.
The evocative power of ideophones might therefore reflect on an inherent sound symbolism understood by all humans. Although we don’t know the exact origin of these universal connections between sounds and meanings, one attractively parsimonious answer comes from human biology and the bodily experience of speech. According to this theory, subtle feedback from our mouth and throat primes us to associate certain phonemes with certain concepts. The mouth tends to form a rounder shape when we form an [o] sound, compared with an [i] sound – which might help to explain the kiki/bouba phenomenon. Voiced consonants such as ‘b’ also last for a marginally longer time than voiceless consonants such as ‘t’ – which might explain why they are associated with slower speed.
As part of the same study, Dingemanse also asked Dutch participants to memorise various lists of word pairs. In one, the ideophones were paired with the correct translation that matched their sound symbolism (kibikibi was paired with its true meaning, ‘energetic’, for instance). In another, the Japanese ideophones were paired with words of the opposite meaning (kibikibi was paired with the Dutch word for ‘tired’).
Over all the experiments, the participants found it far easier to learn the ideophones paired with their correct meaning, remembering about 86 per cent of the ‘congruent’ word pairs, compared with 71 per cent of the word pairs in which they had been given the wrong translation of the ideophone. Once again, this was not true in another experiment that measured how well they learnt Japanese adjectives – supporting the idea that there is something special about ideophones, and the way they are formed, that makes them particularly vivid.
Harsh Finnish action film, gray and bloody. Good.
Sisu; untranslatable, Finnish word, a Finnish word variously translated as stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardiness. It is held by Finns to express their national character. It is generally considered not to have a single-word literal equivalent in English (tenacity, grit, resilience, and hardiness are much the same things, but do not necessarily imply stoicism or bravery).
[translator's note]
The most serious problem of Honig's translation is to render the central concept of ficçǒes sociaes as 'social myths'. For Pessoa, myths were more real than surface 'realities'. But a ficcǎo social for the Banker was merely a fiction, a lie, a false tradition, designed to perpetuate injustice. It possesses none of the veiled redeeming features of a myth. The Portugueses term for myth, mito, was quite familiar to Pessoa, but he chose not to use it in this context. The English cognate fiction is the proper translation.
readers of translations, not excepting this one, should keep in their mind the Italian proverb tradutorre, traditore – 'translator, betrayer'.
Glamour is, rather, a form of nonverbal rhetoric, which moves and persuades not through words, but through images, concepts, and, totems. (Even when conjured as word-pictures, glamorous images are perceived and remembered as emotionally resonant snapshots, not verbal descriptions.)
Glamour is powerfully persuasive. Yet because it relies on imagery and channels desire, it is often dismissed as trivial, frivolous, and superficial.
the old Scots word glamour described a literal magic spell. Glamour (or a glamour) made its subject see things that weren't there. A 1721 glossary of poetry explained: "When devils, wizards or jugglers deceive the sight, they are said to cast glamour o'er the eyes of the spectator." Glamour could, Scott wrote in 1805, "make a ladye seem a knight; / The cobwebs on a dungeon wall / Seem tapestry in lordly hall." That power was believed to stretch into the real world. In his diary, Scott worried that "a kind of glamour about me" was mking him overlook errors in his page proofs; he wondered whether the right herbal concoction "would dispel this fascination." (As both magic and metaphor, glamour and fascination are closely related.)
Glamour [...] emerges through the interaction between object and audience. Glamour is not something you possess but something you perceive, not something you have but something you feel.
Unlike escapist entertainment that simply provides emotional distraction, glamour is escapist in the profound sense identified by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Echoing Queen Christina's Antonio, Tuan argues that escapism is the essence of culture, which he defines as "the totality of means by which I escape from my animal state of being." This uniquely human escapism allows us to shape the world, and ourselves, through deliberate action.
A human is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is. Humans not only submit and adapt, as all animals do; they transform in accordance with a preconceived plan. That is, before transforming, they do something extraordinary, namely, "see" what is not there. Seeing what is not there lies at the foundation of all human culture.
A single static two-dimensional portrait – a selective representation "preserved for posterity" – is, by its very nature, deceptive. Viewers perceive such a portrait differently from a real human being. If, as [Jessica] Coen claims, young women do not realise that "most waists don't really bend without a roll of flesh" or that "a 40-year-old woman actually does have some wrinkles," it is because they've mentally edited away those flaws in the people they see every day. In the flux and movement of life, the mind overlooks imperfections that appear glaring in a still image. Retouching may therefore produce an image truer to the mind's eye.
Charisma (originally a religious term) is a quality of leadership that inspires followers to join the charismatic leader in the disciplined pursuit of a greater cause. More colloquially, charisma is a kind of personal magnetism that inspires loyalty.
Charisma in either sense is a personal characteristic like intelligence. A place, an idea, even an object can be glamorous, but only a person can be charismatic. And while glamour depends on the audience's receptive imagination, even unsympathetic audiences can feel the power of charisma.
Most important, glamour requires mystery, allowing the audience to fill in the details with their own desires. Glamour doesn't persuade the audience to share a leader's vision. Instead, it inspires the audience to project their own longings onto the leader (or movie star, vacation resort, or new car).
[...]
Charisma enhances leadership; glamour enhances sales.
While not really my type of book, it might be good to read at this point; to love oneself first...
"Making yourself feel good is not a nothing," Sharon said.
This hadn't occured to me.
For Sharon, the simple act of privately wishing people well has a way of changing the way we relate to them, and to the world.
This equanimity about death lasts maybe three minutes, but each time it happens, it changes me slightly. If you define transcendence as a moment in which your self fades away and you feel connected to the all, these musically bittersweet moments are the closest I've come to experiencing it.
The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death - bitter and sweet - are forever paried. "Days of honey, days of onion," as an Arabic proverb puts it. The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor; you could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch, and the same dualities would rise again. Yet to fully inhabit these dualities-the dark as well as the light-is, paradixcally, theonly way to transcent them. And transcending them is the ultimate point.
If we don't transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect.
the "wounded healer," a term coined by the psychologist Carl Jung in 1951, is one of humanity's oldest archetypes. In Greek myth, the centaur Chiron was injured by a poisoned arrow that gave him terrible pain, but also curative powers. In shamanistic cultures, often healers must first undergo an initiation process involving great misery. In Judaism, the Messiah's powers derive from his own suffering; he surrounds himself with the poor and the sick because he's one of them. In Christianity, Jesus is the wounded healer who cures bleeding women, hugs lepers, and dies on a cross to save us all. And in Islam, Muhammed is the impoverished orphan who grows up to spread a message of honoring the pariah, the parentless, and the poor.
Longing itself is a creative and spiritual state.
There is a traditional trope of laughing at how badly our dates go. We think: "I'm a still circle of perfection in a sea of madness!"
"Who in this room wants to be loved for who they are?" he continues. "Put your hands up if you want to be loved for who you are."
The hands raise again.
"Oh, my goodness," chides Alain De Botton. "We have work to do still. Have you not been listening to anything I've been saying? How can you possibly be loved for who you are? You're a deeply flawed human being! Why would anyone love you just as you are? You've got to grow, and you've got to develop!"
People whose favorite songs are happy listen to them about 175 times on average. But those who favor "bittersweet" songs listen almost 800 times, according to a study by University of Michigan professors Fred Conrad and Jason Corey, and they report a "deeper connection" to the music than those whose favorites made them happy. They tell researchers that they associate sad songs with profound beauty, deep connection, transcedence, nostalgia, and common humanity-the so-called sublime emotions.
The Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca collected many of this country's lullabiews and concluded that Spain uses its "saddest melodies and most melancholy texts to tinge her children's first slumber".
The Japanese, who love sakura flowers most of all, attribute this preference to mono no aware, which means a desired state of gentle sorrow brought about by "the pathos of things" and "a sensitivity to impermanence"
We don't actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful things-the bitter together with the sweet. We don't thrill to lists of sad words, for example.
The Spanish call it duende, the yearning, burning center of flamenco dance and other art forms of the inflamed heart. Portuguese speakers have the concept of saudade, a sweetly piercing nostalgia, often expressed musically, for something deeply cherished, long gone, that may never have existed in the first place. In Hinduism, viraha - the pain of separation, usually from the beloved - is said to be the source of all poetry and music. Hindu legend says that Valmiki, the world's first poet, was moved to verse after watching a bird weeping for her mate, who'd been making love to her when he was killed by a hunter. "Longing itself is divine," writes the Hindu spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. "Longing for wordly things makes you inert. Longing for Infinity fills you with life. The skill is to bear the pain of longing and move on. True longing brings up spurts of bliss."
Yiddish word kvelling. It means "bursting with pride and joy for someone you love."
This longing you express
is the return message
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
[Rumi]
It might be more useful to view creativity through the lens of bittersweetness - of grappling simultaneously with darkness and light. It's not that pain equals art. It's that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.
University of Washington business school professor Christina Ting Fong found that people who simultaneously experience positive and negative emotions are better at making associative leaps and at seeing connections.
"If followers mess up on an important project," Schwarzmüller told Ozy Media's digital magazine, "it might be good to consider saying, "I'm sad this happened," instead of "I'm angry this happened." Personal power "motives people to work for you toward shared goals, and because they like you.
Tim [Chang] observed that peopel build companies and teams that reflect not only their values and strengths but also what he calls their "core wounds."
They open up to Susan about all the things they wish they didn't feel. "I don't want my heart to be broken," they say. Or, "I don't want to fail."
"I understand," Susan tells them. "But you have dead people's goals. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure."
One, the interviews were full of stories of pain and suffering at work: panic attacks, injured relationships, feelings of devaluation. Two, the interview subjects rarely used words such as pain or suffering to tell their stories. They were anxious but said they were angry; they were sad but said they were frustrated. "There's an unspectacular mundane suffering that pervades the workplace," [professor Jason] Kanov told me. "But we don't feel allowed to acknowledge that we suffer. We endure way more than we should, and can, because we downplay what it's actually doing to us."
Leaders who behave angrily during challenging situations are often assumed to be more powerful than those who react sadly. [...] Yet a 2009 study by management professors Juan Madera and D. Brent Smith found that showing sorrow rather than anger sometimes leads to better outcomes for leaders, including stronger relationships with followers, and a greater perception of effectiveness.
Pennebaker found that the people who wrote about their troubles were markedly calmer and happier than those who described their sneakers [during daily 20min writing sessions]
As Estelle Frankel explores in her excellent book Sacred Therapy, this is why so amny societies celebrate coming-of-age rituals in religious contexts, and why so many of those ceremonies involve the death of the childhood self and the birth of the adult one. In some cultures the child is buried (temporarily!) in the ground, and disinterred as an adult; sometimes he's tattooed, or maimed, or performs some other feat marking the end of childhood and the emergence of a new, adult self. Sometimes this involves a separate physical space, whether an initiation hut or a body of water, a church or a synagogue. The point of these rituals is that X must always give way to Y, and that this process, which involves both sacrifice and rebirth (the ultimate creativity) belongs to the realm of exaltation.
Whatever pain you can't get rid of, make it your creative offering.
compassion literally means "to suffer together"
psychologist Jonathan Cohen found that people asked to consider the suffering of victims of violence displayed activation of the same brain region as a previous study had shown of besotted mothers gazing at pictures of their babies.
processing people you've never met as if their pain is your own... reactions were likely influenced by your vagus nerve, your anterior cingulate cortex, your periaqueductal gray.
Darwin is associated, in the popular imagination, with bloody zero-sum competition, with Tennyson's "nature red in tooth and claw" – with the motto "survival of the fittest." But this wasn't actually his phrase. It was coined by a philosopher and sociologist named Herbert Spencer and his fellow "social Darwinists" who were promoters of white and upper-class supremacy.
If you're a melancholic type, you might expect to find your deepest stirrings reflected somewhere in the discipline [of psychology]. But other than the "high sensitivity" paradigm, the closest you'll come is the study of a personality trait called "neuroticism," which is about as appealing as the name sounds. According to modern personality psychology, neurotics are fretful and insecure. They're prone to illness, anxiety and depression.
Neuroticism does have upsides. Despite their stressed immune systems, neurotics may live longer because they're vigilant types who take good care of their health. They're strivers, driven by fear of failure to succeed, and by self-criticism to improve. They're good scholars because they turn concepts over in their minds and consider them at great length, from every angle.
An important first step is to cultivate humility. We know from various studies that attitudes of superiority prevent us from reacting to others' sadness–and even to our own. "Your vagus nerve won't fire when you see a child who's starving," says Kletner, "if you think you're better than other people." Amazingly, high-ranking people (including those artificially given high status, in a lab setting) are more likely to ignore pedestrians and to cut off other drivers, and are less helpful to their colleagues and to others in need. They're less likely to experience physical and emotional pain when holding their own hands under scalding water, when excluded from a game, or when witnessing the suffering of others.
But perhaps none of this [noticing suffering in others] is possible without first cultivating self-compassion. This may sound like the opposite of what you'd do to encourage humility. But many of us engage, without even realizing it, in a constant stream of negative self-talk: "You're terrible at this." "Why did you screw that up?" But, as Jazaieri observes, "There's no empirical evidence to suggest that beating ourselves up will actually help us change our behavior; in face, some data suggests that this type of crticicism can move us away from our goals rather than towards them."
Conversely, the more gently we speak to ourselves, the more we'll do the same for others. So the next time you hear that harsh internal voice, pause, take a breath–and try again. Speak to yourself with the same tenderness you'd extend to a beloved child–literally using the same terms of endearment and amount of reassurance that you'd shower on an adorable three-year-old. If this strikes you as hopelessly self-indulgent, remember that you're not babying yourself, or letting yourself off the hook. You're taking care of yourself, so that your self can go forth and care for others.
"The word "loser" is spoken with such contempt these days, a man might like to forget the losses in his own life that taught him something about good judgement."
Garrison Keillor
But where did this "tyranny of positivity" come from? Why did her father believe that he had to "fight" cancer with blind optimism? And why did his bereaved daughter feel so much pressure to smile?
The answer to these questions can be found in American cultural beliefs about the self. We're encouraged to see ourselves, deep down, as winners or losers - and to show, with our sanguine-choleric behavior, that we belong to the former group. These attitudes shape countless aspects of our lives, often without our realizing it.
[...]
Americans, it turns out, smile more than any other society on earth. In Japan, India, Iran, Argentina, South Korea, and the Maldives, smiling is viewed as dishonest, foolish, or both, according to a study by Polish psychologist Kuba Krys. Many societies believe that expressing happiness invites bad luck and is a sign of selfishness, shallowness, and an uninteresting, even sinister, mind. When McDonald's opened its first franchise in Russia, local workers were bemused by its ethos of employee cheeriness, according to the radio show and podcast Invisibilia. What is this American smile? they asked. "We are all serious about life, because life is struggle," as one employee put it. "We were always a little bit afraid of America's smile."
[Americans] don't turn over our water glasses at night, as Tibetan monks do to remember that they might be dead by morning. We don't write down our wishes and expose them to the elements, as the Japanese do at Mount Inari. We don't weave imperfections into our rugs, as the Navajo do, or bake them into our pottery, as the Japanese practice with the art form of wabi sabi.
a remote tribe required mothers to give up something precious every year, to prepare for their sons' departures at adolescence.
expressive writing exercise: would the people who love you still love you if they knew what you just wrote? Would you still love you? Do you still love you?
A field in social psychology called terror management theory. According to this theory, the fear of death encourages tribalism, by making us want to affiliate with a group identity that would seem to outlive us. Various studies have shown that when we feel mortally threatened, we become jingoistic, hostile to outsiders, biased against out-groups.
Carstensen even found these patterns among healthy people facing social unrest. Young and strong Hong Kong residents who were worried about Chinese rule in 1997, and later about the SARS epidemic, made the same social choices as older people. But when life appeared to settle down after the political transition, when the threat of SARS subsided, these young people started acting "like themselves" again. Again and again, Carstensen's studies showed that the important variable is not how many years since you were born - but how few good years you feel you have left.
When the Romans triumphed, writes Ryan Holiday, an influential author on Stoicism, the victorious commander would be stationed at a place of honor, where the adoring crowds could see him best. But instead of immersing himself in glory, he was followed by an aide whispering in his ear, "Remember, thou art mortal." Marcus Aurelius, too, wrote in his Meditations, "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." Seneca suggested that each night we tell ourselves that "You may not wake up tomorrow," and that we greet every morning with the reminder that "You may not sleep again."
"I'm not saying that Hindus are happy about death," Ami hastens to explain. "They feel just as much loss. But there's more of a sense that death is part of life. There's a fatalism, a sense that we don't have an ability to change it, that there's a power that's greater than ourselves, even greater than science's ability to find treatment and cures. Things happen for a reason. If this is our time, this is our time."
But the doctrine of reincarnation doesn't solve the pain of separation between two attached souls, Ami explains. "It's unlikely those two souls will meet again. And who knows where one will land and where the other will land. And that is a true loss."
(we don't move on, we move forward)
We need each other to remember, to help each other remember, that grief is this multitasking emotion. That you can and will be sad, and happy; you'll be grieving, and able to love in the same year or week, the same breath. We need to remember that a grieving person is going to laugh again and smile again... They're going to move forward. But that doesn't mean that they've moved on.
Yehuda and her colleagues studied a particular gene, associated with stress, in a group of thrity-two Holocaust survivors and twenty-two of their children. They found that this gene, in both parents and offspring, showed a typoe of epigenetic change called methalation. It was remarkable evidence that "preconception parental trauma" might be passed on from one generation to the next.
not only can pain last a lifetime, it can last many lifetimes.
But evidence started to accumulate that trauma could cause long-lasting bodily change, including to brain neurocircuitry, the sympathetic nervous system, the immune system, and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.
"I have poor shock absorbers, and I should just let it pass, because my biology is going to have extreme responses before it calmes down."
Nietzsche, who wrote that "he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."
"Live as though all your ancestors were living again through you," said the ancient Greeks. And this didn't mean literally to reenact their lives; it meant to give them a new life, fresh and clean.
The ancient proverb quoted in Ezekiel: "The fathers ate sour grapes, and the children's teeth were set on edge." But the Bible quotes this proverb in order to reject it: We aren't responsible for the sins of our parents, it says. And neither must we bear their pain.
Maybe you're a manager who realizes that sadness is the last great taboo in the workplace, and you want to create a healthy culture, one that's positive and loving yet acknowledges the dark along with the light, and understands the creative energy contained in this bittersweet fusion.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-30458-001?doi=1
1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."
3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.
4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".
5 Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.
8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.
9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.
To [Aristotle], "all discoverable things have already been discovered; all thinkable things previously thought; all forms of government already assessed; all workable feats of engineering tried and tested", wrties the historian Thomas Moynihan. What this implies is that Aristotle and his contemporaries had littel sense that tehere could be a future world with ideas, technologies and things that were not already part of their universe.
All this could explain why the Romans and Greeks turned to mysticism. Troughout history, ancient societies in Europe, China or Mesopotamia sought the wisdom of oracles, who promised answers from entrails, fire, dreams, bones, or even the crakcs on roasted turtle shells. And the Romans were no different. Before officials embarked on battles or elections, they'd ask a priesthood of augurs to study bird behaviour for guidance. (In Latin, the word 'auspices' essentially means 'looking for fortunate signs in birds') With the confidence of the historian relating fixed events in the past, these august would provide information about fixed events in the future.
'Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man, and his number is six hundred three-score and six.' Centuries later scholars would realise that this number – 666 – was not random. It was a figure calculated useing the Hebrew letters for 'Nero Caesar', which can be converted to 50, 200, 6, 50, 100, 60 and 200, adding up to 666. [some refute this interpretation]
"You're going to have lunch with the President. The menuy is humble pie. You're going to eat every last mtotherfu8Icking spoonful of it. You're going to be the most contrite sonofabitch this world has ever seen."
Italy's Beretta was founded in 1526, and Grolsch started brewing beer in 1615.
Researchers studying Japanese firms have found that companies with adopted heirs consistently outperform companies with blood heirs (which in turn outperform non-family firms.) Motivated by the honour of adaptation, the practice encourages star managers to invest themselves in the long-term prospoects of the company.
Another way that targets nudge people away from the long view is when goals are thought of as 'ceilings'. This is best demonstrated by the 'New York City taxi effect.' When it rains in NYC, it's hard to get a cab. Common sense would suggest that it's because demand is high, but it's also due to supply. Researchers have found that taxi drivers often don't choose to take full advantage of bad weather. They could, of course, reap in fares all day. What actually happens instead is that they earn their day's target faster, and so clock off early. Rain encourages people to take a greater number of short journeys, which are more lucrative for taxi drivers, but after a while it leads to fewer cabs on the roads.
'Almost inevitably, many people become adept at manipulating performance indicators through a variety of methods.' Muller writes, 'many of which are ultimately dysfunctional for their organisations.' This negative effect of metrics on people's behaviour is neatly described by a principle called 'Goodhart's Law', named after British economist Charles Goodhart, which is often phrased as: 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.'
'... when firms are forced to increase reporting frequency, they cut back on investments.' Kraft told me. Other studies suggest that quarterly reporting correlates with reductions in R&D spending, patents, advertising and hiring, as well as cuts in discretionary spending and project delays.
People have often moved on to new roles before the consequences of their actions become accountable.
The managers who used short-termist language worked in firms that were more likely to cut R&D in years when they reported small earnings. And when the researchers looked at the shareholder composition, they found many more 'transient' than 'dedicated' investors.
One intriguing fact about shinise is that a large proportion of them provide services that never go out of fashion. Of the 1,000 companies more than 300 years old, 230 are in the alcohol business, 117 are hotels and 155 in the food industry. But it's also a question of priorities, and the targets they set for themselves and their employees. Scaling up, maximising profits, reporting quarterly or increasing market are not top of the list. Instead, it's just as important, if not more so, to aspire to other goals, such as ethical and stable stewardship or passing the baton to the next generation.
Kongo Gumi, a construction company established in the year 578. The company refers to an idea called 'ie', which means 'house' and emphasises continuation.
The University of Al Quaraouiyine provides an education underpinned by both the Islamic faith and benevolent concepts such as 'ummah' - Muslim community - social responsibility as expressed in 'zakat', and endowment via 'waqf', which advocates giving wealth to last beyond death.
Joining me in the Lords gallery to watch the debate was Roman Kzrznaric, who co-authored the analysis of teh Intergenerational Solidarity Index we covered earlier. He has been a prominent advocate for the rights of future generations in recent years - and in his book The Good Ancestor has called for a new movement made up of what he calls 'time rebels'. One of his arguments is that modern democracies, especially in the wealthiest countries, as 'colonising the future'.
'We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk, nuclear waste and public debt, and that we feel at liberty to plunder as we please.'
favourite suggestions is a mischievous idea called 'an intergenerational chaining effect' proposed by the philosophers Tyler M. John and William MacAskill. As an incentive to focus on the long view, the pair suggest that the generosity of a politician's pension should not be decided until the political generation that follows.
'One of the design features of language is displacement, the capacity to refer to the nonpresent,' writes the evolutionary psychologist Michael Corballis.