Sounding wistful

There's a song I heard recently called Dear Younger Self.  I remember seeing a book title about a year ago with about the same title.  I guess the thought has a good sentiment.  But, it sounds to me to be a bit wistful since the impossibility of this thought cannot be overcome except in science fiction.

The song goes into how the composer should inform himself of how the world really works and of true values masked by a hurried life.  I don't know why such a person wants to settle for writing a song to a younger self when he has about 30 years left on his full life.  He might want to wait until he has gained about 20 more years of wisdom before he write that letter.

Maturity is a process.  People have tried to speed it up.  The phrase wise beyond her (his) years exists because of the rarity of seeing such a thing.  People can't really circumvent it.  Even for those wise beyond their years, the wisdom is usually not followed by matching actions.  They turn out to be people who know platitudes, but don't have the life's story to support their so-called wisdom.

You just have to wait for it.  Maturity is beautiful to see when it happens, but pushing it or imagining to see it won't allow for it to happen.  Embracing each phase in the maturation process is what everyone does naturally, so to expect otherwise is nothing but vanity, perhaps self-aggrandizement.

That makes the Beatles' song of old pretty accurate, "Speaking words of wisdom - let it be."

24/7/365

NASA released a one-year continuous time lapse of the Earth from a point approximately 1 million miles from the Earth between it and the sun.  They spliced together 365 days worth of time lapse from shots of the Earth taken every two hours.  It was fascinating to see the cloud patterns and the wobble of the Earth slightly from the video.  The Earth didn't look quite as vibrantly blue as the famous picture taken from the Apollo 11 in 1969.  But, it was still noticeably blue against the backdrop of the blackness of space.

I am always amazed at the different look of the Earth in space as opposed to the shots NASA releases of other planets by space probes.  Anyone arriving in our galaxy from elsewhere would certainly notice it too.  It is inviting to see such vast blue oceans, cloud patterns, and land masses.  And I can see why the area of the Egyptian pyramids would have been singled out after looking at the planet from a million miles away.  It is a center point on the Earth that is almost always visible.  Clouds rarely cover the area.

The video, I'm sure, will spawn many thoughts after getting to see it.  I'm glad to be alive at this time and place in space/time.

Vintage

I read an article about 5 years ago by a History scholar.  The article wasn't about history, however, but about teachers of history.  He had conducted research and was reporting on the way history professors presented their material in the classroom.  Particularly, he compared the organizational patterns of their material as it was presented to students.  He found that professors with 10 years or more could easily move between the connection points (the episodes making up an event) than the professors with fewer years.

That finding seems like a no-brainer on the surface.  However, one reason he used professors in his research and not other kinds of teachers, such as high school teachers, is that the university teacher is considered an expert in the field.  They should be the ones to make connections within an event with ease because of the sheer amount of information they have at their disposal.  It would appear that more information would translate into ability to make connections that less information would prohibit.  Not so.  The experience of using the information in different settings, over time, with different kinds of personalities, and in repetition after reflection influences the effectiveness of the types of connections professors are able to make.

I thought of that study when a language teacher I spoke to last week mentioned that she had a student learning English who could not understand the Subject-Verb-Object order of English enough to produce grammatically correct sentences.  She was frustrated with him and offered expletives about his personality, which she had attributed to the reason for his lack of understanding.  As it turns out, the teacher was one without 10 years of teaching experience, less experience with a variety of languages (even though she was bilingual), and without exposure to the backgrounds of people from the area of the world the student was from or to the nature of the language the student spoke which used a reverse phrase order in use of headwords.

What is true with wine is true with humans, too.  The flavors of new wine and vintage wine are very different.  Vintage wines are so robust with flavor.

Date stamped

I remember talking with my college roommate about a decade or more ago about some research in my field that applied to his profession of counseling.  The published articles were about gender and language.  We specifically talked about the feminine characteristics of the "counseling session" as it existed at that time.  Years have intervened since then, so I thought that maybe the ideas from that time had been thought about more by those teaching counseling in the universities.

Until today... I saw a man who has been peripherally involved in counseling.  He filmed an interview with a female author because he liked a book that she had written.  His introduction to the filmed interview included a comment for men to listen because this woman was saying things that would help both men and women.

First, if a man interviews a woman and feels the need to tell men in his audience not to tune out a message because the messenger is a woman, I know his psyche is stuck somewhere in a world before 1975.  That's never a good sign for up-to-the-minute information.  Second, if a man feels the need to suggest to other men who are already voluntarily listening to a filmed video clip that they need to listen, the man has a control issue or a low self esteem without going further.  I listened critically from that point on because his issue is not mine.  Third, if a man recommends a book that is based on anything close to a psychological premise and is written by a woman, I know he is thinking that the information is differently formatted from a male's general organizing pattern.  It is a signal that information is going to be based on personal experience without taking personality into account, and and it pervades what will be said.

My expectations didn't let me down.  I heard the woman speaking give a lot of personal experience, make mostly generalizations about transferrence of her experience to the audience at large, and no allowances were made for differing personalities among people.  The experience left me high and dry. While I am pretty sure universities have moved down the time continuum in how they teach psychology today, it was clear this man and woman were stuck in a time zone prior to the modern age.  Language acts as a date/time stamp on an event.  Fortunately, for this one, the amount of time was short, considering the context.  I escaped with my life this time.

Tentative assertion

What I absolutely eschew is a person who doesn't think something is true because he or she hasn't thought through the issue enough to consider the possibility that what has been said can be true.  I think it is also true that a certain failure of exposure to scientific inquiry makes one a little arrogant in what he or she does know.

The discussion was about the typologies of the world's languages.  Mostly it is true that about any aspect of a language that a person could think of in communicating to someone else in a standard way has been tried and/or is represented in the world's languages.  Typology is about the patterns of a language, generally speaking.  While it is true that languages have a dominant pattern for making statements, there are a number of different combinations languages have to do the work of questions, negation, emphatics, and other aspects.  In English S(ubject)/V(erb)/O(bject) is the dominant pattern even though other patterns do exist.

So, when I made the statement that Spanish had an OSV pattern in it, a person said he knew Spanish fluently and it wasn't so.  Well, you know what my next move would be.  And as it turns out, there are examples of and OSV pattern said as acceptable Spanish.  What the person didn't know were the principles of language.  He knew Spanish very well without a doubt because he was married to a native Spanish speaker.  He knew German well and had exposure to Vietnamese, so he had a good sense of language.  But, studying languages more analytically could have helped his cause.

Yo no voy a comer las naranjas, pero las manzanas, si, mama va a comer.     SVO + conj + OVS
I won't eat oranges, but apples, yes, mom will eat.     SVO + conj + OVS

He seemed a little surprised, but acknowledged the pattern's grammaticality.  I used to find myself in his position more times than I would like to admit when I was younger and had less ability to analyze language.  I am still wrong sometimes even now, but the difference might be that if I know I am on shaky  ground, I am much more tentative in making assertions.  I know the difference between when I have science on my side and when I don't.

In the shadow of bravery

I admire bravery wherever I see it.  I spoke with a woman from Pakistan today who had come to the U.S. (legally) to get her education.  She wants to become a teacher because she hurts for her country's female population.  She knows that her countrymen routinely ignore half of their population when they educate their young people.  She wants things to be different.

That's not the bravery part.  The courageous act she wants to perform is to return with a highly respected education from this country and teach young women and girls about math, science, commerce, economics, and other subjects that would enhance their understanding of quality living.  She knows that many of the men who run the country don't share this vision in the least.  And she knows those men would kill someone who tried to change the status quo.  She still wants to educate young women because she has daughters herself and wants them to have a better life.

I don't know if I possess this kind of bravery.  I try to take new paths sometimes, but I usually try to work within a framework to get things done diplomatically or politically.  I could probably count on one hand the number of times I have been courageous about going against the status quo.  And that makes me genuinely admire this woman who might have to face down an imminent threat on her life one day in the not so distant future.

Billboard words

I was getting my hair cut.  The stylist in the neighboring chair was carrying on a conversation with her customer.   I wasn't paying attention too closely, but I did overhear her say, "He's my kind of people."  I hadn't heard that in a while.

I used to hear, "He's good people," a lot.  I didn't hear that expression until I was in my 30s.  I grew up in a different part of the country than where I lived for 30 years of my adult life.  At first, it didn't make good sense to me.  I had heard, "He's my kind of person," and "He's from good stock,"  but never the two expressions so common to the region I lived in for 30 years.

I finally understood the expression, "He's good people."  I don't live in that region of the country any longer and haven't heard the expression since leaving - until today.  It turns out the stylist was from the region I had lived in so long.

Dialect features mark us all in in our view of life.  It doesn't matter if expressions of a dialect fit the grammar of the mainstream language or not.  The features are said, often, over several generations, and mark the people from the area.  I have my own set of dialect features.  They mark who I am.  I could work to remove them (and I have removed some of them because they don't exude the image I want to have), but in some way, I want them to show.  They're a type of billboard saying, "This is me."

Yes, but partly no

Independence Day: Resurgence was exactly what one would expect from a sequel.  It was done well enough, built carefully on the first movie, and phased out the characters from the first movie that would not be acting any longer for the second sequel.  But even if it was predictable, it was suspenseful in all the right parts.  It maintained and heightened the conflict between the alien force and the human race.  It elevated the stakes by making the aliens' ships and weapons better and bigger than before.  It was a good way to spend time with characters who acted nobly to save the world.

One part that people might have expected to reach a heightened and even better level than the first movie would be the speech to save the world.  The first movie featured the U.S. president quoting Dylan Thomas at the climax of his inspirational speech, "We will not go quietly into the night" [at time stamp 1:43 of the video clip].

People were stirred to action and nobility.  The president's speech in the sequel in light of this first speech was an enormous disappointment.  The character chosen to be president was gruff in appearance and in speech manner.  He gave a terse, monotonous, uninspirational speech to rally the troops.  Fortunately, the president from the first sequel decided at that point to make the ultimate sacrifice to take out the queen mother of the aliens.  If it had not been for that, the movie might have failed in reaching the goal of maintaining the Independence Day spirit.

When the sequel leaves the cinema, compare the two speeches.  Anemic will be one of the words that comes to mind when you hear the speech to rally the forces.  It should be one of the lessons every communications teacher uses to give a non-example of motivational speeches.

What I'm used to

I remember well reading the introductory matter to a dictionary for the first time.  I know, no one really does that.  But, I decided to since most people haven't.  I found a number of interesting facts, but what intrigued me the most was the make-up of the committee that decided what entries to put in and how to rank and cut the information gathered to make the book that people use so authoritatively.  Intrigue was the right word at first because I had never read about that before, but as time went on, my intrigue turned disbelief at the liberties they took to conform the book to their own standards, ignoring some of the usages of some of the people surveyed.

I still recall reading about the word access.  In the 1980s, people began to use the word as a verb, especially when it came to accessing their money in their accounts.  However, the dictionary committee didn't care that the nature of the word had begun to change.  They made the decision to reflect only its noun use, so that people could only have access to their accounts.  That was unbelievable and unwarranted since so many people had begun to use access a verb.  I felt betrayed by the committee.

So, today as I was reading in USA Today about the orbiter Juno that had successfully been inserted into Jupiter's orbit, I came across something like access in the last sentence of the article.  The article said, "The information stream will end 19 months later, when NASA purposefully plummets Juno into Jupiter, Green said."  In my head I thought, there's something wrong with the two words used in the alliteration of the verb phrase.  Purposefully, for one, seemed like the wrong word.  I think the author meant to say the orbiter would intentionally be driven into the planet at the end of its mission.  In that case, the word to use would have been purposely.  I used to work with a colleague who never was able to see the distinction of the two words, so she settled on purposefully as her word to use and hoped no one would ever notice.  The verb, for two, also seemed different in its use than how I was normally used to hearing plummet used.  Some verbs in English don't take objects, called intransitive.  A little trip to the dictionary showed that the verb was intransitive.  But the author ockalf this article used "NASA purposefully plummets Juno" using plummets as a transitive verb.  Juno is the object.  

Many times people get words mixed up because they don't use them enough to remember the differences.  Pummel and plummet look and sound a lot alike.  So, I am thinking the author merely confused the two words because of lack of use, forgetting that pummel is used transitively and plummet is not.  Sometimes, journalists use a thesaurus to get words and so they don't always know how words are used.  Sometimes, their brains merely confuse words.  And sometimes, people are writing out of their field of expertise and try to apply words they see in a completely acceptable context to an unfamiliar context and fail in their attempt at transfer.  Who knows what happened here?

But, of course, dictionaries don't always report what is acceptable, which is why I started the blog with the story of access.  Maybe, the verb plummet is changing.  Maybe I ride with the crowd that hasn't picked up on the change yet.  Maybe it's a dialect feature of the writer, past or current, with which I am not familiar.  Maybe it's the dictionary's fault for not reporting usage that the younger generation has begun to use.  Maybe it's the writer's background of not having or not remembering the grammar that's taught in schools.  Or maybe it's just a confused writer who didn't have enough time to revise before a deadline.

Whatever.  It seems like I am hearing and reading a lot of really different communication these days from what I am used to.

[The USA Today article in general is very informative and reported what happened in a professional manner.  You can find the link to the article by clicking here.]

Oh, that younger generation

I don't always get to see language changing right before my eyes, but I have noticed that the generation of millennials and a lot of (maybe majority of) generation Y have decided to add s to the words of motion such as backwards and forwards, and somewheres and nowheres.  Today I overheard someone say, "It came out of nowheres."  I didn't even have to look up to know the relative age of the person speaking.  When I did, sure enough, it was one of those people in the cusp of generation Y and front end of millennials.  It's one of their trademarks on the English language.

No one my age would say nowheres, only nowhere and would not add s to any of the words mentioned above.  In fact, those words were taught in school as having the stigma of non-standard speech.  But the sands of time have poured through the hourglass and a new generation just now filling the ranks of the workforce have decided to make a change.  Of course, none of them orchestrated the change, and none of them is really trying to make the change.  It happened when they were in 8th grade and high school.  It was their mode of communication to be different from the adults.  It became habit.  It stuck.  Now they continue to speak the same way.  They weren't educated out of it.

And that's how change happens most of the time.  From about 450 ACE until now, changes have filled the English language.  And the language we speak marks us all.

Sold

It was a real treat today.  I walked in, looked for a couple of shirts in a clothier store, located my purchases, was about to collect what I had scouted out to pay for them when he walked up.  He said something pleasant to strike up a conversation, introduced himself, and begin to do what he was very, very good at - sell.  But without you minding that he was working at selling you something.  It was a work of art.

He never created overt pressure.  He laughed at remarks that I made.  He made a joke or two of his own.  He had the perfect follow-up for whatever was said.  And, he knew the point - exactly - when I was finished with looking and buying.  He cheerfully closed the sale, told me his name again, and welcomed me back whenever I chose to return.  It could not have been a more aesthetic experience.  What a work of art.

I will go back.  They had the kind of clothes I like to wear, and if his treatment is the kind I will receive there, I will return soon.  I will definitely ask for Ed, salesman extraordinaire.