Okay, CoSo.
This week's #newsletter is a reflection from Wednesday's walkabout, when I took my grief and anger for six hours through the city, and reminded myself (if of nothing else) of all the ways in which human beings can live in service to their rich and diverse surroundings.
Even if it's too much to ask that any one life or livelihood will ever alleviate all the wounds in our hurting world, it is enough that we are here.
(CW: Genocide and suicide do come up!)
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/walkabout-or-when-the-world-is-too
@MLClark You never fail to expand my vocabulary. 😘
"contrapuntal"
"palimpsest"
"take tinto" (is this a local colloquialism?) ... ah, explained later in the column
"vallenato"
Comments in my next post ...
😉 I actually thought of you when I wrote "palimpsest".
"Will Stephen know this word? Well, we shall see!"
🤣 I might start making a game of this now.
NB: Tinto can also be used for red wine - and more commonly is in some regions - so it's important to get the context right.
The "take" is a funny part of language difference, too; we "have" coffee or "make" a decision in English, but you "take" (tomar) both in Spanish.
Thanks for sitting with the piece, Stephen.
@MLClark Oh, you'll win the vocabulary game. The brain leaks words as we get older. I'm in the thesaurus every day trying to remember a word on the tip of my tongue.
Here's an old KPCC article on H.E., the source of the photo ... Harlan hosted an SF talk show for years on KPFK. He was succeeded by JMS.
Oh, I didn't mean it competitively. I meant, sneak in a new word each time just for the fun of *maybe* introducing something new. Language elitism is *not* my jam.
I spent years in academese and, when there, used to play "academic bingo" with myself, noting the jargon & names students were trained to use & drop instead of learning to communicate effectively with everyone. Exclusion was often the goal, playing at knowledge elitism.
Now I code-switch the heck out of everything. :)
@MLClark Back in my law enforcement days, one of the more cerebral detectives would come into briefing and write the "word of the day" on the blackboard, challenging us to slip it into a report.
(I always won, of course.)
I'm afraid all I can slip in is spacey jargon, like nitrogren tetroxide and monomethyl hydrazine.
Or on a good day, dimethylethoxysilane. 🙄
Language is fun when it knows its place. ;)
I've always been fascinated by folks who managed to get through humanities degrees and come out prescriptivists (the sticklers for a One True Way).
A good humanities education should teach, among other things, that linguistic variation is a living museum for our shared histories, our cultures, our priorities, our conflicts, and our quirks.
Why on Earth would anyone want everyone to speak exactly the same way?
Where's the fun in that?
(Jots down "prescriptivists" ...)
"Why on Earth would anyone want everyone to speak exactly the same way? Where's the fun in that?"
That's why we have Russian. 😊
I remembered one "word of the day" from the cerebral detective -- "circumlocutious."
(Not to be confused with Cirque du Locutus ...)
Sometimes a watch commander would ask me why I used a word.
I'd reply, "Word of the day." And that was that.
I donated a thesaurus and visual dictionary to our report writing room.
Wholeheartedly agree. 1920s SF mags are a treat, too, because some of the so-called "hard SF" in their pages was informed by popular beliefs in mesmerism, and the power of vibrations - ideas we'd consider goofy today. Makes one wonder what in SF today will seem ridiculous tomorrow.
Also, early Twilight Zone episodes pronounce words like "robot" differently. It's remarkable to see how much has changed in just a few decades with many pronunciations.
Language is always changing. :)
@MLClark Re TZ ... I've been watching them on Paramount Plus. Several space-related episodes based on Project Mercury, Project Dyna-Soar, etc.
Sometimes I look up the air date and compare it to where current events were at the time. It's pretty clear Serling or another writer saw something in the news and ran with it.
They're simple stories by today's standards, but the writing is solid.
@MLClark "... linguistic variation is a living museum for our shared histories, our cultures, our priorities, our conflicts, and our quirks."
True of older novels, of course, but I love watching older films to study not only the lines but the delivery of the lines. Films are a living museum too.
Lots of '60s TV shows (including Trek) were written by people who served in WW2. Their scripts reflected those experiences.
These days we get lots of terrorism stories because of 9/11.