Tag: words
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Bouba-Kiki…?
Now that I’m well into my dotage, and taming my thoughts is harder than trying to herd the ants that live on the porch, I have to wonder why nobody seems to understand why I have taken to calling myself G. It’s a perfectly balanced name, and seems to act as a subtly nuanced, although…
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Uhmm
Now that my summer leaves are falling, I suppose it’s not surprising that I have renewed my interest in the words that have remained faithful to my denuding branches -not just words, though: conversational words; words that used to drip like water from the leaky faucet of my mouth -on command, or not… Sometimes though,…
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I am the best of them that speak this speech, were I but where ’tis spoken
It happened again! Every so often one arrives like a silent telegram in the night: a word. The first one I remember came to me about a year ago: anabaptists. But instead of the usual meaning of adults being baptized, in my dream it meant enslaved shipboard children… Then came tenebrous a few months later.…
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The Atlas
Ahh retirement, a time when it is impossible to escape your memories and yet difficult to believe they once had a life of their own… “Daddy, what’s a ‘stralyer’?” My daughter has a habit of coming up with sounds, part-words, and checking them out on me. “You mean trailer, don’t you sweetheart? It’s a thing…
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What’s gone and what’s past help
How many of us actually try to clarify in words, what we think we’re feeling? Affect labelling it’s called; apparently, the very act of labelling a negative emotion, can blunt its harmful effects even without a conscious goal in mind. In fact, labelling positive emotions seems to have a similar salutary effect.[i] The mechanism is…
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The feast of languages
I’ve never been very good at foreign languages -perhaps that’s why I am so fascinated that some people can speak more than one with seeming ease. Some languages, I can recognize by the sound alone, although I don’t understand what is being said, for others I can make out a few words, although seldom the…
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Oh world, but that thy strange mutations make us hate thee
Do you sometimes use words you do not really understand? Words that swirl around you like autumn leaves in the wind; words that come to you as innocent as children, playing; as strangers, lost? Words can be like that: splashing against you by accident then sticking like mud. Sometimes, they are only substitutes for something…
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What my tongue dares not that my heart shall say
There was a time when I thought that feeling pity for someone was a virtue; it meant feeling discomfort at their situation, I suppose, but perhaps it was also tinged with relief that their situation had not happened to me. And yet was that all I felt? Surely there was some concern and a wish…
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Words, words, words!
I can’t remember when it first became evident to me that my mind was not alone in the universe I occupied; perhaps it wasn’t immediately clear to me that others, too, had thoughts and that they may well be different from my own. The Theory of Mind, as it’s now called, develops early in childhood…
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