Tag: words
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The difference between the almost right word and the right word, is like a lightning bug and the lightning
It’s rather easy for those of us who share a culture and language (such as English) to forget that the meanings of some of the expressions we use do not follow from their lexical makeup: the idioms. They can play unique havoc in translations: foreign poetry, for example. Metaphors may or may not cross…
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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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