Banished Words
/Linguists will tell us that words are simply strings of sounds, and that those sounds in no way determine the words’ legitimacy. An opera in Italian is not better than one in German because you dislike the supposedly “harsh,” guttural, deep-in-the-throat sound of German. Being put off by the soundscape of a language is a matter of taste, a subjective experience of its words, not an objective fact about them. The bickering such judgments foster leads nowhere, for every person’s experience is, finally, true. Still, it is interesting that we do more than see and hear words; we feel them. Language is embodied, not just a baked-in set of abstract principles. Words have physical impact, a texture, a sensation. They are visceral, and perhaps this helps explain linguistic conservatism: any change is felt, not simply noted.
Jerry DeNuccio takes a look at banishing words and the role of slang in the evolution of language. In the passage above he manages to make me consider something I had not before, the idea of words as food, that words like food have a taste, a texture and combinations that please us and nourish us. As such we then have the equivalent of words that are comfort food, words that are nutritionally sound and words that are special treats
Rethinking Sleep
/One of the first signs that the emphasis on a straight eight-hour sleep had outlived its usefulness arose in the early 1990s, thanks to a history professor at Virginia Tech named A. Roger Ekirch, who spent hours investigating the history of the night and began to notice strange references to sleep. A character in the “Canterbury Tales,” for instance, decides to go back to bed after her “firste sleep.” A doctor in England wrote that the time between the “first sleep” and the “second sleep” was the best time for study and reflection. And one 16th-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive more children because they waited until after their “first sleep” to make love. Professor Ekirch soon learned that he wasn’t the only one who was on to the historical existence of alternate sleep cycles. In a fluke of history, Thomas A. Wehr, a psychiatrist then working at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., was conducting an experiment in which subjects were deprived of artificial light. Without the illumination and distraction from light bulbs, televisions or computers, the subjects slept through the night, at least at first. But, after a while, Dr. Wehr noticed that subjects began to wake up a little after midnight, lie awake for a couple of hours, and then drift back to sleep again, in the same pattern of segmented sleep that Professor Ekirch saw referenced in historical records and early works of literature.
I learn from David K. Randall, writing for The New York Times, that I'm not really suffering from insomnia. I am simply not naming my sleep patterns correctly. If instead of thinking of it as insomnia getting in the way of sleep and thought of it as the break before my second sleep I'll probably feel less stress about it. Do you actually know anyone that gets 8 hours of sleep?
The Week's Links: September 23, 2012
/Recommended This Week:
Teams: What I Learned This Week
/- If you let your idea of what others are thinking be the determining factor when you make decisions you are not doing your best work.
- It is very hard not to find frustrating encountering situations where people inadvertently, accidentally or purposefully withhold information in order to have control and power and make them the center, dismissing collaboration in the process.