Vocabulation
April 25, 2006
The use or choice of words.
–William Craigie’s New English Dictionary, 1928
Jeffrey Kacirk’s Forgotten English Calendar offers this quote on language by Thomas Jefferson.
It is much to be wished that the publication of the county dialects of England should go on. It will restore to us our language in all shades of variation. It will incorporate into the present one all the riches of our ancient dialects; and what a store this will be may be seen by running the eye over the county glossaries and observing the words we have lost by abandonment and disuse, which in sound and sense are nothing inferior to nothing we have retained. When these local vocabularies are published and digested together into a single one, it is probable we shall not find a single word in Shakespeare which is not now in use in some counties in England.
What would TJ say about our present use of the language?
Dave, loving words, so he does.
The wanton insult of Old Age
April 10, 2006
No, I’m not complaining about my own circumstances. Mark Twain wrote the words in The Five Boons Of Life, one of his many short stories. For the curious, the five boons are Fame, Love, Riches, Pleasure, and Death, being the choice of gifts offered by the good fairy to the story’s hero. Only one of the gifts is valuable. You’ll never guess how it turns out. Or maybe you will.
I won’t tell you more, because Mark Twain is the master story-teller, not me. I recommend the tale to you, as well as most of his remaining 59 short stories. Correct me if I’m wrong, but short stories as a genre are hard to find these days.
I have been reading The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain as an ebook on my little Palm, a boon of life for one who spends altogether too much time in Doctor and Dentist waiting rooms. I figure I have enough unread Twain short stories to last me for several years of future waiting room waits.
Dave, reading and waiting.
A nation of non-readers
March 18, 2006
During my snootier moments I am tempted to think that the U.S. is a nation of non-readers. But take a look at one of our Southern neighbors:
Brazil | A nation of non-readers | Economist.com
But Brazilians’ indifference to books has deeper roots. Centuries of slavery meant the country’s leaders long neglected education. Primary schooling became universal only in the 1990s. Radio was ubiquitous by the 1930s; libraries and bookshops have still not caught up. “The electronic experience came before the written experience,” says Marino Lobello, of the Brazilian Chamber of Books, an industry body.
The article goes on to say that Brazil may be shaping up to be a big book market for publishers. Conventional publishers, perhaps, but it might be a bigger opportunity for electronic publishers and e-books, whose ship has yet to come in, even in the developed world. I hope I live to see this happen. It’s an exciting prospect.
Dave, who loves his books, regardless of form.
Nineteenth century armed brigs
February 16, 2006
Most of us are used to having generous personal space, and this makes accounts of life aboard the jam-packed armed sailing ships of the 1800s fascinating. Here is an interesting recent email exchange on the subject from the Patrick O’Brian mail list:
On 2/9/06, Ed Barnard wrote:
It seems to me that Richard Henry Dana reported in _Two Years Before the Mast_ that the crew size was only a half dozen men or so.I have the impression that Indiamen of our period carried a rather larger complement; perhaps since they were armed they carried more crew than an unarmed merchantman? Or is it that Dana was sailing a couple of decades later, perhaps with split topsails requiring fewer crew to handle?
—Yes, Dana was writing of a period a few decades later. In addition, the Pilgrim was a small brig, 180 tons. No split topsails, but small enough that just a few crew could handle the sails.
I believe that Indiamen of 800 and 1200 ton carried crews of 100 - 150 during the 18th and early 19th century. Partly to protect against piracy, and partly to offset the high death rate on voyages to the East Indies.
Crew sizes decreased significantly after 1815, perhaps because of decreased threats and better nutrition/health. Nordhoff, sailing on a ‘limejuicer’ (British merchant ship) to the East Indies around 1850, reported a ship’s complement of about 24, mostly Indian lascars with a handful of Europeans in the skilled positions.
Don Seltzer
Dave, landlubber.
Sin-eater
January 17, 2006
Patrick O’Brian, somewhere in one of his Aubrey-Maturin novels set in the early 19th century, wrote about a person who made a living as a sin-eater. As I remember the passage, the sin-eater got caught by a press gang and was brought on board ship as an involuntary crew member. He was a miserable soul and was wasting away, partly because he was being severely shunned by the forecastle jacks.
Wondering how much license the author had taken, I did some of what passes for research these days - I “googled” it. I found a long and detailed article on funeral customs, most of which tried to tell me a lot more than I wanted to know, but it did mention sin-eaters.
It seems that during the period between the death of a loved one and burial, people got pretty edgy. Not sure whether the person laid out would wake from the dead or not, they “waked” the departed and never left the body alone. Harking back to the biblical scape-goat, they called in the poor guy who was the village sin-eater. He earned a miserable fee and a scanty meal for taking on himself the sins of the dead. Then if the dead didn’t wake, the usual case I presume, he would be sinless and go straight to heaven.
Professor Evans of the Presbyterian College, Carmarthen, actually saw a sin-eater about the year 1825, who was then living near Llanwenog, Cardiganshire. Abhorred by the superstitious villagers as a thing unclean, the sin-eater cut himself off from all social intercourse with his fellow creatures by reason of the life he had chosen; he lived as a rule in a remote place by himself, and those who chanced to meet him avoided him as they would a leper. This unfortunate was held to be the associate of evil spirits, and given to witchcraft, incantations and unholy practices; only when a death took place did they seek him out, and when his purpose was accomplished they burned the wooden bowl and platter from which he had eaten the food handed across, or placed on the corpse for his consumption.
I bet you didn’t know that!
Dave, who has made somewhat different provisions for taking away his sin.
The Sony eBook reader
January 7, 2006
Discaimer: This weak-eyed reader gets along just fine using his PalmOne Zire 31 PDA as a reader, but some day… .
USATODAY.com - The plot thickens with a thin eBooks device
LAS VEGAS — Sony opens a new chapter in the electronic-book saga by unveiling its handheld Reader Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show.
The tale has been a ho-hum one so far; eBooks account for only about $10 million of the $24 billion publishing industry.
Aside from the way-too-high price, the Sony Reader seems to have done things right. I’m waiting for someone to buy one and let me try it out.
Around the size of a paperback but only a half-inch thick, the Reader has a 6-inch gray-scale screen and is easy to hold at less than 9 ounces.
The Reader’s breakthrough is its “electronic paper” display, which is touted to be as easy to read as a printed page. The screen is not backlighted and is viewable from multiple angles. And unlike a computer’s display, it doesn’t “redraw” itself dozens of times a second. The lack of flicker is easier on the eyes.
The typeface on my PDA is plain ugly, but after using it to read a half-dozen books, I find it is much easier on my eyes than trying to read from the excellent display of my Thinkpad laptop. That said, I am very curious about the electronic paper display.
I do not look for the eBook industry to do much until there is standardization of the various file formats. If I buy a reader I want to have a choice of sources for downloading books.
Dave, who happily can read one-handed and in the dark.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
December 12, 2005
Here’s an interesting review of the recent ‘Narnia’ movie. Makes me wish I had gone to see it, but maybe it would be even better to go back and read C.S. Lewis again.
Reformation 21 » Movie Review: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
However, we must realize that a movie has never converted anyone, and films do not change culture. Only the Spirit of God is capable of such actions. One of my fears with this movie is that the evangelical Church might rush in to force the Christian message of the film upon a populace who is simply enjoying a good story told well. The power of Lewis’s work is not preaching, but pointing people towards an imaginative picture of love and goodness that captures the mind and heart. Attraction to true beauty and goodness–of which God is the author and ultimate embodiment–naturally leads to a desire to explore the longing these create which, indeed, can only find their rest and fulfillment in Him. That is my great hope for this film.
This should provide some comfort to those who feared some theological problems with the movie.
Dave, duly comforted.
Jarhead, a post-script
December 1, 2005
Funny how some books hit a nerve. As I read Jarhead and wrote about it in my last post, I was struck by the hopeless tone of the book. To have no hope is a type of death. Yet, author Swofford’s admission of his hopelessness reveals a brutal honesty about the seamy side of life.
I admire that honesty, even though it leaves me wanting to scream at him, “It doesn’t have to be that way!” Since I have experienced little of what he writes about, I stifle that scream and try to understand what leads him to his hopeless outlook.
Such understanding is not difficult, because Swofford doesn’t play games with his readers. He graphically describes life in the Marines and the cynical breaking down of the barriers to being a killing machine. He also recognizes the almost casual manner in which our nation’s leaders and military commanders send our young men out to endure hardships, and perhaps die, to further national purposes that are not always clear and honest.
If there is a problem with Swofford’s viewpoint, it is that it is mostly derived from his personal experience with the Gulf War. He makes no attempt to put that war and his experience into a historical context. Each war has its own context that helps explain how and why it happened. The common denominator, however, is the experience of the grunts, the infantrymen, who bear the brunt of the suffering and dying in all wars. Wofford makes his own contribution to understanding of this reality.
The answer to the hopelessness that comes from observing man’s inhumanity to man in the unending history of warfare is found in the hope of life after death. We never need to say, “Is this all there is?” An answer can be found in the lives of the Christian martyrs who went to their deaths without hopelessness?
God’s greatest gift to us may be the faith to believe that this present life with all it’s troubles and pain is just a transitory bridge to a new and better existence. We also are given sufficient clues about the nature of that new existence to give us peace and maintain our faith while we are passing through. What more could we ask?
Dave, ready to move on to the next book.
Jarhead
November 30, 2005
I just finished reading Jarhead by Anthony Swofford. The book centers on Swofford’s service in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper Platoon in Operation Desert Storm. Writing a first-person account of a ground war between grossly mismatched opponents that only lasts a few hours hours poses a challenge. What does the author do with the rest of the book? Swofford’s solution was to describe “a number of people reacting to the difficulties of life, war, and service in the U.S. Marines.” To this he adds a lot of autobiographical material, which too often reads like padding.
I picked up the book because of the Marines I know and respect, and because war stories interest me, probably because I was too young for the Great War and my periods of military service missed Korea and Viet Nam. I will always wonder how I would have reacted under fire, and I am very thankful that I didn’t have to find out.
Swofford was raised a Roman Catholic and was an altar-boy while in his early teens. He joined the Marines at age seventeen-and-a-half, and it took the Marines just a matter of weeks to transform the altar-boy into a trained killer, or at least to talk and act like one. His language was transformed into a more or less continuous string of profanity and blasphemy, his professed morality into sex-crazed activities, and his regard for human life was reduced to the vanishing point. One of the important messages in his book is that neither the Marines, nor war, nor any other raw aspects of life can completely squeeze the humanity out of most men. A few it kills, either mentally or physically, but most survive.
Swofford survived to go on to college and become a successful writer. Some of his friends fell victim to their de-humanizing military experiences, and in Jarhead he sympathetically tells their stories.
Here is the troubled ending of the book:
I am entitled to despair over the likelihood of further atrocities. Indolence and cowardice do not drive me - despair drives me. I remade my war one word at a time, a foolish, desperate act. When I despair, I am alone, and I am often alone. In crowded rooms and walking the streets of our cities, I am alone and full of despair - the same despair that impelled me to write this book, a quiet scream from within a buried coffin. Dead, dead, my scream.
What did I hope to gain? More bombs are coming. Dig your holes with the hands God gave you.
Some wars are unavoidable and need to be well fought, but this doesn’t erase warfare’s waste. Sorry, we must say to the mothers whose sons will die horribly. This will never end. Sorry.
Dave, thinking there can be nothing worse than hopelessness.
England expects that . . .
October 21, 2005
Dave, honoring the memory of Admiral Lord Nelson
