Setting the bar high

On the day which, for Christians, means ultimate forgiveness, it seems not at all odd for me to contemplate failure. It comes from a conversation with an old friend, about our dreams from when we were flush with the fire of youth, ready to go out and flash brilliant as the stars we knew ourselves to be.

This, in the land of opportunity, the land of milk and honey. Because our surroundings were -- and are still -- extraordinary, we expected we would be equal to our landscape. Shocking, I know, but when we left school, nobody handed us tights and a cape.

So many of us flew out of our studies and were... ordinary. We didn't earn millions of dollars our first week on the new job, we didn't discover the cure for every known cancer, we didn't win an Oscar or a Grammy or an Emmy or a Nobel Peace Prize, we didn't save the earth from an approaching asteroid, write the Great American Novel or paint the next Sistine Chapel. We became teachers, welders, plumbers, preachers, housewives, parents, grandparents, homeowners, renters, cat-feeders, dog-walkers, gardeners, babysitters, fishermen, and general doodlers.

For some of us, that was always good enough. Become good at being yourself, do well at a given career, and happiness comes. But for others among us, being just very good is never good enough. We were told when we were young that we were special, and, by jingo, we're going to be special, some day. Except that, we're still stuck in dead-end jobs, or worse, stuck in the unemployment lines, the welfare lines, the disappointment circle. We reached (or have nearly reached) the half-century mark in our lives, and what we have to show for it is a photograph of one of us shaking hands with somebody famous. We have an unfinished manuscript. We have a stack of unsold canvases. We have the keys to a car we don't actually own, and likely never will.

There lies a cord of wood which was once the tree of promise, having borne little fruit.

It's not that our lives are so hard, or anything like it. In fact, being poor in this country is a lot like being filthy rich in most lands. We have roofs over our heads, food on the table, free entertainment not necessarily of our own making, companionship, information, freedom... ah, yes, freedom.

With that freedom comes the moral obligation, one feels, to excel, and to help others to do the same. So those of us who fail to thrive sense in ourselves the roots of opprobrium. We may greet our fellow man with a hearty smile and warm handshake, but we shy away from the scowl in the mirror.

Funny thing is, my old friend became a star of distant stage and screen, a man of sharp wit and sharper words in a place where saying the wrong thing can mean the end of his freedom, or even the end of his life. And he naturally gets nervous about his performances. We, here, in the sweet land of liberty, have no such cause for dread, and still we fear.

What my friend, last night, reminded me was, that, even when there is no real adversity in our lives, there is still a struggle to rise above it, and a reluctance to forgive ourselves when we quit striving. We should have had that place in the firmament, if we'd only....

If we'd only had the courage to believe in ourselves as we were told we could. But I'm told it's never too late to start over.

What means this "proper English?"

Over at Volokh, they've been having a right rollicking discussion of "proper English."

I'm in favor of restating the argument "is this proper English?" as "is this precise language?"

Adaptation of usage is commonplace in a living, ever-changing tongue, and sticklers (as I often show myself to be) have a right to become a little upset by some of those changes. For example, the regular application of "momentarily" to mean "presently" (soon), and "presently" to mean "currently" seems to chafe many. Words do change, and presently is now returning to its earlier (pre-16th century) usage. I've ultimately come to think it's funny. We've gone rather round our hindquarters to reach our elbow, linguistically.

But, while the meanings and uses for certain words change, this is usually effected by intellectual laziness or by lack of comprehension of the substance behind a definition. In other words, change comes through misuse of a perfectly good tool for communication.

I'm sure a sensible fellow wouldn't encourage his sons to use a belt sander or angle grinder to, say, carve the spindles of a bedpost -- especially if he had a perfectly good lathe and appropriate cutting tools right across the room at the time. So why would a laissez-faire attitude strike that same man, when it comes to tools to make himself understood?

I suppose it is because most people are only craftsmen, artisans within a certain medium, and care not a whit for the other trades. I do not know the difference between a capacitor and a microprocessor, and would not know how to use either one, whereas my physicist father can tell me in precise terms what the purpose and position should be for each. My father, though, sees no difference between a French chef's knife and a gardening trowel.

If one does not pursue an art, one does not value its equipment. When one does not value the thing, it stands a very good chance of being misused, abused, and, eventually, destroyed.



And so it is: every person speaks. I suppose every person moves, as well -- out from bed in the morning to face the dawn. That does not make him an athlete. And speech does not make a person a poet or an orator.

It just makes him a user -- and often, abuser -- of the tools.

The more I think about it, the more I believe I should attempt to rescue from the scrap heap those words long forgotten, terms loved and used by Chaucer and Milton and Shakespeare and then set aside as modernity crept in. The old tools may be a bit rusty, but they have not had their edges ground away into dull, flat uselessness. I can restore them.

I will get to it anon.

books books books books movin' up an' down....

oops. that's not how the poem goes. But it is a bit of a description of my house, and it's got me following Dean Barnett as he posted at Hugh Hewitt's blog. I went over to Library Thing, as he suggested, and found myself engrossed for several hours, trying to enter my library into their database... Sadly, I have not yet even made a hiccup of a dent in the list I need to enter.

This is the problem with being a compulsive verbivore.

Still, if you have a library (and, you probably do), check out this site. It's way cool!


Afterthought: I'm going to have to ask for a lifetime membership for my birthday. The free account only allows you to enter 200 titles. That doesn't even cover what's in the bathroom, at home.

I gotta get more shelves, or stop going to auctions.

From a tree stump to a mess of words

I often wish I had become an etymologist by trade. I probably could have had a fun-filled career. After all, one of those things I most enjoy doing is wondering where certain words and terms came from.

It's not just that I spend hours pondering what possessed the first woman to point to a bunch of leather straps and say "sandal" (come on, you know men wouldn't bother to come up with a separate name for each of the different types of footgear), but I do wonder how we got from a logge of a felled tree to a log entry in a ship's record to a thread of comments on a blog.

Many many generations back (many, many, many, many moons -- enough with the moons, already!), a ship's log was a stump on a knotted rope, tossed over the stern to see how fast she was sailing. How far back is that block of wood? Hmm, we're cruising at five whopping knots, this morning! If this keeps up, we should be in Capri by...

But then the log comes in and below decks, to the cap'n's quarters. How he persuaded the crew to carry that thing down the hatch is beyond me, but there it is on his table, alongside charts and that sextant and compass. And it's become a book, where he scribbles his record of the day's events, as well as the plans for this cruise, and whatever else he needs to keep track of.

Or did it become a log before the stump? Did the ship's log come from logos? It is, after all, the word of the captain.

Does our blogging owe its name to the Greeks, or to the Angles? And, then, how does said "blog" translate into a Latin verb (see comments by Archonix and Baron Bodissey)?

I'm stumped.

Creativity... what is it and where does it come from?

Over at Watermark, sb poet asks her readers to introduce themselves, offering three questions to start the ball rolling:

• What do you do that you consider creative? Is it easy, or difficult for you?
• What supports -- or undermines -- your creativity?
• If you could give a friend one piece of creative inspiration (advice, or a poem, or a painting, or a book, or whatever occurs to you) what would it be?

Those are pretty tough questions for introductory paragraphs, especially for soliciting comments -- and especially the first one. It's my understanding that blogging manners usually include not hogging the comment section, keeping your remarks brief and to the point.

Nevertheless, they're darned good questions. As somebody whose self-esteem has forever been wrapped up in how much and how well I produce creative works, and, in return, my creativity is shackled to my self-esteem, I'd have to my view of creativity is any outlet for something not rigidly mundane.

The trouble is, sometimes, the things one does for creative outlets can also serve as destructive forces.

I draw. I paint -- both watercolors and walls. I garden. I photograph. I collect and display certain otherwise useless objects (postcards, glow-in-the-dark crap, injun stuff, old books, cats, other stuff). I cook. I sew. I write.

I blog.

None of this do I see as my high art form. Somewhere deep inside me there may very well be a Rembrandt or a Whitman or whatever, but he seems to be embarrassed to be seen with me, so far. Mostly, I have the level of artistic creativity in my head that they seem to use for writing standard television sitcoms. (Hey -- it was new once!) Still, creativity is the act of letting yourself be not afraid to make your own vision of the universe sing even the smallest song for itself. I let the hounds out to bay at the moon even when there is no moon.

As one of my instructors often said, never use paint straight from the tube.

Being creative is fairly easy. It's the follow-through that kills ya.

I'm bipolar. I have a hard time finishing anything if it's not done by the time I finish one of my manic phases. Ideas I have -- I have them by the gross daily. I used to keep post-it notes and sketches all over my walls, until I saw a show where one character (a paranoid schizophrenic accused of murder) did the same, and I realized how nuts it was to do that. (Now, I keep it to only a few at a time. And, only near the bathroom mirror, for the "scare factor".)

There is such a thing as too much creativity, after all. It's that bottle of liquor on the top shelf of the parents' cabinet, the stuff that sells for more than you could earn in a week. You know it's heady, you know it tastes extraordinary, and you know, intellectually, that it should be sipped only until you get a little bit warm inside. Still, some will drink, straight from the bottle, until they can't function.

Now, I blog.

Of course, I don't post most of my inventive stuff up here -- then everybody would understand how really truly nuts I get, some days, and we can't have that, can we? In fact, I blog so that my brain doesn't take its little vacations without me and come back with those great tans it always gets. I blog to keep a regimen, to control the creative bent, to provide structure and a modicum of direction for myself.

For those who are less in need of inhibitors than I (well, that would be everybody, now, wouldn't it?), or rather, for those who could use enticement to start their genesis machines, I mostly pay attention. It's "here, read this -- you'll get a kick out of some of the ideas," or "let's go visit this park," or "let's shop at the art supplies store," or "wanna come play in my garden?" I have to start them up.

But it's funny. Most people I know have little trouble finding creative outlets, have no trouble at all coming up with ideas. Their problem is that they're afraid others will think the work is "amateurish" or "silly". My question to them is, "What's wrong with that?"

Everybody was an amateur at one time. It's the love of the art and activity which makes an amateur.

"Silly" makes the smiles for which life is worth living.

And so I blog.

Plural madness

John, at EclectEcon, asks the penetrating question of the ages: You Say "Gazebos"; Would Dan Quayle say "Gazeboes"?

He's really enjoying the spelling issue.

Still, simple pluralization of some terms is too much fun to leave alone, isn't it?

For example, if it's mouse/mice, is it house/hice and spouse/spice? Mom says "yes" to the latter.

Goose, geese = moose, meese?

One index, two indices. One Kleenex, two Kleenices?

If the plural of criterion is criteria, is the plural of tampon Tampa?

One ovum, more ova. One bass drum... um... ah...



And I've learned, through the years, that you can't actually keep a gazebo in your yard. After a finite amount of time, the gazebo becomes a starebo, and then you're just being rude.