Omnium: language

Showing posts with label language. Show all posts

05 November 2024

Beware of cheating

Weaker and weaker.
Week by week.
Day by day.
Who cares?
Why?
As long as there are
such moments of joy ...

Would I know
there's not much time left
I might like to write
about veracity, tonight.

About manipulation,
about ethics,
(not only)
for journalists and photographers.

The peace of the night

01 September 2024

Swarming stupidity

Typing swarm intelligence after 0,13 seconds I got told there are 1,570.000 entries.

Afterwards, I hesitated to type swarm idiocy.

The peace of the night.

18 December 2022

Beers & Books CCLV – Dafydd ap Gwilym

Clicking the label
Dafydd ap Gwilym
soon you will agree with me:
There's no bard like him.

Dafydd ap Gwilym (c. 1315/1320 – c. 1350/1370)

16 December 2022

Beers & Books CCLIII – Dante's Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy

Dante Aleghieri (c. 1265 – 14 September 1321)

15 December 2022

Beers & Books CCLII – Boccaccio's Decamaron

The Decamaron

Giovanni Boccaccio (16 June 1313 – 21 December 1375)

14 December 2022

Beers & Books CCLI – Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340s – 25 October 1400)

14 January 2021

[Capita Turciensis] Laughing Lhursday*

Recently [2008] - I was just reading the last chapter of The Bastard of Istanbul - I heard Tetrapilotomos chuckle, which induced following dialogue:

- Yes?

- Blimey, no wonder there's a steady increase of population in Turkey.

- What are you busy with, Tetrapilotomos?

- Merowinger time.

- I see. And what does this have to do with the population growth in Turkey?

- Do you know what aureum caput regni means?

- Golden head of the imperium, or so?

- Not bad. And caput orbis?

- Head of the world.

- Not bad. And what's a colloquial German word for broken?

- Kaputt. Spelled with one t less in English it means a) utterly finished, defeated, or destroyed and b) unable to function.

- Not bad. And do you know what a condom is being called in Turkish.

- No idea.

- Kaput.

* [For first time visitors]: Typo in the title? Nah. It's just that
I would not let a tiny T spoil an avantgardistic alliteration.

26 May 2020

On Convention

Today, while admiring the elegance of the swallows giving me the honour to again spending a summer under Seanhenge's roof, suddenly Chapter 5 [On Convention] in 'The Short Story' by Sean O'Faolain came to my mind.
I jumped up, took the book, opened page 173, finally put on my skirt in order to type the following:
'We forget when enjoying the pleasure of any art, of music, poetry, painting or the theatre, that a very great part of our pleasure has been dependent on convention. We are expected to forget it. In the theatre we have all tacitly agreed to see nothing odd about a room that, on the stage, has only three sides; or, in painting, it does not seem odd to us that we see a view as if our heads were held in a vice whereas in life we let our eyes wander east and west, shift position a dozen times and see the landscape under fifty changing lights. The point is elementary; that is why it so important; because it is so very obvious it is constantly forgotten, and this forgetting has, as I will show in this chapter, profound implications. I will here barely hint at one of them by recalling how a humourous philosopher once pointed to a cow in a field and said to me, 'What do you see there?'
I obligingly said that I perceived a cow. 'But you do not,' he replied. 'You deduce a cow. All you see is the appearance of one-half of the outside of a cow. And when you look at a portrait of your aunt all you see is a picture of the outside of one-half of your aunt. You go through a series of lightning processes before accepting this superficies as a portrait of your aunt. It is, for instance, the whole case against realism that it concentrates on giving us the outside of the one-half of everything.' In other words the convention of realism depends for its success on our forgetting that realism is a convention. So does every other convention.'

The peace of the night!