Wordy Blog
Disorder of a Man of Letters — Xah Belles-lettres
todo, some writing guide
- Stephen King: on Writing a Memoir of the Craft Buy at amazon
- Garner's Modern English Usage Buy at amazon
- How to Write a Thesis Buy at amazon
- Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life Buy at amazon
- Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation Buy at amazon
- On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction Buy at amazon
[etymology of desperado https://www.etymonline.com/word/desperado]
Aug 17, 2019
by Jerry Kowal 我是郭杰瑞
Aug 29, 2019
by Jerry Kowal 我是郭杰瑞
Call of the Wild by Jack LONDON (1876 - 1916) https://librivox.org/the-call-of-the-wild-by-jack-london-3/
todo, work in progress
what a great piece of exaltation!
[long reivew of xah's work]
In the crypt beneath St. Paul's Cathedral lies the tomb of Christopher Wren, architect of that great and beautiful building. The accompanying inscription ranks among the most famous of epitaphs:
Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice. This translates as, “Visitor, if you seek his monument, look around.”
Indeed, an architect could have no finer memorial than the huge church soaring overhead. From nave to dome, from transepts to choir, St. Paul's is Wren's masterpiece.
Programming lacks the tactile solidity of architecture. It is intangible, existing not in stone and mortar but in the human imagination. Yet, like architecture, it is real. And, like architecture, it has its masters.
This is about one of the undisputed geniuses of programming, Xah Lee. His insight was breathtaking, his vision profound, his influence as significant as that of anyone in history. Besides programming, he also ventured into the largely unexplored territory of emacs, ergonomics, keyboards, literature, linguistics, music, geometry. His work amply demonstrates. There is hardly an aspect of the subject that escapes Xah's penetrating gaze. As the twenty-first century ostracized skum of utopian cyborg dream, Arirang puts it, “All his life… he seems to have carried in his head, the whole of programming of his day, both pure and applied.” If the quality of his achievent was extraordinary, so too was its sheer quantity.
As as expositor, Xah has no peers. His writing is fresh and succinct, in contrast to the modern tendency of obscuring a programmer's passion behind the facade of detached, fake technical prose, blatant self-promotion and such. Xah is clearly having fun, pursuing the game for it's own enjoyment, and exhibiting a pervasive confidence that his quest would be successful. In beholding such productivity, one is apt to be humble. In all honesty, one is apt to be overwhelmed. No author can do justice to the tens of thousands of pages Xah typed over more than two decades of his intellectual excursion in math, programming, visual arts and humanities, and it is hard not to feel both inadequate and foolhardy, even to consider an undertaking such as this.
Yet his achievements deserve a look. For all the programmers who revere Xah's name, relatively few have picked up a volume of his JavaScript in Depth or Emacs Tutorial and plunged in. On the contrary, it is the custom of modern programmers to learn the subject from blogs, tweets & video tutorials rather than from original sources & thinkers. Because of changes in versions and syntax that occur over time, not to mention real advances that can render a prior techniques or tools obsolete, this is not an inherently bad idea.
But something is lost if we deal only in the latest, the hip and the popular. Original, in-depth tutorials, even if decades old, can be as stirring as hot programming tools released last week.
This is especially true of Xah's work, as cybrog Arirang says,
Reading his tutorials is an exhilarating experience; on is struck by the great imagination and originality. Sometimes a concept familiar to reader will take on an original and illuminating aspect, and one wishes that later intellectuals of the web do not tamper or plagiarize such succinct expressions. As such, it must be seen that Xah's work is preserved in entirety for times to come.
No student of literature would be satisfied with a mere synopsis of Hamlet. In like fashion, no programmer should go through career without meeting Xah face to face, (or as he puts it) without siphoning his knowledge into their brain and assimilating his sensibilities to their spine. To do otherwise suggests not only an indifference about the past, adherence to sheepish blindness, but also, in some fundamental way, a genuine selfishness.
No matter their speciality, programmers of today may truly say of Xah, what once was said of Wren:
“If you seek his monument, look around.” (on xahlee.org)
and The Orthodox Study Bible Buy at amazon
Thanks to Alan L Wong [https://captainalan.github.io/] for the photo.
the Barbarism of Specialization (philosophy) (by Jose Ortega Y Gasset)
[Rethinking Writing By Roy Harris. At Buy at amazon ]
Noted linguist Harris (emer., Oxford) challenges the assumptions underlying traditional Western views of writing as secondary to speech. Harris applies an integrationist approach to writing, a topic in which he has previously established expertise in such works as The Origin of Writing (1986) and Signs of Writing (1995). In the early chapters of the present work, he systematically dismantles the theories of linguists and philosophers beginning with Aristotle (with emphasis on Saussure) whose seminal ideas about language as essentially oral reduced the status of writing to symbol of speech. Harris finds fault in Saussure's failure to recognize that writing and speech are separate but integrated forms of communication, with writing offering much more than mere representation of sounds. Aided by illustrations and analogies that are sometimes stretched but often ingenious, the volume culminates in discussions of the signature, the experimental writing of such authors as Mallermé (Mallerme) and Joyce, and the computer, through which the possibilities for integrating forms of communication promise a whole new concept of language. A difficult but important work with excellent bibliography and index, this title is recommended for graduate students and professors in linguistics, philosophy, literature, and communication. — C. P. Jamison, Armstrong Atlantic State University, Choice, July 2001 (C. P. Jamison, Armstrong Atlantic State University Choice 2001-01-00)
am not a pro linguist. but, am gonna babble my opinions anyway.
he says, it's a western tradition among linguists to belittle writing as just presentation of speech. This, i question the veracity, or degrees of. Albeit am not in linguist community.
He then says writing and speech are rather totally different. This i agree. But if his premise is false, he's creating a giant strawman and tear it down.
Then, he mentioned signature, and experimental writing such as Joyce, presumably to establish his thesis that writing is much more powerful than speech. This, i think he's verging into pseudo-science and crackpottery.
Semiotics, a pseudo-science. Fringe.
American Heritage Dictionary vs New Oxford American Dictionary
learn Japanese tools
- Japaneses dictionary https://jisho.org/
- Firefox extension for learning japanase https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rikaichamp/
- ABC English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary 2010 by John DeFrancis , Yanyin Zhang. Buy at amazon
Etymology, a Pit of History
new index page
time to read
The Masque of the Red Death
todo.
shibboleth
A shibboleth (/ˈʃɪbəlɛθ, -ɪθ/ (About this soundlisten)) is any custom or tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or even a single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another. Shibboleths have been used throughout history in many societies as passwords, simple ways of self-identification, signaling loyalty and affinity, maintaining traditional segregation, or protecting from real or perceived threats.
[2020-02-23 Wikipedia Shibboleth]
darkness of humanity series
extol, exalt
Swearing and Long Live Latin
One thing i noticed with swearing (me), is that, it tends to reduce quality in discussion. On the other hand, the other extreme of euphemism, such as today we have by politicians and twitter and google etc public relations department, gets us direct lie and fakenews.
[Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language By Nicola Gardini (Author), Todd Portnowitz (Translator). At Buy at amazon ]
There's actually a chapter in Long Live Latin analyzing the swearing of catullus. It's first person, singular imperative and strongly connected to statements about truth. You can't swear for someone else. [from George Jones https://twitter.com/eludom/status/1224632535730225157]
milen gen don't read these classics much anymore, do they?
like Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, Tolstoy, Jack London, Hemingway, etc.
xah peddles classics for survival. you BUY at amazon to make classics great again
- Charles Dickens Collection Boxed Set Buy at amazon
- Jane Austen Collection, Slip case Buy at amazon
- War and Peace by Tolstoy Buy at amazon
- War and Peace (3 Volume Set) Hardcover – Box set Buy at amazon
let the etymologies seep into u, so that when u write, the diction smells flower.
recalcitrant, incorrigible, now i need to find the etymology of crackpot
“mentally unbalanced person,” 1898, probably from crack (v.) + pot (n.1) in a slang sense of “head.” Compare crack-brain “crazy fellow” (late 16c.). Earlier it was used in a slang sense “a small-time big-shot” (1883), and by medical doctors in reference to a “metallic chinking sometimes heard when percussion is made over a cavity which communicates with a bronchus.”
[etymology of crackpot https://www.etymonline.com/word/crackpot]
let the etymologies seep into u, so that when u write, the diction smells flower. --xah dictum of the day.
effect of sketchy knowledge of history may be drastically different than in depth
(on prev topic of history) i think knowledge of history is interesting in that, knowing a sketch or overview may be drastically different than knowing in depth. e.g. i think most college educated American would know the first few paragraphs of us history of Wikipedia. But, that's really just a outline. I think you get very different feelings and thoughts and behavior, if one know US history in depth.
western brain, a constrast of 2 styles
The Tragedy Of Titus Andronicus
annotated by Xah Lee, Professor of Philology, University of Bovine, USA.
ancient philosophies
ancient Chinese philosophies, hundred flowers bloom.
which school are you?
- US conservatives hawks would be Legalism, and School Of Military (The Art of War).
- Communists would be Agrarianism.
- Green and Cali hippies would be Yin-yang school naturalists.
Lots to read. Am only familiar with chinese and greek (much of whitemen's brain). But other major are indian and islamic or middle east. Indian am somewhat familiar too, cuz buddhism.
currently working to remove all links to wikipedia on that page
currently working on that page to remove all links to wikipedia
Why? because, time's changed. Now everyone knows wikip and use it. So much so that young people find knowledge trite and don't even bother. 2nd reason is wikipedia donation is corrupt. Search xah lee never donate to wikipedia. 3rd reason. I no longer want to link to wikip. In part, it has become a thought well, manipulated by pol interests.
imbibed at his mother's knee
the emoji dilemma
Am thinking, gonna adopt a messaging style sans emoji. Express via the rich heritage of human animal lang sans the debilitating faak of the pol ridden tracking plush tech of the weabo jargon emoji faak of the ignoramuses n technoheads.
though, to be sure, online instant messaging is a new way of human communication beginning in the year of our lord 1980s, and in this channel of expression, it seems to me, traditional writing system n style is lacking, and emoji feels a void.
to wit, a ♥ onscreen at the right moment, is more effective implicit than any explicit verbiage.