Kwame Anthony Appiah has an interesting piece over at the Atlantic on language and usage, racial designation as social identity, and the linguistic arguments that (hopefully) lead to consensus. In short, it’s a philosopher’s take on whether we should capitalize the B in black as a designation for those of African descent.

My two cents? I don’t really care which—capitalized or not—ultimately wins out. But opinions to the contrary notwithstanding, there simply is no case to be made for applying one rule to black and another to white. Just doesn’t make sense.

But in this crazy, upside-down world in which we now find ourselves, sense is in rather short supply.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

Evangeline Garreau, from the latest issue of her never-boring email newsletter, on the occasion of her thirtieth birthday:

One thing that becomes more clear to me every year is the absolutely absurd improbability of existence. You’re telling me not only did intelligent life form on earth and then persist for MILLIONS of years despite fundamental design flaws in the species that continually attempts to self-destruct, BUT THEN two people amidst billions found each other and fell in love and created BRAND NEW LIFE, and THEN I made it all the way around the sun THIRTY TIMES despite the fact that a) I barely made it out of infanthood and b) the planet is chockablock full of life-threatening dangers?? Who doesn’t want to have a party about that??

A question every Saturday Costco shopper is bound to ask sooner or later.

It was pandemics that brought down the Roman Empire, argues John Gray. And while it’s unlikely we’re on a similar trajectory, he does have some questions. “Human knowledge has increased tremendously,” he writes, “but are we so much more reasonable than the Romans were at their peak? Or are we descending into a state of collective derangement, far more rapidly than they did? The answer may begin to be clear over the coming months. ” Actually, Mr. Gray, we have our answer now. I’m afraid it’s…derangement.

“There is no such thing,” writes Jason Wilson, “as bad birdsong.”

This is extraordinary:

[T]he larger the human economy has become—the more people and the more goods and services they produce—the faster it has grown on average. Now, especially if you’re reading quickly, you might think you know what I mean. And you might be wrong, because I’m not referring to exponential growth. That happens when, for example, the number of people carrying a virus doubles every week. Then the growth rate (100% increase per week) holds fixed. The human economy has grown super-exponentially. The bigger it has gotten, the faster it has doubled, on average. The global economy churned out $74 trillion in goods and services in 2019, twice as much as in 2000. Such a quick doubling was unthinkable in the Middle Ages and ancient times. Perhaps our earliest doublings took millennia.

How did Darwin establish that earthworms are deaf? “He blew whistles at the ground, shouted into their burrows, played them the bassoon and placed them on a table next to a piano….”

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

“People who don’t write think that writing is just the physical act,” says author Edward P. Jones, “but first come all the steps of thinking it out before.”

It’s hard to convince non-writers of this truth—and still harder to account for when you’re putting together an estimate for a client.

Something I learned early on in this business is that you don’t simply charge for the time you spend at the keyboard; you charge for your experience, your know-how, your insights. In other words, you charge for all the unique ways in which you approach—and ultimately solve—a particular creative problem.

Think about the way your mechanic makes a living: Parts plus labor equals an invoice. Pretty simple and straightforward, right? The problem is, my labor includes an awful lot of internal, off-the-clock mental noodling—whether I’m actually conscious of it or not. Yet I can’t exactly bill for the time an idea popped into my head when I was mowing the lawn, or when the perfect ending to a 30-second TV spot revealed itself to me when I was on a hike.

It’s just part of that nebulous, ill-defined thing we call the “writing” process, I reckon.

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Seems appropriate right now to share this, the first known television interview with Nelson Mandela:

Only twenty-four seconds long, the footage is believed to have been filmed during a break in the 1956 Treason Trial.

While we’re at it, here’s Paul Simon covering Peter Gabriel’s “Biko,” about the anti-apartheid activist who was murdered in 1977:

That pretty much sums it up for me.

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After moving to Argentina three years ago, Dominic Hilton remains frustrated with his inability to learn the language—and bemused at the locals’ misuse of English:

You see a lot of that in Buenos Aires. English swearwords, I mean. It’s as if swearing in a foreign language doesn’t count. Oh, those? I imagine people saying. Forget about those. They’re just some random four-letter words. No one understands, or bothers with translating them. Let’s go eat some more beef!

Meanwhile over at the Guardian, correspondents contributed to a list of 10 of the best words in the world (that don’t translate into English). Here’s my favorite:

Dating back to the 16^th century, the term Feierabend, or “celebration evening,” used to denote the evening before a public holiday, but has come to refer to the free time between leaving the office and bedtime on any working day.

The key to understanding Feierabend is that it isn’t time for going to the cinema or gym, but time for doing nothing. In 1880, the cultural historian Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl described the concept as “an atmosphere of carefree wellbeing, of deep inner reconciliation, of the pure and clear quiet of the evening.”

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Couple of cool stories from Humanities magazine: Ron Stanford rediscovers some photographs taken in 1972 while he and his wife were on an NEH-sponsored trip to Louisiana to document Cajun and Creole musicians, and Sheryl Kaskowitz writes about the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration, “one of the New Deal’s most radical, far-reaching, and highly criticized programs.”

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“English is an immensely complicated language to get right,” writes Mark Forsyth, “and native speakers often have no idea of its strangeness.” In fact, he adds, it’s “largely made up of the rules we don’t know that we know.” For example:

You are utterly familiar with the rule of ablaut reduplication. You’ve been using it all your life. It’s just that you’ve never heard of it. But if somebody said the words “zag-zig” or “cross-criss” you would know, deep down in your loins, that they were breaking a sacred rule of language. You just wouldn’t know which one.

Speaking of loins, Forsyth explains how, when it comes to verse, rhythm is far more important than rhyme:

It’s the subtle difference when we record a record or present a present or tell a rebel to rebel. It’s a difference that is very hard for people to learn, and is the main reason that, in a strong French accent, there’s no difference between happiness and a penis.

His book, The Elements of Eloquence, would make a great gift for the word nerd in your life. Like, you know, me. I mean, I do have a birthday coming up.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment