Fascinating Facts and Trivia.

Creating the Better Language

The way we communicate is a messy business. Languages, which evolve over time, become conflicted messes that make learning and speaking them correctly far more challenging than they need to be. The New Yorker’s Joshua Foer explores one man’s effort to create a better language and the surprising results that followed.

There are so many ways for speakers of English to see the world. We can glimpse, glance, visualize, view, look, spy, or ogle. Stare, gawk, or gape. Peek, watch, or scrutinize. Each word suggests some subtly different quality: looking implies volition; spying suggests furtiveness; gawking carries an element of social judgment and a sense of surprise. When we try to describe an act of vision, we consider a constellation of available meanings. But if thoughts and words exist on different planes, then expression must always be an act of compromise.

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like “knight.” No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

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100 Books Down and A Few Recommendations

Last January, feeling nostalgic for the kind of in-depth reading I did as a kid before the Internet intervened to make me a scanner, I decided to set of a goal of reading 100 books in 2012. I just finished—and thought I would mention the books that I either enjoyed the most or got the most satisfaction from this year. Other than The Winter of Our Discontent, I deliberately left out books that I re-read this, because Discontent was a very different read now than when was 19.

Fiction

  • This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
  • The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck.
  • Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
  • Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
  • The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Honorable Mentions: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides and Demian by Herman Hesse.

Non-Fiction

  • The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • The Paradox of Love by Pascal Bruckner
  • Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary
  • One Life at a Time, Please by Edward Abbey

Read more

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Government of the Elderly, by the Elderly, for the Elderly

If you’ve ever felt that government policy is excessively focused on the needs of older Americans, you’re not alone. Despite spending which is incrediblymr_six_jumping focused on the elderly, most Americans–including older Americans–believe more of the budget should be focused on the young, as Derek Thompson notes:

At a time when education is absorbing huge cuts and Medicare and Social Security spending continue to grow faster than the size of government, it’s a question worth asking: Is Washington biased toward old people?

The easiest way to answer the question is: Of course it is. Older Americans show up disproportionately at the ballot box, in Congress (the average age of a senator is 63), and in our budget. Fifty percent of federal benefits flow to the 13 percent of the population over the age of 65, David Leonhardt reported in the New York Times last weekend.

But Americans of every age group think that the federal budget should focus more on young people than old people, according to the American Values Poll, from The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute, which was released today. Asked if Washington should aim its spending toward the young, 73% of twentysomethings and a plurality of senior citizens said yes.

Of course, younger Americans could help themselves by actually turning out to vote.

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The Worst Words of 2012

Writing in The Atlantic, Jen Doll has created a list of the worst words of 2012.

A few of her selections are listed below:

Epic. Adjective. Unless you’re describing The Iliad or The Odyssey (and in a high school or college English class), choose anew, friends. Don’t make me say this again in 2013.

YOLO. Soul-searching, soul-sucking acronym. YOLO is probably the most disliked word among the groups I surveyed for this post. Merriam-Webster’s Kory Stamper says it best, prefacing her opinion with this disclaimer: “As a lexicographer, I must withhold judgment on any word, either established or in-the-making. Words are raw materials and each has its place and purpose; some people find eggs to be slimy and gross, yet they will happily eat them when they’re incorporated into a cake. Even moist, which seems to get the brunt of the word-hate, has its place.”

Read the whole list here.

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A Mote of Dust Suspended in a Sunbeam

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