BLAZE

Today's language lessons

1. Dr Seuss does chiasmus

a.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.

b.
I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful, one hundred percent.

c.
From there to here, and here to there, funny things are everywhere.


2. Recreational grief

"The British think tank Civitas published a report this week under the title Conspicuous Compassion. Its author, Patrick West, argues that public outpourings of grief, such as those after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and following a number of recent child murders, show that society hasn't become more caring or altruistic, but more selfish. He asserts that what seem to be public signs of caring — such as wearing coloured ribbons, signing Internet petitions, and carrying banners saying 'Not In My Name' — are part of a culture of ostentatious caring which is about feeling good, not doing good; of projecting one's ego and thereby showing others what a deeply caring individual you are, not actually doing anything that makes a difference."

Kinda makes you think, huh?


3. Lucid in the sky with diamonds

"The death was reported this week of the British-born, Canadian-based psychiatrist and researcher Humphry Osmond, who in the 1950s carried out many experiments in mood-altering substances such as LSD and mescaline to find therapies to aid schizophrenics (he helped Aldous Huxley to experience mescaline, whose effects the author described in The Doors of Perception in 1954). Osmond coined the word psychedelic for such substances in a letter to Huxley in 1956; he said it included 'the concepts of enriching the mind and enlarging the vision.' He coined it irregularly from psyche + Greek delos (clear, manifest)."

I believe my family had one of those weird degrees-of-separation relationships with Dr Osmond — but by that reasoning, we also have relationships to Marilyn Monroe, Margaret Atwood, and Kate Bush, so perhaps that's really apropos of nothing but coincidence. (But my mother likes the Marilyn thing...)


4. Oh those Martians!

"The Martian day is some 39 minutes longer than ours and has been officially named the sol (the Latin for sun, which is also the official astronomical name for our star). NASA workers on the various Mars spacecraft projects have coined "yestersol" for the sol before the current one."

Maybe I'll move to Mars ... after a few weeks I'd catch up with myself! Though I suppose Martians don't have weeks either, since a week is seven days. We need a word for seven sols!


5. Chiastic pedagogy

"Teachers operate at a higher level of effectiveness when they question answers than when they answer questions." —Dr. Mardy Grothe


Yours crossingly,
Leslie