Master and Commander

On my boat at lunch today, I snatched a snippet of Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian.  Wonderfully written; I only allow myself little bits of it and only while on the boat.

It is very entertaining how he heavily lays on the nautical terms and then manages to explain them through context without becoming pedantic.  As a sailor, I enjoyed the epiphany of “mainstay” as not just a crucial element of something, but as the line that hold up the main mast — a crucial element indeed.

Equally entertaining was the movie version of “Master and Commander” starring Russell Crowe.  Gripping, dramatic, it draws you in.  I’m looking foward to reading the whole Aubray/Maturin series.

Bits of Writing Systems

Was at a class this evening, in the course at Stanford University called Writing Systems of the World.  Talk about a rich place for inspiration.  Many new lexical concepts were exposed.

We explored some idioms, such as the consistent use across diverse cultures in ancient Meso-America of the term “deer snake” to refer to a boa constrictor.  We found strong parallels between the letter arrangements in Hebrew and the trigram arrangements in the I Ching.

The guest speaker, Mira Amiras, addressed Writing Systems as Sacred Systems, with rich examples from the Jewish and Arabic traditions.  Her use of the phrase “going into occultation”, while discussing the Kabbalah, highlighted the study of the Occult as the study of the Hidden.

We were treated to a quick tour of the Decipherment of the Writing System of Ancient Teotihuacan by one of the two researchers who accomplished that, Tim King (who is also the instructor for the course).  Equally impressive was his ability to pronounce the words from all of the related languages.  He explained the theory of Glottochronology, where a language will only replace core words at a rate of 5-14% per thousand years.  Historical linguists use this to place languages in time relative to each other.

Peripatetic

Just read an article about the founders of YouTube.  It described them as young, creative, and peripatetic.  That word has the sense for me of someone who wanders, who moves about.  To get more exactitude, I looked it up — on the world’s dictionary, Google, of course.

Turns out it does have the common meaning of walking about, of being itinerant.  But it also carries a meaning related to Aristotle.  Using Peripatetic (with the initial capitalization) as a descriptor means related to Aristotle or to the Aristotelian school of philosophy.  All this because Aristotle taught while walking around the Lyceum in Athens.

You can see Aristotle walking and teaching in the The School of Athens, painted by Raphael in 1511.  He’s in the center, stepping foward, with hand extended, in the blue robe, carrying his Nicomachean Ethics.  Here’s an art print of this scene, which I have in my hallway:

Listen well to those below

“Encourage and listen well to the words of your subordinates.  It is well known that gold lies hidden underground.” — Nabeshima Naoshige (1538 – 1618) in Ideals of the Samurai (translated by William Scott Wilson).

This is an idea all too often forgotten or ignored.  And most subordinates are very hesitant to speak their minds.  But even in that something can be learned.  It just takes lots of paying attention and reading the signs.

I’m always amused when I read the ancient Chinese texts and the various ministers in a kingdom begin reporting sightings of bizarre, mythical animals.  That was their way of, very indirectly, saying that something was wrong with the government.  Effectively, their reports of monstrosities were a safe way of declaring that Heaven and The All Under Heavan (the kingdom) were not in harmony, thus producing abominations.

Yippee ki ay

I encountered this phrase at the end of the new Bruce Willis movie “Live Free or Die Hard“.  It’s his signature phrase from the earlier movies in the series:  ”Die Hard“, “Die Hard 2 – Die Harder“, and “Die Hard with a Vengeance“.  I had to know where it came from.

It’s a variant of cowboy yodelling.  The most famous song that contains these sounds is “I’m an old cowhand from the Rio Grande“, which was written in 1936 by Johnny Mercer.

Bing Crosby recorded it for the the 1936 movie “Rhythm on the Range” and Roy Rogers recorded it for the 1943 movie “King of the Cowboys“.  There were also versions by other famous singers, such as Frank Sinatra, Harry Connick Jr., and Ray Charles.

There are a wide variety of spellings for these sounds.  Yippee is also rendered as yippie, yippe, and yippy.  Ki can be kay and kai.  Ay is sometimes a, aye, yah, and sometimes combined with ki to form kayah.

So Willis is alluding back to the wild days of the American cowboy, with a twist of humor, since the song is actually about a Texan who drives a Ford V-8 and learned all his songs from the radio.  :->

Severest School

“He is best who trains in the severest school.” – Thucydides

I saw this quote today in an airport, while reading an article about a SWAT team and all of the rigorous, varied training they go through.  No matter how well they plan, the random always happens.  They often fall back on their training.  The point, of course, is the harder you train, the more likely you are to be successful in the entirely unpredictable situations that life throws at you.

I really enjoy these nuggets of wisdom that were relevant in Greece in 400 B.C. and are still very relevant now.  Thucydides, an Athenian general who served in the 5th century B.C. war between Athens and Sparta, later became a historian and wrote about his experience in the History of the Peloponnesian War.

Hello World!

I have always been fascinated with words.

Their origins, their meanings, the sound of them, the minutiae of spelling, all of the systems that people have used to communicate.

I’m sure much of it is because both of my parents are English professors.  I went into engineering and found a whole other set of worlds full of symbol systems.  One of my favorite books to just go browsing in is Writing Systems of the World: Alphabets, Syllabaries, Pictograms.

I love the way words can pick up meanings.  The popular consciousness attaches seemingly random connotations.  It’s an adventure.