David Crystal. History
of English in 100 Words. ©2011 The
first English word to be written down was “roe.” It was carved in runic characters on a deer
antler. Crystal takes the reader on a
trip through our history and along the way shows us the richness and complexity
of our language. In 1963 when I was a
management intern in the office of the Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, his executive
assistant, John Donovan, called me into his office and told me to go to the
library and get a book called Rozum’s Universal Robots. He said the secretary thought it could be
mined for speech material, and I was to do the mining. It was a nice assignment, and I guess I
learned at the time that the book was based on a Czech play first produced in
1921. What I didn’t learn was that the
word “robot” was coined to name the automatons in that play and from there entered
our language and became the basis for hundreds of additional words or
variations. We have all Hoovered our
living room rugs, so we are familiar with the tendency to make the brand names
of new inventions into the common name for all similar products. “Xerox me a copy of this.” The one that I like best is “escalator.” The name was coined from the Italian word “scalia”
for the Otis Elevator company to describe its new product, moving stairs. It was called the Otis Escalator and the name
was meant to be associated with the Otis Elevator. From that we have the escalation of
hostilities in the Middle East and the escalator clause in your contract. There’s much more in the internet age. Crystal brings us right up to date and makes
it clear that Moore’s Law applies not only to transistors but also to the coinage
of words. June 2013
Umberto Eco. The
Prague Cemetery. ©2010 Only in the
endnotes is the reader told that all of the characters in this novel are based
on real people except Simonini, the narrator, who pulls it all together in
telling his life story from about 1840 in the Piedmont to 1897 in Paris and then
a few years more. Even Simonini is
something of a collage of real people. Simonini
starts his career working for a notary who forges wills and other
documents. He is looking for revenge
because he is convinced that the notary stole his inheritance from his father,
who left only debts when he died. Simonini
soon learns the trade and forges a document that gets his boss put in prison so
that he can take over the business. From
there he moves on to the secret service in the Piedmont and adventures
involving Garibaldi. Later he works for
the French secret service, where he forges the letter that gets Dreyfus sent to
Devil’s Island. His basic income is from
forgeries and reselling consecrated hosts to devil worshippers, but his real
life’s work is rewriting a letter his grandfather wrote describing a meeting of
Rabbi’s in a cemetery Prague in which they discussed plans to take over the world. He is able to sell it several times to
various secret services and also to get it published in book form. Finally he sells it to the Okhrana as a draft
for The Protocols of Zion. His last act is an attempt to blow up one of
the first construction sites for the Paris Metro. Eco gives us a tour through the depths of anti-Semitism
in 19th C Europe and introduces to all the players, including the
Jesuits, and gives us a full account of a black mass. June 2013
F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender
is the Night. ©1934 CD version ©2010 Rosemary
Hoyt, a budding silent screen actress meets Dick and Nicole Diver on a beach
near their Riviera hotel. Rosemary thinks
Dick and Nicole are the most wonderful people she has ever met, and they like
her. She accompanies them to Paris. There is almost something between Dick and Rosemary,
but before that can develop, a body is found in Rosemary’s room. Dick drags the body out into the hall so that
no scandal can touch Rosemary and her career.
They part company. Then we get
the back story for Dick and Nicole. He was
a psychiatrist at the institute where Nicole was being treated for some kind of
mental illness. Her family was very rich
and thought that the best thing for Nicole would be to marry a doctor who could
always take care of her. She is
absolutely gorgeous, and Dick falls in love and marries her. It’s never clear to what extent her money
contributed to her attractiveness for Dick. Nicole puts up the money for a psychiatric
institute. It works for a while, but
Dick starts to drink a bit too much, and his partner asks him to leave and take
Nicole’s money with him. They drift
around Europe, and they drift apart.
Back on the Riviera, they run into Rosemary and Nicole suspects an
affair between her and Dick. She’s
feeling fully cured and decides to have an affair of her own with their old
friend Tommy. Then she asks Dick for a
divorce. He agrees and returns to the US
and practices medicine in several towns in NY state and sort of fades
away. It’s a sad story of too much money
and misdirected ambition. I didn’t like
it much, perhaps because the characters all seemed to be losers despite their
advantages of physical beauty, wealth and education. I was struck again by the beauty of
Fitzgerald’s prose and by the structure, which sometimes made this feel more
like a script for the stage or screen than a novel. Sometimes at the end of a chapter, it seems
like the characters exit, the lights go out and the curtain comes down. June 2013
Malcolm Gladwell.
Blink. ©2005 You might say this
is a book about thinking without thinking.
We all make so called “snap judgments,” but what is the intellectual
basis for these? Gladwell suggests that
they come from our subconscious mind and draw on the sum of our experience. He
introduces his subject with an anecdote about the Getty Museum’s purchase of a
6th C BCE kouros from a Swiss dealer for $10 million. The Getty ran every test imaginable to insure
the statue was authentic, and all physical tests showed that it was. They called in art historians experienced with
evaluation of ancient Greek culture; each in turn rejected the statue, but none
of them could say exactly why, at least not at first. The kouros was a fake, and it was proven to
be so when they rechecked the documentation – a post mark from a time when that
post office was not in operation, a piece of paper that wasn’t right for the date
of the document written on it and so on.
On reflection, the art historians were able to explain their negative
reactions. The statue didn’t fit into the
sum total of their experience with this type of statue. In another anecdote, he relates how the Republican
Convention in 1920 was deadlocked among three candidates. There were four others in the race as well
but not in serious contention. A
compromise candidate was needed. One of
the four was Warren G. Harding. There
didn’t seem to be anything objectionable about him and he had an arresting
presence – he looked like a president.
The Convention chose him and he proved to be the worst president we’ve
ever had. Gladwell calls it “the Warren
Harding error.” We tend to make
judgments on the basis of appearance and experience. Sometime we’re right, like the art
historians, and sometimes we’re wrong, like the politicos in Chicago in
1920. We associate leadership with tallness
and as a result CEOs are taller and even for non-CEOs each inch of height above
average is worth $789 per year. Another
phenomenon is our reaction to facial expressions. Paul Eckmann and Sylvan Tompkins spent seven
years “unpacking” the human face, i.e., learning what all the muscles are and
then learning the meaning of the various combinations of these muscles when they
contracted or relaxed. They documented the
meaning of the various combinations and also discovered that there are very few
differences in the meanings of facial expressions among races and cultures. We all read faces and respond to what we see
on the basis of what we have stored in our subconscious. Gladwell describes the results of many tests
and experiments to study the effects of the unconscious behavior. It makes an interesting read and from it I
found an explanation for behavior in myself and others with regard to race,
gender and other issues on which we have modified our behavior over the course
of our lifetimes as society as a whole has become more tolerant. A place to get a feel for this is at implicit.Harvard.edu. On this site there are a number of IAT tests
in which you can check out your own responses.
I took the young person-old person
test and didn’t find it especially convincing, but your experience may be
different. The best thing to do would be
to read Gladwell’s book. June 2013
Stephen Greenblatt. The
Swerve. ©2011 This is the story of
Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) who served as a scribe for seven popes including
the notorious Baldasare Cossa, who took the name John XXXIII until he was
deposed. Poggio was an excellent scribe
and ended his career as chief scribe in the Vatican, but his passion was for
finding ancient Latin texts and for the language in its purest form. In the winter of 1417 Poggio made a great
discovery. In an abbey in Germany he came across a manuscript of a long-lost
classical poem, Lucretius's De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of
the Universe"). Greenblatt sees it as the origin of the renaissance and,
in effect, of modernity.
Because
I listened to this book on CDs, I needed to check some spellings and I came
across the review in the url above. It is so well done that I urge you either to
read this Guardian Review or the book. One
thing that interested me that is not in the review is Greenblatt’s description
of the library of Alexandria. Here are
some of the things developed in that library: Archimedes defined pi and laid
the foundation for calculus, Euclid developed his geometry, Eratosthenes proved
the world is round and calculated its circumference with an error of only 1%,
other scholars determined that one could sail west to get to the Indies,
developed hydraulics and pneumatics, and heliocentric theory, and determined
that the year is 365 and 1/4 days long and proposed the idea of leap year. June 2013
Donovan Hohn. Moby-Duck. ©2011
Hohn was an English teacher at a private school on 16th
Street in Manhattan. One of his students
submitted a short essay that discussed an accident during a storm in the North
Pacific in January 1992. A container
fell overboard during an extreme roll, broke open and released boxes containing
28,000 float toys. As the flotsam moved
east with the currents, the toys escaped their packaging and began to be found
along the coast of Alaska. Hohn was
curious and researched the stories. He
became so interested that eventually he quit his job so that he could continue his
study and find out what happened to the toys.
The toys came in packages of four, a yellow duck, a beaver, a turtle and
a frog. Many examples of each had been
found by beach combers, but all anyone really talked about or wrote about was
the ducks, the iconic American bath toy.
The toys came from a factory in Guangzhou, which he was able to visit, and
there the owner showed him the original dye from which the duck had been cast
in plastic. From his writing Hohn seems to
be a very engaging person, and the proof of that is in how he was able to talk
his way onto every imaginable kind of scientific expedition or cleanup
operation that had any relevance to the possible movements of the ducks. He
joined cleanup operations along the Alaskan coast, rode a containership
transiting the North Pacific, crewed on scientific expeditions to the Great
Pacific Garbage Dump and along the coast of Labrador, hitched a ride on a
Canadian ice breaker sailing east to west through the Northwest Passage and, of
course, visited the factory in Guangzhou. Along the way he tells about beach combers
and oceanographers, the way oceans work and how the oceans and their
inhabitants are affected by the plastics we dump into them. Some things mentioned anecdotally: The first documented floating object was
Osiris in his coffin, which Isis recovered in the waters off what is now
Lebanon; ocean circulation was completely different before the closing of the
Isthmus of Panama; in Alaska it’s O.K. to be a conservationist, but not an
environmentalist. All through the book
he refers to Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s
an enjoyable read, but if you can only read a few pages, read the epilogue
where he talks about the role of Ishmael.
Halfway through the novel, Ishmael recedes from being a character and
becomes more of a pure narrator, and the theme of paternity appears. It just was then when Melville was halfway
through with his writing that his first child was born. June 2013
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