diving semantics

[Quero]

I think the job you do and the place you call home does wonders in 'masking' Tinnitus. The sounds of water, boats, motors, insects ,tiny frogs at night and human activity on a high level helps to both distract you and overwhelm much of the tinnitus. I have found it to be true, and am determined to get out into the woods and waters as much as possible this spring and summer.

It's true what you say. I live in a house full of fountains for that reason, and I have the most wonderful small colony of little chirping frogs living in the canals that surround the central terrace. But I have to switch them off when I want to have a conversation. The combination of the tinnitus and the burbling water makes it impossible for me to catch enough of what my interlocutor says (and fill in the rest by lip reading--which constitutes about 50% of my comprehension) without constantly asking for repetitions. Here's a snapshot of a part of my house with bridges over canals/leading into rooms and one of the fountains.

I would not suggest Mescaline. It's a wonderful high, but I sort of left that kind of thing behind when I passed the age of 60.

I was actually joking there. My days of ingesting psychotropics just for the fun of it are long past. While the 60's and 70's were personally interesting in that respect, at that time I expected to have a long life ahead of me. Now I've got a long life behind me and don't want to gamble with what's left. And who wants to be an anachronism anyway?

But, after they wear off, the devil is chattering again in my ear.

This is why I take no meds for this condition. I have developed very good focusing skills in order to ignore the noise.

I'll soon be trying hearing aids developed in Denmark which do not amply any sounds, but pull the octaves you can't hear well and move them over too lower frequencies in a complete octave that you are still able to hear effortlessly. The intent is to trick the brain, which is where the sounds come from.

I wore two earlier iterations of Danish hearing aids for about 20 years, from about the age of 35, and they work while you've got them on (you're still at the mercy of the noise when you put your head down to sleep). But after years of living in North America and Europe, and then coming to Asia, the last pair I had eventually reached the end of their functional life and became impossible to replace from my current location. So now that I no longer have to hear during conferences/committee meetings/workshops/courses, and I communicate mainly through hand signals or bytes, I no longer wear hearing aids, and I have let/forced my brain decide what to listen to. I'm going to stop writing about it now because I can't think about tinnitus and ignore it at the same time (right now it's like a tinny siren wailing away with a low hum as an undertone).

 

[fjpatrum]

Ipads weren't used much before the 21st Century. Hard to believe, but there it is. Ever watch a movie made in the 90s with not a single cell phone in sight? How the hell did they know what time it was?

The connection with linguistics is vague but present if you consider that within two generations most children will be unable to tell time using an analog clock/watch face. This is about when the ability to write well will finally almost vanish , freeing people from any sense of inadequacy. Works of fiction will be historical artifacts, replaced by graphic novels.

...

People will continue to write well, despite the general decline of "common communication" in the written form. The fear that print media is dying is also misplaced, though I grant it looks more likely now than it did 20 years ago when I first started hearing this argument.

Language is dynamic. If it wasn't we'd all still be writing in hieroglyphics. I don't like the "decline" of grammar and linguistic clarity any more than you do but let's not pretend this is somehow unnatural or something to actually be worried about. It'd be like saying we were never like that at 16 when referring to the actions of teens today. Of course we were, we've just gotten too old to remember it.

 

[agilis]

People will continue to write well, despite the general decline of "common communication" in the written form. The fear that print media is dying is also misplaced, though I grant it looks more likely now than it did 20 years ago when I first started hearing this argument.

Language is dynamic. If it wasn't we'd all still be writing in hieroglyphics. I don't like the "decline" of grammar and linguistic clarity any more than you do but let's not pretend this is somehow unnatural or something to actually be worried about. It'd be like saying we were never like that at 16 when referring to the actions of teens today. Of course we were, we've just gotten too old to remember it.

It is completely normal and natural, and language is as dynamic and as reflective of contemporary issues and preferences as is the law. Judges tend to be a bit oblique about this, but it is certainly true. I know that you are thoroughly aware that what is 'correct' in punctuation, spelling and even in definition is completely the result of common usage. Still, I would modify what your first sentence says to read (Some) people will continue to write well, especially if your standards include things like elegance, exceptional grace, and other aesthetic elements, along with clarity and those virtues which have more pragmatic value. Evolution is not always 'upward', or in the direction of improvement; following Darwin, evolution is generally in the direction of enhanced survival and reproductive success, certainly for life forms but also in language and culture generally, though in allegorical and metaphorical guise.

I read a great deal, and while there are some exceptional writers still (or very recently, in the case of Christopher Hitchens) to be found in the few languages with which I am familiar, I cannot shake the feeling that they may represent the sudden brilliance that the last remnants of pure light from a setting sun sometimes delight us with.

I certainly remember being 16, and one of the deepest satisfactions of my life is knowing that there were few opportunities for mad carnal or emotional excess that I failed to seize. Growing up in the NYC area at the end of the Beat Generation and through the entire counterculture period has made me regard current 'alternative' life styles and culture as rather pallid, derivative and boringly cautious.

 

[boulderjohn]

I know that you are thoroughly aware that what is 'correct' in punctuation, spelling and even in definition is completely the result of common usage.

Not completely.

There was no formal study of English grammar at all until a few hundred years ago, and thus no true rules. The first grammar books and grammar rules were for the most part modeled on Latin. When trying to determine what was "correct" in English, the so-called experts would often defer to what was correct in Latin. In some cases, they deferred to what was possible in Latin. For example, the rule against splitting infinitives in English came about because it is not possible to split infinitives in Latin. In English, it is not only possible to split infinitives, it is often much better to do so, but many generations of students received failing grades for breaking that rule. The same is true about ending a sentence with a preposition--it can't be don't in Latin, so it shouldn't be done in English, the experts said. That is the rule that supposedly led Winston Churchill to exclaim "This is a situation up with which I shall not put!" English is not Latin, but we still suffer to this day because of misguided people's insistence that it is.

Other rules came about because someone got the bright idea that it should be a rule. When I first got the version of MS Word that had the grammar check, I was frequently flagged on my relative pronoun usage. Mystified, I did some research and found that a little over a hundred years ago someone got the bright idea that the meaning of adjectival phrases would be more clear if we started the restrictive ones with that and the non-restrictive ones with which. Some grammar books agreed and made it a rule, but most didn't. Whoever set up MS Word included it. It has never been a part of common usage, though, and I believe MS Word has dropped it from the grammar program.

Our spelling rules are largely a sad result of poor timing. Around 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was published in an England that had no grammar or spelling rules. People spelled things the way they sounded to them. Moreover, English dialects differed dramatically from town to town. Few people could read. Chaucer's work was probably the greatest best seller of the day, with scribes working furiously to keep up with the demand for the huge, hand written volumes. Over the next 50 years or so, the English language changed dramatically in pronunciation. It was at that time that the printing press was introduced to England. This allowed for cheap books and made learning to read worthwhile. It eliminated the hundreds of dialects across the land. What was one of their first best sellers? Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, printed with Chaucer's spelling, then already becoming obsolete. And so for the most part we spell our words today the way they sounded to Chaucer 700 years ago. If Chaucer wanted to write what he heard in a sentence that talked about a "kuhnikt" who carried a "kuneefuh" he spelled it the way he sounded, and today we write knight and knife.

 

[agilis]

All grammatical rules, spelling convention, and word meanings are entirely, 100% set by useage. These may change slowly, and our ephemeral existence in the game may make it seem as if there are fixed rules, but there are not. All, all of it is set by useage, or usage, if you prefer. "Gunsel" to any late 19th early 20th Century cop orother user of underworld argot meant one thing and only one thing: An effeminate boy-toy that older male criminals of significant power might keep around for odd jobs and the occasional romp to provide the old crimnal boss with certain erotic activities he may have developed a taste for long ago in stir. Along comes Dashiell Hammett. He writes a novel "The Maltese Falcon" and uses the word exactly correctely, in precisely the manner it was intended to be used. It is, btw, a corruption of a Yiddish criminal underworld word for 'little goose'.

Almost a century flashes by like a waking dream, and every cheap writer of criminal fiction uses the word as a synonym for 'gunman'. They just didn't know. After enough of them used the word in that incorrect manner, and after Hollywood blesses it by using it in that incorrect 'gunman' manner, its meaning has been changed by useage. Try using it correctly and watch the blank stares you get.

We all know the Greco-Latin illegitimate extensions of their grammatical rules into English, but some of us still observe them. The next time someone uses the silly non-word 'octopi', remind them that Latin does not take Greek plural indicators. Be careful, though. They may pull out a dictionary and show you that usage has made this chimerical construct correct. Through usage! Then, of course, the word 'chimera' has, for legions of game players, come to mean a character in a video game, not an illusion, not (as it should be) an hallucination comprised of ill-fitted parts. And guess who will ultimately win that one?