language pop quiz

I pulled the following sentence, which contains an error, from an article at The Atlantic titled "Is the Ivy League Fair to Asian Americans?" Here's the sentence:

Again, the implication here seems to be that while Asian-American applicants as a group excel at tests, an important factor in admissions, their talents, skills, and other interests tend to be significantly inferior to students of other races, and having them around isn't as enriching for other students.

The nature of the error is:

(A) poor tense control
(B) faulty/illogical comparison
(C) ambiguous pronoun reference
(D) dangling or misplaced modifier

From the same article, another sentence with an error:

As I see it, we know that even well-intentioned people regularly rationalize discriminatory behavior, that society as a whole is often horrified at its own bygone race-based policies, and that race is so fluid in our multi-ethnic society that no one can adequately conceive of all the ways it is changing; knowing these things, prudence dictates acceptance of the fact that humans aren't equipped to fairly take race into consideration. [italics in original]

The nature of the error is:

(A) poor tense control
(B) faulty/illogical comparison
(C) ambiguous pronoun reference
(D) dangling or misplaced modifier




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la sexualité: un sondage

Voici un petit sondage fait dans onze pays (y compris la France) intérrogeant les citoyens sur leur sexualité (positions sexuelles préférées, etc.). Quelques-uns des résultats vous seront un peu surprenants, j'imagine...


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hierophany

In a term coined by Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade (meer-CHAY-uh ell-YAH-dih), a hierophany is an eruption of the sacred into the realm of the profane (i.e., the ordinary, not the vulgar/obscene). One suddenly finds oneself standing in the presence of the holy, a fact that disrupts the normal, mundane continuity of human existence.

I'm fascinated by theistic fiction, i.e., fiction about the presence of the holy in our midst. A great example of this sort of fiction is the short story titled "The Visitation," by sci-fi author Greg Bear. You can read a truncated version of the story for yourself here.


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sentence equivalence!

Here's a GRE Sentence Completion problem from Manhattan Prep's blog.

The exhibit is not so much a retrospective as a __________ ; the artist’s weaker early work is glossed over and any evidence of his ultimate dissolution is absent entirely.

Select two correct answers.

(A) paean
(B) philippic
(C) tirade
(D) panacea
(E) eulogy
(F) crescendo

In the revised GRE's Sentence Completion section, the object of the game is to select TWO words that are each capable of (1) completing the sentence correctly and (2) giving the sentence a similar meaning. In other words, the words you select need to be either synonyms or almost-synonyms. Two antonyms might conceivably complete the sentence, but this would violate criterion (2). To get around this problem, the GRE Sentence Completion questions are designed so that a pair of antonyms can't be selected without one or the other word in the selected pair sounding ridiculous in context.

Have at it, then click the above link for the answer and explanation. I was able to answer correctly despite not knowing the meaning of "philippic," which is not a word I'd normally expect to see on the GRE.


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the poetry of Stephen R. Donaldson

Two of my favorite poems are by fantasy/SF writer Stephen R. Donaldson, whom I will always associate with his Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series: two trilogies and a tetralogy-in-progress. The first poem I'll place here is about death and bereavement:

Death reaps the beauty of the world--
bundles old crops to hasten new.
Be still, heart:
hold peace.
Growing is better than decay:
I hear the blade which severs life from life.
Be still, peace:
hold heart.
Death is passing on--
the making way of life and time for life.
Hate dying and killing, not death.
Be still, heart:
make no expostulation.
Hold peace and grief
and be still.

--Stephen R. Donaldson, 1977
Lord Foul's Bane, Chapter 17, "End in Fire"

The second poem, about the last defense of nature, requires a bit of explanation. The being reciting this poem is a Forestal, a powerful spirit of the woods whose function is the guardianship of forest life: trees, plants, and forest creatures. This particular Forestal, Caer-Caveral, is also trying his best to hold the beautiful region of Andelain together. Andelain is the heart of the Land, but like the rest of the Land, it is under attack by an invention of the Despiser (a satanic/Sauron-like figure): the Sunbane, a curse that drives the Land's natural cycles into unnatural frenzy, forcing earth and sky into a cruel series of rapid changes: desert, rain, pestilence, fertility, etc.-- each phase lasting only a few days, then quickly changing, in random sequence, to a new phase in under a day. The Sunbane, a violation of the natural Law, is ripping the earth apart, and Caer-Caveral knows that even he cannot win against its onslaught. This song, then, is his lament.

Andelain I hold and mold within my fragile spell,
While world's ruin ruins wood and wold.
Sap and bough are grief and grim to me, engrievement fell,
And petals fall without relief.
Astricken by my power's dearth,
I hold the glaive of Law against the Earth.

Andelain I cherish dear within my mortal breast;
And faithful I withhold Despiser's wish.
But faithless is my ache for dreams and slumbering and rest,
And burdens make my courage break.
The Sunbane mocks my best reply,
And all about and in me beauties die.

Andelain! I strive with need and loss, and ascertain
That the Despiser's might can rend and rive.
Each falter of my ancient heart is all the evil's gain;
And it appalls without relent.
I cannot spread my power more,
Though teary visions come of wail and gore.

Oh, Andelain! forgive! For I am doomed to fail this war.
I cannot bear to see you die-- and live,
Foredoomed to bitterness and all the gray Despiser's lore.
But while I can I heed the call
Of green and tree; and for their worth,
I hold the glaive of Law against the Earth.

--Stephen R. Donaldson, 1977
The Wounded Land, Chapter 12, "The Andelainian Hills"

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going over your errors in reading comprehension

At the tutoring center where I work, I have plenty of SAT students. When it's time to score their performance in Critical Reading, I usually work it this way:

1. For the Sentence Completion portion of Critical Reading, I tell the students whether or not they've gotten a question right, but I don't tell them what the answer is. We go over the question and reason our way, together, to the correct answer.

2. For the Reading Comprehension section, I ask the students to perform what I call "the line-number exercise." I give them the correct answers to the RC questions they got wrong, then I ask them to go back into the reading passages and find the line numbers that provide evidence for why a given answer is correct. If the question already has line numbers in it, I ask the students to write a short sentence explaining why the answer is correct ("B is correct because the passage says X...").

The line-number exercise gets the students to train themselves in cognitive skills that can't be taught explicitly: skills like scanning and inference. I prefer this indirect method-- which places the burden of learning directly on the students-- to easier methods that involve leading students by the nose. Double-plus ungood, that.


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Americans and the media

You might enjoy this long piece from a 1996 issue of The Atlantic titled "Why Americans Hate the Media." Excerpt:

As with medieval doctors who applied leeches and trepanned skulls, the practitioners cannot be blamed for the limits of their profession. But we can ask why reporters spend so much time directing our attention toward what is not much more than guesswork on their part. It builds the impression that journalism is about what's entertaining—guessing what might or might not happen next month—rather than what's useful, such as extracting lessons of success and failure from events that have already occurred. Competing predictions add almost nothing to our ability to solve public problems or to make sensible choices among complex alternatives. Yet such useless distractions have become a specialty of the political press. They are easy to produce, they allow reporters to act as if they possessed special inside knowledge, and there are no consequences for being wrong.

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a very interesting story

Thanks to a friend of mine, I've been made aware of a 1961 short story by a gent named Hal Draper. The title of the story is "MS Fnd n a Lbry"-- a title whose meaning the story makes clear. Read it here. An excerpt from the beginning of the story:

From: Report of the Commander, Seventh Expeditionary Force,
Andromedan Paleoanthropological Mission

What puzzled our research teams was the suddenness of collapse and the speed of reversion to barbarism, in this multigalactic
civilization of the biped race. Obvious causes like war, destruction, plague, or invasion were speedily eliminated. Now the outlines of the picture emerge, and the answer makes me apprehensive.

Part of the story is quite similar to ours, according to those who know our own prehistory well.

On the mother planet there are early traces of *books*. This word denotes paleoliterary records of knowledge in representational and
macroscopic form. Of course, these disappeared very early, perhaps 175,000 of our yukals ago, when their increase threatened to leave no place on the planet's surface for anything else.

First they were reduced to *micros*, and then to *supermicros*, which were read with the primeval electronic microscopes then extant.
But in another yukal the old problem was back, aggravated by colonization on most of the other planets of the local Solar System, all of which were producing *books* in torrents. At about this time, too, their cumbersome alphabet was reduced to mainly consonantal elements (thus: thr cmbrsm alfbt w rdsd t mnl cnsntl elmnts) but this was done to facilitate quick reading, and only incidentally did it cut down the mass of Bx (the new spelling) by a full third. A drop out of the bucket.

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scan first? read the whole thing first? look at the questions first? aaaaaggghhh!!

Students sometimes ask me how best to approach long passages in the SAT's Critical Reading section. They're usually wondering which of the following options to take:

1. Read the whole passage first, then answer the questions?

2. Read the questions first to get an idea of what to look for, then scan the passage to answer the questions?

3. Use a "scan as you go" approach to answer the questions, trusting that the first question relates to the first part of the passage, the second question relates to the second part, etc.?

The answer is: it depends. Students have different cognitive styles, which makes it impossible for me to recommend one specific approach. There's also the issue of time pressure: if you're pressed for time, then certain options, like reading through the entire long passage first, may not be available to you as the clock runs down. This will affect your strategy.

A lot of test prep companies recommend simply reading the passage first, be it long or short. There are obvious advantages to doing this. First, you now have the entire passage in your head, making it easier for you to scan more quickly for whatever you need to know. Second, because you've internalized the passage, you can figure out context-based relationships better. Third, you probably have a clear notion of what the passage's main idea is. All of this means that, if you've read well, you should be able to march relentlessly through the ensuing questions as easily as Einstein doing basic algebra.

But what if you're not the type who can get through a long reading passage without falling asleep? My first reaction to this question is: I feel sorry for you and your future college career. The fact of the matter is that you're going to be doing a lot of reading while in college, and much of it will involve literature that you just won't want to study. So toughen up! The only way around this obstacle is through it. My second reaction is a little more moderate: true, many passages will be boring, so find a method that works for you. If Method (1), above, doesn't work, then try Method (2). This strategy has also been recommended by test prep companies before. Especially if you're pressed for time, you need to read for information in a targeted way as opposed to trying to swallow the entire passage in a single mental gulp.

Method (3) has its uses, too. I find it especially helpful if I see questions about vocab-in-context: "In the context of the passage, the word mortal on line 36 most likely means..." That sort of question can be answered quickly, and without reference to the entire passage: just scan the lines above and below it.

Don't get trapped into thinking that there's only one magical method to beat the SAT. There isn't. In the end, the so-called "tricks" that test prep tutors teach their students are nothing more or less than good old reading skills-- the selfsame skills that you'll be using (and hopefully honing) while you're in college. Every method has its merits and demerits. Figure out what you're comfortable doing, make sure you can do it efficiently, within the allotted time, and be ready to switch to a Plan B if your preferred method doesn't seem to be helping you.

As Bruce Lee said: Be like the nature of water, my friend. Be flexible; shape your technique to fit both yourself and the situation. What that really means is: master several different techniques so that you don't run out of options when it's crunch time. True freedom comes from having options. Having options comes from self-discipline, and that involves time, effort, and focus.


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a famous soliloquy

One of the most famous of Shakespeare's soliloquies comes from the tragedy Macbeth. This particular meditation, on the futility of life given the crushing inevitability of death, has come to mind lately thanks to a friend's having posted some YouTube clips of Ian McKellen's, Patrick Stewart's, and Nicol Williamson's respective performances of these lines.

The play is nearing its end, and Macbeth has just learned of the death of his wife:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28

Is life meaningless? Is living a futile act, like a bad play in which we're all players who "strut and fret"? I occasionally ask my students this question: Why do anything? The question itself is vitally important, I think, because if you seriously believe that nothing is worth doing, then life becomes either a long wait for death or a preparation for suicide.

So I ask you: why do anything? What makes life worth living?


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strange sentences

What do you make of the following sentences?

1. This sentence is false.

What's the truth value of the above sentence? If the sentence is false, then it's true that the sentence is false, which makes the sentence true. But if the sentence is true, then that truth contradicts the literal import of the sentence... which makes the sentence false! You could blow your mind if you think about this too hard.


2. Police police police police police.

Yes, this is an actual sentence. Can you make sense of it? (With thanks to Malcolm.)


3. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

This is a classic example, often used in linguistics, of how a sentence can be grammatically correct and yet be total nonsense.


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SAT: tone of passage

I have some students who are occasionally confused by "tone of passage" questions in the SAT I's Critical Reading section. I've just stumbled upon a decent resource that takes you through the thinking process for one passage. Give it a look. Be careful: the article is actually four pages long, so you'll need to click the page numbers just below the first part of the article to see the rest. After you've read the article, come back here and try your hand at determining the tone of the following passages. To see the correct answer, along with an explanation, highlight the bracketed space.


Passage 1 (from here):

[NB: The UK author of this piece is examining Arnold Trehub's theory of consciousness.]

What about the self, then? It’s natural that given Trehub’s spatial perspective he should focus on defining the location of the self, but that only seems to be a small, almost incidental part of our sense of self. Personally, I’m inclined to put the thoughts first, and then identify myself as their origin; I identify myself not by location but by a kind of backward extrapolation to the abstract-seeming origin of my mental activity. This has nothing to do with physical space. Of course Trehub’s system has more to it than mere location, in the special tokens used to signify belonging to me and truth. But this part of the theory seems especially problematic. Why should simply flagging a spatial position and some propositions as mine endow a set of neurons with a sense of selfhood, any more than flagging them as Fred’s? I can easily imagine that location and the same set of propositions being someone else’s, or no-one’s. I think Trehub means that linking up the tokens in this way causes me to view that location as mine and those propositions as my beliefs, but notice that in saying that I’m smuggling in a self who has views about things and a capacity for ownership; I’ve inadvertently and unconsciously brought in that wretched homunculus after all. For that matter, why would flagging a proposition as a belief turn it into one? I can flag up propositions in various ways on a piece of paper without making them come to intentional life. To believe something you have to mean it, and unfortunately no-one really knows what ‘meaning it’ means – that’s one of the things to be explained by a full-blown theory of consciousness.

Moreover, the system of tokens and beliefs encoded in explicit propositions seems fatally vulnerable to the wider form of the frame problem. We actually have an infinite number of background beliefs (Julius Caesar never wore a top hat) which we’ve never stated explicitly but which we draw on readily, instantly, without having to do any thinking, when they become relevant (This play is supposed to be in authentic costume!): but even if we had a finite set of propositions to deal with the task of updating them and drawing inferences from them rapidly becomes impossible through a kind of combinatorial explosion. (If this is unfamiliar stuff, I recommend Dennett’s seminal cognitive wheels paper.) It just doesn’t seem likely nowadays that logical processing of explicit propositions is really what underlies mental activity.

Some important reservations then, but it’s important not to criticise Trehub’s approach for failing to be a panacea or providing all the answers on consciousness – that’s not really what we’re being offered. If we take consciousness to mean awareness, the retinoid system offers some elegant and plausible mechanisms. It might yet be that the theatre deserves another visit.

1. The author's tone in this passage is

a. one of enthusiastic agreement, with only a hint of doubt.
b. politely skeptical, but not entirely so.
c. angrily critical, though not about the essential points.
d. purely humorously critical.
e. respectfully objective, expressing no personal opinion.

ANSWER AND EXPLANATION (highlight the space between the brackets to see): [The answer is (B). Why? Answer (A) doesn't work because, as the last paragraph says, the author has "important reservations" regarding Trehub's theory. The author notes that elements of Trehub's theory are "elegant and plausible," which means we can eliminate answer (C). By the same token, (E) also fails, because the author obviously has an opinion about Trehub's theory, both noting its flaws and acknowledging its merits. Answer (D) fails because the passage contains no humorous elements, and is not relentlessly critical of Trehub.]


Passage 2 (from here):

[NB: The author is writing about how to approach long, involved books on history.]

But apart from this matter of personal learning style, what I’ve found is that many of my students don’t know what to do when confronted by a whole book. Some try to study it as intensively as they would try to study a chapter in a work of philosophy or political theory. They spend hours and hours on their reading, and often end up angry and unfulfilled. They’ve spent an inordinate amount of time preparing, but they rarely feel they have mastered the text. And when the discussion in class focuses on other aspects of the book in question, their frustration grows.

Others read through an assigned book the way they get through their casual reading. They read at forty to sixty pages an hour, take no notes, and give little thought to the content beyond the impressions of the moment. If they are diligent, their eyes have indeed scanned every word in the whole three hundred-page book, but anything that sticks in the student’s memory got there by chance and two days later he or she won’t be able to say anything coherent about the book’s content or point of view.

The easy thing to do for a grumpy old professor when faced with these reactions is to throw up his hands in the traditional gesture of professorial despair, and launch into one of those eloquent and ever-popular rants, ancient already in the days of Socrates, about how young people today have no attention span, don’t know anything and don’t know hard work.

It is all true, and has been true since Socrates was a sprout, but repeating traditional laments doesn’t help either students or professors wrestling with big fat books in political studies seminars. As I’ve reflected on this problem, I’m increasingly aware that reading serious books – not textbooks and not tracts of theory or philosophy – is a skill that not everybody learns. I’ve been reading dozens and even hundreds of books a year for so long that these reading skills are second nature to me; I don’t think about how to read serious books that aren’t textbooks anymore than I think about how to ride a bicycle.

As I teach, though, I see that not everybody learns how to do this in high school. Through no fault of their own, many students are raised on textbooks and treatises rather than novels and history. You aren’t born knowing how to ride a bicycle and you aren’t born knowing how to read big books effectively for seminars. On the other hand, the basic skills required, either for bike riding or book reading, aren’t all that hard to learn — and once learned, they stick.

A history book is different from a book of political theory or logical argument, and it needs to be approached in a different way. When approaching a history book, the first thing to do is to ask the Winston Churchill question. At a dinner, Churchill once criticized the dessert: “This pudding has no theme.” Most puddings and books have a theme. In the case of a book, this is a big idea or subject. Your first job as an analytical reader is to figure out what that is: you must answer the Pudding Question.

What does the author think is the big story the book is trying to tell – and what does the author think is the point of that story?

2. The author's tone in this passage is

a. constructively critical of his students.
b. disparaging of his students.
c. wary or suspicious of his students.
d. condescending to his students.
e. one of pity for and solidarity with his students.

ANSWER AND EXPLANATION (highlight the space between the brackets to see): [The answer is (A). Why? Answer (B) fails because the author never adopts an insulting tone about his students. To the contrary, the author notes that it would be easy to react negatively to students' inability to read a large book intelligently. He is, in fact, sympathetic to his students' plight ("through no fault of their own")-- the opposite of disparagement. Answer (C) fails for the same reason, and there is no direct evidence in the text that the author both pities his students and feels solidarity with them, thus eliminating (E) as a possibility. A test-taker might be tempted to choose (D), but there is no evidence that the author sees himself as superior to students who are obviously inferior. Besides, it's hard to be sympathetic and condescending at the same time. (A) is the best answer given the textual evidence: "repeating traditional laments doesn’t help either students or professors wrestling with big fat books in political studies seminars" and "A history book... needs to be approached in a different way" are both clear examples of a constructively critical approach: the author has perceived a problem and is offering a way to solve it.]


Passage 3 (from here):

[NB: The author, Freeman Dyson, is writing on the need for "heretics" in science in the context of discussions of global warming and climate change.]

We are lucky that we can be heretics today without any danger of being burned at the stake. But unfortunately I am an old heretic. Old heretics do not cut much ice. When you hear an old heretic talking, you can always say, “Too bad he has lost his marbles”, and pass on. What the world needs is young heretics. I am hoping that one or two of the people who read this piece may fill that role.

Two years ago, I was at Cornell University celebrating the life of Tommy Gold, a famous astronomer who died at a ripe old age. He was famous as a heretic, promoting unpopular ideas that usually turned out to be right. Long ago I was a guinea-pig in Tommy’s experiments on human hearing. He had a heretical idea that the human ear discriminates pitch by means of a set of tuned resonators with active electromechanical feedback. He published a paper explaining how the ear must work, [Gold, 1948]. He described how the vibrations of the inner ear must be converted into electrical signals which feed back into the mechanical motion, reinforcing the vibrations and increasing the sharpness of the resonance. The experts in auditory physiology ignored his work because he did not have a degree in physiology. Many years later, the experts discovered the two kinds of hair-cells in the inner ear that actually do the feedback as Tommy had predicted, one kind of hair-cell acting as electrical sensors and the other kind acting as mechanical drivers. It took the experts forty years to admit that he was right. Of course, I knew that he was right, because I had helped him do the experiments.

Later in his life, Tommy Gold promoted another heretical idea, that the oil and natural gas in the ground come up from deep in the mantle of the earth and have nothing to do with biology. Again the experts are sure that he is wrong, and he did not live long enough to change their minds. Just a few weeks before he died, some chemists at the Carnegie Institution in Washington did a beautiful experiment in a diamond anvil cell, [Scott et al., 2004]. They mixed together tiny quantities of three things that we know exist in the mantle of the earth, and observed them at the pressure and temperature appropriate to the mantle about two hundred kilometers down. The three things were calcium carbonate which is sedimentary rock, iron oxide which is a component of igneous rock, and water. These three things are certainly present when a slab of subducted ocean floor descends from a deep ocean trench into the mantle. The experiment showed that they react quickly to produce lots of methane, which is natural gas. Knowing the result of the experiment, we can be sure that big quantities of natural gas exist in the mantle two hundred kilometers down. We do not know how much of this natural gas pushes its way up through cracks and channels in the overlying rock to form the shallow reservoirs of natural gas that we are now burning. If the gas moves up rapidly enough, it will arrive intact in the cooler regions where the reservoirs are found. If it moves too slowly through the hot region, the methane may be reconverted to carbonate rock and water. The Carnegie Institute experiment shows that there is at least a possibility that Tommy Gold was right and the natural gas reservoirs are fed from deep below. The chemists sent an E-mail to Tommy Gold to tell him their result, and got back a message that he had died three days earlier. Now that he is dead, we need more heretics to take his place.

3. The author's tone in this passage is

a. intensely scolding
b. scientifically inquisitive
c. curiously frightened
d. slightly annoyed
e. drily humorous

ANSWER AND EXPLANATION (highlight the space between the brackets to see): [This question may be the most difficult for test-takers to answer, and I deliberately designed it to be that way. The correct answer is (E). Were you, perhaps, inclined to choose (B)? I don't blame you, but if you chose (B), you fell into my trap. You see, sometimes SAT questions are constructed in such a way as to mislead you by playing into your expectations and presumptions. This article is by Freeman Dyson, a well-known scientist, and we all automatically associate scientists with human qualities like curiosity and fascination with the universe. Without a doubt, Freeman Dyson is a scientifically inquisitive individual. The problem, though, is that the test question is asking you about the tone of the passage, not about the attitude of the author. That's an important difference.

Don't be tempted to read anything into the passage: use only the textual evidence before you when answering a question. In this case, you'll observe that the passage contained not a single inquisitive-sounding sentence. This was not an exploration of the universe's mysteries; it was, instead, a fond meditation on the need for different thinkers-- "heretics"-- in scientific discourse. So (B) is wrong. Answer (A) is also wrong because Dyson's tone is gentle, not caustic. He certainly expresses no fear, so (C) is also wrong, and (D) fails because, even though Dyson makes reference to certain problems, he never expresses annoyance about them. Instead, the passage is suffused with wry humor as he chronicles the way in which Tommy Gold was repeatedly right while the rest of the scientific establishment turned out to be repeatedly wrong. The first paragraph, with its reference to being burned at the stake, is also obviously humorous in intent, as is the frequent use of the words "heretic" and "heretical," words normally employed in a religious context. None of this passage is laugh-out-loud funny, of course, which is why it qualifies as dry humor.]

I hope this little exercise in determining tone has been helpful to you. Keep on reading! There's no substitute for it. Read a lot, and read widely. Don't stick to just one genre. And as the author of Passage 2, above, recommends later on in his article: read actively. That's the best way to benefit from your studies.


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all hail ENGRISH!

Engrish.com is a hilarious website that's been around for years. I first learned about it while I was living in Korea. The site features photos of mangled English, primarily from East Asian countries, much of which is uproariously nonsensical. Here are a few good ones, sorted by country.

China:

1. To help you rent a nice family.

2. Don't hurt me for your pretty!

3. Do not disorder rubbish here.


Japan:

1. I go down the stairs of the right side immediately and excel you.

2. Try to put on and out!

3. The wonderfully throbbing Christmas.


South Korea:

1. I do a lot of thing.

2. Crapmeat tortilla.

3. "Worm-up" clothing.



An exercise for the student of English: try to change the Engrish in the above-linked images into proper English!


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"Will reading old books help my vocabulary on the SAT?"

So you're stuck reading Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Melville's Moby-Dick. You find yourself wondering whether the effort will be worth it: will any of this reading pay off when it's time to take those dreaded SATs? Can reading old books help me develop my SAT vocabulary?

The short answer to this question is: probably. Why? Because many of the words used in those old books are still very much in circulation.

You have two types of lexical libraries in your head. In linguistics, these libraries are called "passive vocabulary" and "active vocabulary." Passive vocabulary is associated with listening and reading; active vocabulary, which is usually smaller, is associated with speaking and writing. Passive vocabulary develops first: as a baby, you spend about a year producing no understandable words, and during that time, your rapidly self-wiring brain is greedily absorbing all the language it hears. Even when you finally start speaking, your passive vocabulary continues to grow. Trying to get your active and passive vocabularies to be about the same level is one of the Great Quests of your life. Many people are voracious readers; this by no means guarantees they'll be competent writers.

This biological reality obtains all throughout high school: your brain is still self-wiring, believe it or not, so everything you cram into it will have some sort of influence. The authors you're reading in English class are master word-slingers; they don't write a lot of "Duhhhh..." and "Uhhhh..." dialogue. Instead, they tend to lace their prose with phrases like "a vexatious situation" and "her surreptitious glance"-- almost as if they knew that, over 150 years later, someone would be needing such vocabulary to score well on the SAT.

The best thing you can do for yourself is to be curious about the words you encounter in your reading. Look up every single word you don't know; don't simply rely on context, because context can be misleading. Make flashcards, write sentences, look the words up on Google to see how they're used by others. Do everything you can to help yourself! Don't act as if your test results are a matter of fate. They aren't. You control your destiny, which means you're responsible for how well you perform on those crucial exams.


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reading and taking notes

When you have to write an essay, the recommended SOP (standard operating procedure) is that you brainstorm first, outline next, then write a series of drafts. My feeling is that, if you're reading and you need to understand the material, you can work the process backward and try reverse-engineering an outline. This technique is especially good if you're reading something completely uninteresting: the creation of an outline is an analytical process; by creating an outline based on the reading material, you're forcing yourself to break the material down into parts and organize those parts correctly.

Let me show you two examples of this technique. The first example will be the more straightforward one: we'll be outlining text of an obviously academic nature. The second example, however, will come from a work of fiction, and will demonstrate that narratives, too, can be rendered in outline form.

FIRST PASSAGE (from SparkNotes, here):

The Italian Renaissance followed on the heels of the Middle Ages, and was spawned by the birth of the philosophy of humanism, which emphasized the importance of individual achievement in a wide range of fields. The early humanists, such as writer Francesco Petrarch, studied the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans for inspiration and ideology, mixing the philosophies of Plato and other ancient thinkers with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Under the influence of the humanists, literature and the arts climbed to new levels of importance.

Though it eventually spread through Europe, the Renaissance began in the great city-states of Italy. Italian merchants and political officials supported and commissioned the great artists of the day, thus the products of the Renaissance grew up inside their walls. The most powerful city-states were Florence, The Papal States (centered in Rome), Venice, and Milan. Each of these states grew up with its own distinctive character, very much due to the different forms of government that presided over each. Florence, considered the birthplace of the Renaissance, grew powerful as a wool-trading post, and remained powerful throughout the Renaissance due to the leadership of the Medici family, who maintained the city's financial strength and were intelligent and generous patrons of the arts. The Pope, who had the responsibility of running the Catholic Church as well, ruled Rome. As the power of the northern city-states grew, the Papacy increasingly became the seat of an international politician rather than a spiritual leader, and many pontiffs fell prey to the vices of corruption and nepotism that often accompanied a position of such power. Nevertheless, Rome, the victim of a decline that had destroyed the ancient city during the Middle Ages, flourished once again under papal leadership during the Renaissance. Venice and Milan also grew wealthy and powerful, playing large roles in Italian politics and attracting many artists and writers to their gilded streets. Venice was ruled by oligarchy in the hands of its Great Council of noble families, and Milan by a strong monarchy that produced a line of powerful dukes.

Perhaps the most prominent feature of the Renaissance was the furthering of the arts, and the advancement of new techniques and styles. During the early Renaissance, painters such as Giotto, and sculptors such as Ghiberti experimented with techniques to better portray perspective. Their methods were rapidly perfected and built upon by other artists of the early Renaissance such as Botticelli and Donatello. However, the apex of artistic talent and production came later, during what is known as the High Renaissance, in the form of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michaelangelo, who remain the best known artists of the Renaissance. The Renaissance also saw the invention of printing in Europe and the rise of literature as an important aspect in everyday life. The Italian writers Boccaccio, Pico, and Niccolo Machiavelli were able to distribute their works much more easily and cheaply because of the rise of the printed book.

Alas, the Italian Renaissance could not last forever, and beginning in 1494 with the French invasion of Italian land Italy was plagued by the presence of foreign powers vying for pieces of the Italian peninsula. Finally, in 1527, foreign occupation climaxed with the sack of Rome and the Renaissance collapsed under the domination of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The economic restrictions placed on the Italian states by Charles V, combined with the censorship the Catholic Church undertook in response to the rising Reformation movement ensured that the spirit of the Renaissance was crushed, and Italy ceased to be the cradle of artistic, intellectual, and economic prosperity.

The Italian Renaissance isn't the most exciting topic for most American high schoolers (and at a guess, it's probably not that exciting for Italian high schoolers, either), so let's do this as quickly and as systematically as possible.

First, I see there are four paragraphs, so these will be our I, II, III, and IV. Outlines shouldn't be essays: every part of the outline should be succinct, containing only the very essence of the information that's relevant for study. Students will be delighted to know that they should avoid complete sentences when taking notes or outlining. Personally, I encourage students to rely on whatever shorthand works best for them to get the job done... even if that means relying on (gack! barf!) online-style English.

Here's the skeleton:

Italian Renaissance = IR

I. IR's origins

II. IR's spread: where & how

III. IR's prominent features

IV. IR's decline

Textbook-style prose makes it easy to figure out how to write your outline: the people who wrote the information were probably using outlines to begin with!

With the skeleton in place, it's time to flesh out the outline by hunting down and listing main ideas.

I. IR's origins
    A. followed Middle Ages
    B. arose from humanism
    C. ascension of lit and arts

II. IR's spread: where & how
    A. began in Ital. city-states
    B. cities that were major centers
    C. papacy's role

III. IR's prominent features
    A. furthering of arts
    B. advancement of new techniques & styles

IV. IR's decline
    A. French invasion (1494)
    B. sack of Rome (1527-- foreign powers?)
    C. Charles V's final nails in coffin of IR

The final bit of fleshing-out means the addition of meaningful, relevant details:

I. IR's origins
    A. followed Middle Ages
    B. arose from humanism
        1. humanism emphasized indiv. achievmt.
        2. early humanists (e.g. Petrarch) studied Gk.& Rom. classics
            for inspiratn. & ideology
        3. classical ideas were mixed w/Catholic thought
    C. ascension of lit and arts

II. IR's spread: where & how
    A. began in Ital. city-states
        1. merchants & politicians supported & commissioned great artists
        2. "products" of IR "grew up" inside city-states
    B. cities that were major centers
        1. Florence
            a. birthplace of IR
            b. was wool-trading post
            c. remained powerful thanks to Medici family (big art patrons)
        2. Papal States
            a. centered in Rome; Pope ruled
            b. papacy gained power, became seat of intl. politics; corruption, nepotism
            c. Rome flourished under papal leadership
        3. Venice & Milan
            a. grew wealthy & powerful
            b. attracted many artists & writers
            c. wielded great political influence
            d. Venice = oligarchy, noble families
            e. Milan = monarchy, powerful dukes

NB: For Section II above, did you see that I changed the outline slightly to reflect the information I had gleaned upon rereading?

III. IR's prominent features
    A. furthering of arts
        1. refinement of technique of perspective (painter Giotto, sculptor Ghiberti)
        2. followed by those who built upon their work
            a. Botticelli
            b. Donatello
        3. High Renaissance = apex of talent & production
            a. Leonardo da Vinci
            b. Raphael
            c. Michelangelo
    B. advancement of new techniques & styles
        1. invention of printing in Europe
        2. rise of lit's importance in everyday life
        3. easy distrib. of works of Boccaccio, Pico, Machiavelli

IV. IR's decline
    A. French invasion (1494)
    B. sack of Rome (1527-- foreign powers?)
    C. Charles V's final nails in coffin of IR
        1. econ. restrictions of Charles V
        2. censorship by Catholic Church in response to Protestant Reformation

The above outline takes a bit of work to make properly, and it requires you to sweep through the text several times in order to put everything in its proper place. But the effort is worth it, because you'll have looked over the text several times, and will have had to decide where, exactly, the various details should be tucked into your outline. The outline itself, once made, can now serve as a useful tool for review when it's quiz or test time.

Let's try the above technique with a bit of fiction, now, shall we? Below, I quote from an online classic: Terry Bisson's science fiction short story titled "They're Made Out of Meat." Enjoy the story, then look at the outline that follows it.

SECOND PASSAGE (from here)

THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT


"They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat."

"Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."

"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?"

"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."

"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."

"No brain?"

"Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat! That's what I've been trying to tell you."

"So ... what does the thinking?"

"You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."

"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?"

"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

"Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."

"Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"

"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."

"We're supposed to talk to meat."

"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.' That sort of thing."

"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"

"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."

"I thought you just told me they used radio."

"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"

"Officially or unofficially?"

"Both."

"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."

"I was hoping you would say that."

"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"

"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"

"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."

"So we just pretend there's no one home in the Universe."

"That's it."

"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You're sure they won't remember?"

"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."

"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."

"And we marked the entire sector unoccupied."

"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"

"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."

"They always come around."

"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone ..."

Reverse-engineering an outline from a piece of narrative fiction is, in some ways, harder than pulling the same stunt with a more academically-toned text. But because stories normally move in phases (think about the distinct scenes in a typical stage play), outlining is possible. So-- what are the phases in Bisson's story? You might analyze it differently, but here's what I see:

I. They're meat beings!

II. They've got brains and thoughts? What do they want?

III. What should we do about this discovery?

Those are the three major phases of the story. By now, you realize that the two interlocutors are unbelievably ancient aliens (they measure time in galactic rotations; the Milky Way rotates once every 250 million years, making Earth only about 20 rotations old!), and the meat-beings in question are human beings. That's right: we're the thinking meat! We're the ones making squishy meat sounds by flapping and squeezing air through our meat, the ones projecting our meat-thoughts via radio, the ones looking for other life out in the void. It's enough to make you wonder what the alien scientists are made of. In Arthur C. Clarke's fictional universes, superior aliens are often like gods-- incorporeal after having shed their material bodies aeons ago. Are Bisson's aliens like that? Or are they made out of a much tougher form of matter-- something that isn't as susceptible to the ravages of time? Perhaps these aliens are a bit naive; they do seem capable of surprise, despite being so well-traveled.

Fleshing out the above skeletal outline will involve adding a bit of detail. With a story this short, it shouldn't be hard to fill in the gaps. Here's my attempt:

I. They're meat beings!
  A. really made of meat
  B. not made of something else?

II. They've got brains and thoughts? What do they want?
  A. talk to other life
  B. explore the universe
  C. contact other aliens
  D. swap ideas
  E. they use radio to transmit meat sounds which represent meat thoughts

III. What should we do about this discovery?
  A. officially? contact them
  B. unofficially: leave them alone and remove all evidence of our existence
  C. contact other intelligences in this region of the galaxy

That wasn't too hard, was it? Just follow the narrative flow, and you'll be able to outline any story more or less systematically.

The point of all this, though, isn't that you should embrace only one particular note-taking technique. The deeper point I'm trying to make is that it's necessary to spend time with a text if you truly hope to understand it. Outlining a given passage is simply one good method for making you stop and analyze the information at hand-- to see how all the parts relate both to each other and to the whole. And as I mentioned above, an outline, once made, is an indispensable study tool for quiz or test time: it's a quick summary of the essentials.

You may be tempted to think that you can simply pick up a text, read it, miraculously commit everything to memory, and somehow manage to ace your tests. If you've got a photographic memory and a highly analytical mind, you might just get away with such laziness. But for most of us normal folks, it makes more sense to buckle down and do the hard work of reading actively and intelligently, taking notes as a way to organize and retain information.

There are no magic solutions, I'm afraid. As has been true over the millennia, study has always been an exercise in time, effort, and focus.


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