Perfumed Garden

I was thinking I might try an uncensored entry but this has turned out to be like the cure for hiccoughs which says that you should run three times widdershins round the house without thinking of a badger. Inevitably you think of a badger and inevitably I am thinking of things that cannot be put on a blog like this. You are free to decide on the nature of these thoughts but they are probably not what you 1970’s throwbacks are thinking. So what to write about instead? I’m going to be random.

The black dog gets me every time, backwards, against the flow around the house, the church, anything in this idyll, this ideal, this religious architecture with its spires stretching to God and other anagrams. The sexton shows us the scratches on the door where the Grimm came last, stalking the marked members of the congregation slowly throughout the sermon. Some armed men broke in and took out the traitors without fuss from anyone; not even the vicar, trembling in the pulpit raised his voice to check their sacrilege. He continued after the door had been shut and locked again, inciting the remaining flock to strive for paradise. And maybe they made it. The Black Dog settled calmly by him and slept, drooling across the stone floor.

Bored with this. This is no longer random. Along with Stephen Fry’s Novel – The Star’s Tennis Balls, I have also got the book Meme Machine by Suan Blackmore who turns out to be the partner of Adam Hart-Davis and the mother of Emily Troscianko who together wrote a history of Henry Winstanley And The Eddystone Lighthouse. There is a good forward by Richard Dawkins (Saint Dawkin perhaps) and a lot of text. Not sure if I’ll get through it yet. It does seem to resonate with my deep ideas over what science and knowledge should be about rather than the wishy-washy ideas of the current national curriculum. I think it was in Richard Feynman’s first book of popular reminiscences that he took issue with some of the over-simplification of science teaching in the US. As usual what happens there, happens here and we have a vast reduction in what science is actually taught to the extent that statements which have to be examined in the SATS (and possibly GCSEs) can be unclear or untrue. There is no allowance for children thinking for themselves. The have to have the right answer, though of course they can spell it anyway they like. Maybe we don’t need to be able to spell; this very text underlines in red when I get something wrong but is it not like the idea of zero tolerance. I use this as an example as I don’t like the idea of zero tolerance when it comes to ASB as much as I like it in the basic building blocks of knowledge. We obviously have to have a balance between defining the language down to the last comma (and you all know my feelings on that) and allowing the language to evolve (Sorry Mr. Dawkins) as it has to this day. However, teaching some level of defined spelling and grammar is the foundation for what I am going to call pompously, intellectual rigour. I am conscious of Mr. Fry laughing at my ineptitude with the language if of course he can be bothered with us silent pseuds lost in the blogsphere. I am sure he can’t be. Is the ‘be’ at the end of that last sentence redundant? Tell me please Stephen.

So memes then! Great things! They have this fuzzy place in my head which links to all those projects I never get around to, programming stuff – music and fractals on the computer, the wind-powered light house etc. The trouble is, the time to do these things outlasts my enthusiasm for them. Bored with this like I was bored with the random paragraph above. My bedtime conversation with my daughter which I mentioned the other day, got onto constructing new words by putting the word ‘out’ in front of something else. I tried at first to think of ‘out-something’ words which I had heard of but my daughter was already onto every possibility she could think of. For some reason I suggested that if several people were building a model of the Cathedral with matchsticks, the winning team could be out-building the others but she suggested with great enthusiasm, out-modelling them which I thought was great. I know I cringe at things like prioritise and intellectuallise but I know what they mean. Remember the experiments where children were given made up verbs and asked them to conjugate them. It was easy even for very young kids (not sure exactly how old but I think we are talking year 1). It’s the same with the creation of new words. Us codgers may hate them because we get fixed in our learning but we all know what they mean. I have an exception to raise here. Leverage! Leverage is as far as I remember a noun – leverage is something you either have or don’t have. It is not something you do. But now, in almost every statement from business, it is used as a verb – to leverage. Technically we have a perfectly good verb in the word lever. I know that to leverage comes from some obscure financial use of the word leverage – the use of credit to enhance one’s speculative capacity – but even in the defined transient verb use there is no mention of its general use as a term form making something better. It’s a buzz word which people think makes them sound important and should be binned, canned, trashed along with the use of the word paradigm by people other than philosophers (and not the French ones at that). After a particularly annoying corporate email used the word paradigm in a meaningless way, I asked around in the office what it meant and I don’t think one person knew. It’s the jargon word for example and any need to qualify it should be done with a sentence of more than one word rather than thinking this catch-all will suffice. Short-cuts, Newspeak, reduction of the language to simple single words is the goal of all good corpy-pseuds. One day, you’ll find that people will wake up and be able to speak only single words. Like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation. The long stream of Japanese will be translatable into a single syllable word which by no means conveys all the colour of the original. Think I’d better post.