language & literature

Word of the day: Synecdoche

language & literature, word of the day / /

Adapted from Wikipedia’s “Synecdoche“:

Synecdoche is a figure of speech that presents a kind of metaphor in which:

* A part of something is used for the whole (“hands” to refer to workers, “head” for cattle, “threads” for clothing, “wheels” for car, “mouths to feed” for hungry people, “The Press” for news media)
* The whole is used for a part (“the police” for a handful of officers, “body” for the trunk of the body, the “smiling year” for spring, “the Pentagon” for the top-ranking generals in the Pentagon building)

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Word of the day: pareidolia

language & literature, word of the day / /

Pareidolia (from Greek para– amiss, faulty, wrong + eidolon, diminutive of eidos appearance, form) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (usually an image) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable. Common examples include images of animals or faces in clouds, seeing the man in the moon, and hearing messages on records played in reverse.

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Clay Shirky on why the Semantic Web will fail

language & literature, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Clay Shirky’s “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview“:

What is the Semantic Web good for?

The simple answer is this: The Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms. A syllogism is a form of logic, first described by Aristotle, where “…certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so.” [Organon]

The canonical syllogism is:

Humans are mortal
Greeks are human
Therefore, Greeks are mortal

with the third statement derived from the previous two.

The Semantic Web is made up of assertions, e.g. “The creator of shirky.com is Clay Shirky.” Given the two statements

– Clay Shirky is the creator of shirky.com
– The creator of shirky.com lives in Brooklyn

you can conclude that I live in Brooklyn, something you couldn’t know from either statement on its own. From there, other expressions that include Clay Shirky, shirky.com, or Brooklyn can be further coupled.

The Semantic Web specifies ways of exposing these kinds of assertions on the Web, so that third parties can combine them to discover things that are true but not specified directly. This is the promise of the Semantic Web — it will improve all the areas of your life where you currently use syllogisms.

Which is to say, almost nowhere. …

Despite their appealing simplicity, syllogisms don’t work well in the real world, because most of the data we use is not amenable to such effortless recombination. As a result, the Semantic Web will not be very useful either. …

In the real world, we are usually operating with partial, inconclusive or context-sensitive information. When we have to make a decision based on this information, we guess, extrapolate, intuit, we do what we did last time, we do what we think our friends would do or what Jesus or Joan Jett would have done, we do all of those things and more, but we almost never use actual deductive logic. …

Syllogisms sound stilted in part because they traffic in absurd absolutes. …

There is a list of technologies that are actually political philosophy masquerading as code, a list that includes Xanadu, Freenet, and now the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web’s philosophical argument — the world should make more sense than it does — is hard to argue with. The Semantic Web, with its neat ontologies and its syllogistic logic, is a nice vision. However, like many visions that project future benefits but ignore present costs, it requires too much coordination and too much energy to effect in the real world, where deductive logic is less effective and shared worldview is harder to create than we often want to admit.

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Gam Ze Yaavor

commonplace book, language & literature / /

“This too will pass” is “Gam Ze Yaavor” in Hebrew, which is represented by the Hebrew letters Gimel, Zayin, Yod (GZY).

From “Israel Folklore Archive 126“:

King Solomon once searched for a cure against depression. He assembled his wise men together. They meditated for a long time and gave him the following advice: Make yourself a ring and have thereon engraved the words “This too will pass.” The King carried out the advice. He had the ring made and wore it constantly. Every time he felt sad and depressed, he looked at the ring, whereon his mood would change and he would feel cheerful.

From “An Address by Abraham Lincoln Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society“, 30 September 1859:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

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Computer commands as incantations

commonplace book, language & literature, social software, tech in changing society, technology, writing ideas / /

From Julian Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society“:

After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era’s definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn’t so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does. They are incantations, in other words, and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial megatrends of the moment — from the growing dependence of economies on the global flow of intensely fetishized words and numbers to the burgeoning ability of bioengineers to speak the spells written in the four-letter text of DNA — knows that the logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.

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Jefferson Davis, the Hill Cats, & the Butcher Cats

history, language & literature / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (396):

Nor was [Jefferson Davis] highly skilled as an arbitrator; he had too much admiration and sympathy for those who would not yield, whatever their cause, to be effective at reconciling opponents. In fact, this applied to a situation practically in his own back yard. The [Confederate] White House stood on a tall hill, surrounded by other mansions. On the plain below were the houses of the poor, whose sons had formed a gang called the Butcher Cats, sworn to eternal hatred of the Hill Cats, the children of the gentry on the hill. The two gangs had rock fights and occasional gouging matches. After one particularly severe battle, in which his oldest son was involved, Davis walked down the hill to try his hand at arbitration. He made them a speech, referring to the Butcher Cats as future leaders of the nation. One of them replied, “President, we like you. We don’t want to hurt any of your boys. But we ain’t never going to be friends with them Hill Cats.”

Davis came back up the hill.

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Beauregard’s dislike for Davis

history, language & literature / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (384):

Part at least of the study and reflection was devoted to composing other phrases which [Pierre Gustave Toutant de Beauregard] considered descriptive of the enemy who had wronged him. “That living specimen of gall and hatred,” he called [Jefferson] Davis now; “that Individual.”

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Troops like sugar soaked in water

history, language & literature / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (347):

[At the Battle of Shiloh,] Governor Harris, still a volunteer aide, sensed this feeling of futility in the soldiers. Shortly after 2 o’clock, he expressed his fear of a collapse to the chief of staff, who agreed and went to Beauregard with the question: “General, do you not think our troops are very much in the condition of a lump of sugar thoroughly soaked with water – preserving its original shape, though ready to dissolve? Would it not be judicious to get away with what we have?”

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Wearing the wrong color to a battle

history, language & literature, security / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (337, 347):

[At the Battle of Shiloh, also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing,] The Orleans Guard battalion, the elite organization with Beauregard’s name on its muster roll, came into battle wearing dress-blue uniforms, which drew the fire of the Confederates they were marching to support. Promptly they returned the volley, and when a horrified staff officer came galloping up to tell them they were shooting at their friends: “I know it,” the Creole colonel replied. “But dammit, sir, we fire on everybody who fires on us!”

[A day later, Beauregard] received a shock … He noticed in some woods along his front a body of troops dressed in what appeared to be shiny white silk uniforms. At first he thought they were Federals who had breached his line … Presently, though, a staff officer, sent to investigate, returned with the explanation. There were the general’s own Orleans Guard battalion, who had turned their dress blue jackets wrong side out to put an end to be being fired on by their friends. Yesterday they had startled the defenders of the Hornets Nest by charging thus with the while silk linings of their coats exposed; “graveyard clothes,” the Federals had called them.

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Recognizing futility

history, language & literature, technology / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (261):

[On 9 March 1862, the world’s first battle between ironclad warships took place. The smaller and nimbler Monitor was able to outmaneuver Virginia, but neither ship proved able to do significant damage to the other. Catesby Jones, commander of the Virginia] gave the Monitor everything he had given the wooden warships yesterday, and more: to no avail. When he tried to ram her, she drew aside like a skillful boxer and pounded him hard as he passed. After a few such exchanges, the crews of his after-guns, deafened by the concussion of 180-pound balls against the cracking railroad iron, were bleeding from their noses and ears. Descending once to the gundeck and observing that some of the pieces were not engaged, Jones shouted: “Why are you not firing. Mr. Eggleston?” The gun captain shrugged. “Why, our powder is very precious,” he replied, “and after two hours incessant firing I find that I can do her just about as much damage by snapping my thumb at her every two minutes and a half.”

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Better in command of the enemy than a prisoner

history, language & literature / /

From “Fort Henry and Fort Donelson“:

Shortly after the surrender of Fort Sumter, Confederates built two forts just south of the border of Tennessee and Kentucky. … Fort Henry guarded the Tennessee River while Fort Donelson guarded the Cumberland. … The key to rolling up the Confederate defense of the Mississippi River was the capture of Fort Henry and Donelson. That job fell to General Ulysses S. Grant and Commodore Andrew Foote. …

Fort Henry was easy prey for the Union gunboats … When Fort Henry surrendered, Grant turned his attention to Fort Donalson. … Inside Fort Donelson, General John Floyd commanded, with Gideon Pillow and Simon Bolivar Buckner under him. …

Gideon Pillow launched an assault against the Union right (McClernand), demolished 5 brigades in the federal line, forcing them into full retreat and grabbed a road that led to Nashville. Pillow had a number of good choices he could have made: turn left or right to battle the exposed flanks of Grant’s army, or use the road he had captured to evacuate to Nashville. Pillow, generally regarded as the worst general on either side during the Civil War, decided to withdraw back into the fort because his men seemed exhausted.

… That evening, Floyd, Pillow and Buckner considered surrender. Buckner, lowest ranking of the three generals, was the one left to do the task. Buckner and Pillow slipped out by boat and Nathan Bedford Forrest, his cavalry and a few foot soldiers found a partially flooded land route out minutes before it was closed off by Union infantry.

According to General Grant’s memoirs, one of Grant’s first questions to Buckner was: “Where is Pillow? Why didn’t he stay to surrender his command?”

Buckner: “He thought you were too anxious to capture him personally.”

Grant: “Why if I had captured him I would have turned him loose. I would rather have him in command of you fellows than as a prisoner.”

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Slavery & whiskey; Foote & Grant

history, language & literature / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (184):

Commodore Andrew H. Foote was a Connecticut Yankee, a small man with burning eyes, a jutting gray chin-beard, and a long, naked upper lip. … he was deeply, puritanically religious, and conducted a Bible school for his crew every Sunday, afloat or ashore. Twenty years before, he had had the first temperance ship in the US Navy, and before the present year was out he would realize a lifelong ambition by seeing the alcohol ration abolished throughout the service. At fifty-six he had spent forty years as a career officer fighting the two things he hated most, slavery and whiskey. It was perhaps a quirk of fate to have placed him thus alongside Grant, who could scarecely be said to have shown an aversion for either.

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How he liked being tarred & feathered

history, language & literature, politics / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (166):

Asked how he enjoyed his office [of President], [Lincoln] told of a tarred and feathered man out West, who, as he was being ridden out of town on a rail, heard one among the crowd call to him, asking how he liked it, high up there on his uncomfortable perch. “If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing,” the man replied, “I’d sooner walk.”

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The conspirer

history, language & literature / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (138):

[John Slidell] was aptly named, being noted for his slyness. At the outbreak of hostilities, back in the spring, an English journalist called him, “a man of iron will and strong passions, who loves the excitement of combinations and who, in his dungeon, or whatever else it may be, would conspire with the mice against the cat rather than not conspire at all.”

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Good will to everyone … with a few exceptions

history, language & literature / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (132-133):

Two days after the first-Wednesday election an insurrection exploded in the loyalist mountain region of East Tennessee. Bridges were burned and armed men assembled to assist the expected advanced of a Union army through Cumberland Gap. … Resistance was quashed and a considereable number of Unionists arrested. … Five were so hanged, and others were held, including that William G. Brownlow who earlier had said that he would fight seccession on the ice in hell. … An honest, fearless, vociferous man who neither smoked nor drank nor swore, he had courted only one girl in his life “and her I married.” Though he was mysteriously absent from home on the night of the burnings, his actual complicity could not be established. He was held in arrest – for a time, at least, until his presence proved embarassing … Davis directed that the parson-editor be released to enter the Union lines. Though he was thus denied the chance to recite the speech he had memorized for delivery on the gallows, Brownlow went rejoicing. “Glory to God in the highest,” he exclaimed as he crossed over, “and on earth peace, good will toward all men, except a few hell-born and hell-bound rebels in Knoxville.”

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A living story, tattooed on flesh

commonplace book, cool stuff, fiction, language & literature, on writing, weird / /

From The New York Times Magazine‘s “Skin Literature“:

Most artists spend their careers trying to create something that will live forever. But the writer Shelley Jackson is creating a work of literature that is intentionally and indisputably mortal. Jackson is publishing her latest short story by recruiting 2,095 people, each of whom will have one word of the story tattooed on his or her body. The story, titled ‘Skin,’ will appear only on the collective limbs, torsos and backsides of its participants. And decades from now, when the last of Jackson’s ‘words’ dies, so, too, will her tale.

As of November, Jackson, the Brooklyn-based author of a short-story collection called ‘The Melancholy of Anatomy,’ had enrolled about 1,800 volunteers, some from such distant countries as Argentina, Jordan, Thailand and Finland. Participants, who contact Jackson through her Web site, cannot choose which word they receive. And their tattoos must be inked in the font that Jackson has specified. But they do have some freedom to bend and stretch the narrative. They can select the place on their bodies they want to become part of the Jackson opus. In return, Jackson asks her ‘words’ to sign a 12-page release absolving her of liability and promising not to share the story with others. (Participants are the only people who will get to see the full text of the story.) They must also send her two photographs — one of the word on their skin, the other a portrait of themselves without the word visible — which she may later publish or exhibit.

… Mothers and daughters are requesting consecutive words. So are couples, perhaps hoping to form the syntactic equivalent of a civil union. For others, the motives are social: Jackson is encouraging her far-flung words to get to know each other via e-mail, telephone, even in person. (Imagine the possibilities. A sentence getting together for dinner. A paragraph having a party.) …

… when a participant meets his or her demise, Jackson vows, she will try to attend that person’s funeral. But the 41-year-old author understands that some of her 2,095 collaborators, many of whom are in their 20’s, might outlive her. If she dies first, she says, she hopes several of them will come to her funeral and make her the first writer ever to be mourned by her words.

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Wordsworth’s “spots of time”

commonplace book, language & literature / /

From Wordsworth’s The Prelude 12.208-218 (1805 edition):

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence–depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse–our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

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