Chronology

Chronology

This temple…

Will never be rebuilt

Its passages are permanently obstructed

There is no treasure to plunder

No wonders to explore

Leave it to crumble

To fall to ruin

One day…

It will be a wonder

The unpassaged temple

The unplundered treasure

But until that day

It is simply a building

A blight on the landscape

Perhaps we should

Demolish this temple

Give history…

A place to start

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The Spoils

There are two sides to every story

Only one is generally heard

To the victor go the spoils

To the loser not a word

Who cares what happens later

If the losing is the cost

When the time has come for counting

The die has to be tossed

A decision must be made

An answer must be given

Time cannot be stretched

And history cannot rewritten

When the battle’s over

When the dust has cleared

No one ever really wins

It’s always worse than feared

This parable is not about

A war torn battleground

But the battles faced everyday

Time to face another round

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Language Buzz

Today I'm feeling the Language buzz.  I was thinking about words that have dual meanings that are contradictory.  The two that came to mind are awful and pitiful.  Both are most commonly thought of as negative words.  The movie was awful.  That excuse was pitiful.  But fascinatingly enough, they didn't start out that way.  The original usage was a more positive one. The vista's view was awful.  The woman's life view was pitiful.  These sound strange to us now.  But at one time they would have been common place.  This is what makes language so fascinating.  You can change one word and make a world of difference.  The nuance of shading in language is amazing if you know what to look for.  One little change can make a little valley into a restricted gorge.  The meanings are the same.  The shade of meaning is different.  In American English, we even give words negative or positive meaning based on sounds.  Harsh sounding words tend to be negative, like gorge.  Soft sounding words tend to be positive like, lullaby.  Now by no means are these rules!  In American English, we have no rules!  Someone even pointed out that the vowel rule ( i before e except after c) is wrong more often then it is right.  But these guidelines give us a baseline to work from.  I find all these language histories and tidbits fascinating.  I think in weird patterns, probably why I had trouble in school, but it makes learning all these odd non rule patterns fun.

BTW I do not have any degree in this.  This is just my ramblings.  NOT YOUR PROFESSOR

TIL I can take online courses abroad...

I recently found out you can take courses at Cambridge and Oxford online. I'm really thinking about it. If I could take it slowly, I might like it. I like the idea of choosing my own courses. One of the things I hated in school was the required courses. I had a course called music for non music majors. It was all stuff I knew. I may not have been a Music Major but I AM a music aficionado. Then again, I never got along with my English teachers. The reasons were very simple. I tend to write like I speak. I am over effusive with prepositional phrases. I am overly descriptive. I do not follow the narrative well. My paragraph structure is laughable. I overuse extensive parlance. (LOL) My poetry, although touching at times, generally follows no set pattern or rhyme scheme intentionally. I do like learn the whys and wherefores of language though. I have been reading books in my spare time about linguistics and the origins of words. It’s interesting. I like how English is both the considered one of the hardest and easiest languages to learn. I like learning all those grammar rules I break haphazardly. I like learning what other people have done so I don’t repeat it. I like learning about the people of history and WHY they did they things they did. If you understand the cause, you will be able to predict the effect. I was always bad at math because I had trouble with the numbers. I understood the processes though. History is just a series of math equations. Person A marries Person B so Person C goes to war with Person B. It is not too hard to figure out. I like history math better than real math. Come to think of it, I used geometry a lot in sports. In basketball, pool and baseball you figure out the angles to calculate the hit for maximum force. In soccer and volleyball and basketball again, angles must constantly be calculated to coordinate throws, kicks, hits, etc. I guess I’m better at math than I thought. I speculate it’s good to be better than you think at something then worse than you think at something. I know that sentence was horrible but I can’t think of any other way to express that thought. That is why I need to go back to school. Perhaps I should study ancient languages and bury my nose in old books. Oh wait, I do that already! Or I could study Cultural Anthropology. That’s the study of society today. I could write a book on how the internet is rotting our brains…



Sounds like an idea…