Posts tagged language
—Eavan Boland, Poetry, October 1995
At Smithsonian.com, David C. Ward surveys the contributions of female poets, including Adrienne Rich, Marianne Moore, and Eavan Boland:
Writing her way out from under the patriarchal inheritance of Irish literary traditions, Boland radically stripped her language and lines down to the essentials. In a series of autobiographical investigations, she remakes language, expressing not only her own artistic autonomy, but the multitudinous roles and traditions that she embodies as a modern woman writer.
Ward looks at several female poets included in “Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets,” an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery through April 28.
Find more poems for St. Patrick’s Day.
Boland is one of my favorite poets - I always sneak her “That The Science of Cartography is Limited” onto syllabi because associating a map with a people (in that poem, a famine road with the labor to build it) is helpful for thinking about who gets to write history and name things.
bright distances/ is such an amazing line in this one.
An infographic for when you’re short on words:
While we may have many words we can use to represent our emotions, there are some feelings that no English word can describe. But that doesn’t mean other languages don’t have words for them—and as part of an ongoing project called Unspeakableness, design student Pei-Ying Lin created an infographic that ties feelings we have no names for to their foreign language word equivalents.
The words in between.
They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside
It was actually an accident that brought to light the symbolic “sight-restoring” ritual. The decoding effort started as a sort of game between two friends that eventually engulfed a team of experts in disciplines ranging from machine translation to intellectual history. Its significance goes far beyond the contents of a single cipher. Hidden within coded monuscripts like these is a secret history of how esoteric, often radical notions of science, politics, and religion spread underground. At least that’s what experts believe. The only way to know for sure is to break the codes.
In this case, as it happens, the cracking began in a restaurant in Germany.
(via the-feature)
The election is over, and it seems like now is as good occasion as ever to turn to poetry. Non? Who better to turn to than Elizabeth Alexander, the poet who wrote and delivered “Praise Song for the Day” at President Obama’s inauguration.
She sees poetry as providing the language that elevates and emboldens rather than demeans and alienates. And, despite these times when more and more of the world requires hard data and the certainty of facts, Ms. Alexander tells us what poetry works in us — and in our children — and why it may become more relevant, not less so, in hard and complicated times.
Trent Gilliss, senior editor
“What I try to explain is, even if I am drawing on personal experience, the truth of a poem is actually much deeper than whether or not something really happened. What matters is an undergirding truth that I think is the power of poetry.” - Elizabeth Alexander
“ Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.”
Steven Johnson (via explore-blog)
Why you always gotta co-opt feminist language, SJ?
(via explore-blog)
This letter was sent to a Russian student by her French friend, who manually wrote the address that she received by e-mail. Her e-mail client, unfortunately, was not set up correctly to display Cyrillic characters, so they were substituted with diacritic symbols from the Western charset (ISO-8859-1) The original message was in KOI8-R.
The address was deciphered by the postal employees and delivered successfully. Some of the correct characters (red) were written above the wrong ones (black).
Encoding problems are usually called Mojibake (from Japanese) but other languages refer to it as monkey’s code, letter salad, chaotic code and even little bushes. Read more at Wikipedia.
(via new-aesthetic)
Clinton’s speech transcript
The Atlantic highlights all of Clinton’s extemporaneous insertions and revisions (using the NYT transcript) in last night’s prepared remarks. The ability to do this in front of an audience in real time, dropping off a gerund from the end of a sentence (“creating”) and putting it into the following one in simple present tense: impressive.
I realize I swam in the deep end of Humanities Computing pools in grad school, but this is fascinating, right?
“ Your mom may not be your target user, but she is a real person who’ll call you on your bullshit. That’s what this exercise is about: forming real assumptions, and then writing what’s real as a means to establish trust.”
Nüshu is a syllabic script created and used exclusively by women in the Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern China. Up until the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) women were forbidden access to formal education, and so Nüshu was developed in secrecy as a means to communicate. Since its discovery in 1982, Nüshu remains to be the only gender-specific writing system in the world.
(via globalvoices)
His, hers, hens: Swedes' gender-neutral push gains ground
Sweden’s bid to ensure equality between the sexes has reached another milestone with the gender-neutral “hen” being included in the online version of the country’s National Encyclopedia.
The pronoun was officially added to the encyclopedia this month as an alternative to the gendered pronouns “han” and “hon” (he and she), according to Slate magazine.
The word, pronounced like the bird in English, is defined as a “proposed gender-neutral personal pronoun instead of he [han in Swedish] and she [hon]”.
It comes as debate continues to rage in the Nordic country where activists are campaigning to obliterate gender roles.
Breaking down gender roles is a core mission in the national curriculum for preschools, underpinned by the theory that society gives boys an unfair edge.
Many preschools have hired “gender pedagogues” to help staff identify language and behaviour that risk reinforcing stereotypes, while at the taxpayer-funded Egalia preschool in Stockholm, staff avoid using words such as “him” or “her” and address the 33 children as “friends” rather than girls and boys.
This month a Swedish toy catalogue published pictures of a pram-pushing Spiderman, a girl riding a toy racing car and another boy standing in front of a toy stove cooking a make-believe meal.
Kaj Wiberg, the CEO of Leklust, the company behind the catalogue, told the Swedish newspaper Metro that it was time to move forward.
“Gender roles are an outdated thing,” he said.
“I’m 71 years old, and those of us who have worked in this industry for a while know that boys play with doll houses. We know that boys can play with Barbie dolls.”
The catalogue photographs have sparked discussion on social media, including from prominent Swedish feminist blogger “Lady Dahmer” who encouraged readers to email the company to show their support.
“The problem with toy stores and their catalogues is that they’re selling a concept, an idea about boys and girls and what kind of qualities and interests they should have,” she told the Swedish English-language newspaper The Local.
“It’s about money because as long as they can fool us into believing boys and girls are fundamentally different, they can keep selling us twice as much.
“Children have a strong need to fit in, not stand out. When they see what is ‘right’ for their gender, it becomes less likely that they dare to break the norms.”
According to Slate magazine, the Swedish Bowling Association also has announced plans to merge male and female bowling tournaments to make the sport more gender-neutral.
It comes as a publishing house releases a a children’s book, Kivi och Monster-hund (Kivi and the Monsterdog) which features the pronoun “hen” throughout. It tells the story of Kivi, who wants a dog for “hen’s” birthday.
But not everyone is embracing the new gender-neutral terminology, Slate reports.
Jan Guillou, one of Sweden’s most well-known authors and a critic of the new word, said in a recent interview that proponents of “hen” were “feminist activists who want to destroy our language”, Slate reported. Others said it could be psychologically and socially damaging for children.
Between this and that national Twitter project, Sweden is fast moving up our list of countries well deserving of the highest of fives.
