Beautiful Universe, beautiful words

A copy of Beautiful Universe appeared on our kitchen table recently, an old copy from 2010.

Leafing through it, I was captured by the glorious photos - but also enraptured by the gorgeous words. What's not to love about these?
anti-crepuscular
noctilucent
Leonids
moonbow
Sun pillar
Vulpecula
nebulosity
Thackeray's Globules
Albategnius
terminator line
Stephan's Quintet
pillars of creation
megaripples

And Mooselookmeguntic. Wow! I'd like to live in a place with that name, especially if I could look up and see Saturn, Mars, Regulus and the crescent Moon lined up across the sky.

But I'll freely admit names like NGC 6820, IC 5070 and Messier 45 do't grab me.

I think I'll bookmark NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day  to look at whenever the abysmal stupidity of the human race starts to get me down. It's a big beautiful universe out there, and we have words to describe it.

Hengist and his horse

One of my all-time favourite books is '1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England', by W C Sellar.

It was indeed memorable for me, because more than a few of the dates and names stuck in my head and gave me a jolt of joy later in life when I studied history. Many a dry lecture was enlivened for me by a passing reference to Sellar's Important Dates and People.

My absolutely favourite quote is this one, about Hengist and his wife (or horse?) Horsa.

Here it is:

“Memorable among the Saxon warriors were Hengist and his wife (? or horse), Horsa. Hengist made himself King in the South. Thus Hengist was the first English King and his wife (or horse), Horsa, the first English Queen (or horse).”

Imagine my joy today, many decades later, to receive the daily Word a Day email and read the following:

(HENCH-muhn) 

MEANING:

noun: A supporter or subordinate, especially one who engages in illegal activities for a powerful boss or criminal.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Old English hengest (a male horse) + man. Earlier a henchman was an attendant who walked or rode beside a prince. Earliest documented use: 1360.

It's an OMG moment! Hengest was named for a male horse and he was married to a woman called Horsa?

Hmm... There's more to this than meets the eye. I love it!

I could have gained a few points on Randling tonight

What is a 'desire path'? That was the question on Randling tonight. And I knew the answer!
As The Bette Davis Cup Squad correctly answered, it's a shortcut, an unofficial path worn through parkland, made by people refusing to use the official path.

I wouldn't have known the word except that someone put up a sign saying, 'We want our desire path', when our favorite exit from Quarries Park was blocked off.

nestlé's milk - how do we say this brand name?

Bright in Victoria is beautiful in the winter, if the sun shines and not a cloud appears in the sky, as was the case when I was there recently.

The Old-Fashioned Lolly Shop was one of the highlights as far as I was concerned. I felt as if I had revisited Britain, as I browsed the array of fudges. I love fudge!

Because I enjoy pictures of dogs, my eye was caught by this lovely reproduction post-card and I bought it. 

It's interesting to think they were advertising the richness of the milk in those days. Today we're always on the look-out for milk that tastes great but has reduced fat.

The shopkeeper - who looked great in old-fashioned costume -  agreed with me that he would probably say the brand-name Nestlé as nest-uhls, as was the usual way when we were young.

Looking around the Internet to see how other people say it, I came across this thread. It seems it's still a debatable question as to whether it's nest-uhls, or ness-lee, or even nesslay.

I'd agree with the following British take on it:

It was always ness-uhlz when I was young, and, to the very very slight extent that I'm called on to say the word today, that is how I say it now. It was most notably heard in the jingle "Ness-uhlz Milky Bar (The Milky Bars are on me!)". Never heard it in the "singular": Nessul. We tend to like our esses on the end of store names: Woolworths, Marks and Spencers, etc., and for some reason the same always went for "Nestles" and some brands. No one in Britain seemed to have noticed the é until relatively recently, but I do understand that we are now expected to pronounce it.

I'll have to research what people are saying around me. All I have to do is mention Nestlé's condensed milk, I reckon, and tell them I love eating it straight from the tin, and I'll get a conversation going. (My friend from Argentina boils it up in the tin before eating it. Yumm!)

powerful words

Stop - a powerful word that brings the traffic to a halt.

Some anonymous but passionate person has used its impact to make a strong statement about the need for Australia to halt the dreadful torment of live animals being sent on hellish ships to die horribly in faraway places.

I wonder what message the purple graffiti are meant to convey? They do reveal that the spray-painter was an idiot, but I don't think that's the intended meaning. At least the lower one provides a colorful contrast to the sticker about animal cruelty.

Helen Keller realises everything has a name

I have the pleasure of working sometimes with young people who want to improve their ability to read and write. Today I wanted to talk to a group about concepts. We read about Helen Keller and how she first began to attach a word to the concept of 'water'. There's a moving film adaptation of Helen Keller's life story here, in which we see the moment when she realised the connection between the word water scratched on the palm of her hand and the actual flow of water from a pump.

Here's a quote from a book called Science, Order, and Creativity, by David Bohm and F. David Peat, Bantam Books, 1987:

Here the case of Helen Keller, who was taught by Anne Sullivan, is particularly illuminating. When Sullivan came to teach this child, who had been blind and deaf from an early age and was therefore unable to speak, she realized that she would have to give Helen unrestricted love and total attention.
The key step was to teach Helen to form a communicable concept. This she could never have learned before, because she had not been able to communicate with other people to any significant extent. Sullivan, therefore, caused Helen, as if in a game, to come into contact with water in a wide variety of different forms and contexts, each time scratching the word water on the palm of her hand. For a long time, Helen did not grasp what this was all about. But suddenly, she realized that all these different experiences referred to one substance in many aspects, which was symbolized by the word water on the palm of her hand... Thus the different experiences were implied in some sense as being equal, by the common experience of the word water being scratched on her hand. It is worthwhile bringing out in more detail just what was involved in this extraordinary act of creative perception. Up to that moment, Helen Keller had perhaps been able to form concepts of some kind, but she could not symbolize them in a way that was communicable and subject to linguistic organization. The constant scratching of the word water on the palm, in connection with the many apparently radically different experiences, was suddenly perceived as meaning that, in some fundamental sense, these experiences were essentially the same.

To return, for a moment, to the idea of a metaphor, A could represent her experience of water standing still in a pail, while B would represent her experience of water flowing out of a pump. As Helen herself said, she initially saw no relationship between these experiences. At this stage, her perception may be put as A not= B. Yet the same word "water" was scratched on her hand in both cases. This puzzled her very much, for it meant in some way Anne Sullivan wanted to communicate that an equivalence existed between two very different experiences, in other words that A = B.

Eventually, Helen suddenly perceived (of course, entirely nonverbally, since she had as yet no linguistic terms to express her perception) that A and B were basically similar, in being different forms of the same substance, which was represented symbolically by the word "water" scratched on her palm. At this point, there must have been in Helen a state of vibrant tension, and indeed of intense creative perceptive energy, which was in essence similar to that arising in a poet who is suddenly aware of a new metaphor. However, in the case of Helen Keller, the metaphor did not stop here, but went on to undergo a further rapid unfoldment and development. Thus, as she herself said later, she suddenly realized that everything has a name.

I've always loved words. And now I see that they are not just great for enabling us to to communicate with others, but, even more crucially, are essential for allowing us to think. Ayn Rand says:

Concepts and, therefore, language are primarily a tool of cognition—not of communication, as is usually assumed. Communication is merely the consequence, not the cause nor the primary purpose of concept-formation—a crucial consequence, of invaluable importance to men, but still only a consequence. Cognition precedes communication ; the necessary pre-condition of communication is that one have something to communicate. (This is true even of communication among animals, or of communication by grunts and growls among inarticulate men, let alone of communication by means of so complex and exacting a tool as language.) The primary purpose of concepts and of language is to provide man with a system of cognitive classification and organization, which enables him to acquire knowledge on an unlimited scale; this means: to keep order in man’s mind and enable him to think.

black swan events

I've learned a new expression today, and with it a new concept. On ABC Radio's Counterpoint program this afternoon I was listening to three philosophers discuss Enlightenment Values in the Twenty- First Century , and one of the speakers referred to what I thought was a black swan effect.

Or maybe he referred to a black swan event.

It was immediately apparent that it meant a circumstance that wouldn't have been predicted, because no previous experience suggested such a thing was possible.

A quick look around the Net told me that it's a theory proposed by Nassim Taleb. Here's a brief quote from his work, posted on Wikipedia:

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable. I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explains almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives.

Taleb says there's a 'nice summary' of his ideas at Arlene Goldbard's blog.

She finishes with these points:

Since we can’t control unpredictable events, we should accept uncertainty and seek to maximize our exposure to serendipity, as by putting ourselves in the way of new ideas.

Since there is such danger in accepting conclusions based on too little information simply because they confirm our beliefs, we should try to remain aware in the present of what we are doing, paying attention to what actually happens and refraining as far as possible from imposing theories on our experience.

We should recognize our poor record as a species in predicting the future, that we are much better at doing than knowing. Some things are more predictable than others: we are safe enough in expecting tomorrow’s sunrise to plan on breakfast. We can start noticing which situations are most susceptible to black swans, and when we encounter them, remember how little we truly know so our ignorance doesn’t lead us around by the nose.

I've been perendinating too long

I haven't posted to this blog for more than seven weeks. I've been perendinating

What a great new word - perendinate. I think it has the power to set my life in order. Whenever I don't want to do something, I won't put it off for one day - procrastinate - I'll leave it till the day after. With a bit of luck, the thing won't need doing by then and I can forget it altogether.

I received this useful verb in my daily mail from A Word A Day.

And while I was checking my spelling of it, I also found this interesting word site.