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april is: a poem a day for national poetry month: April 20, 2012: My Dead Friends, Marie Howe -
My Dead Friends
Marie HoweI have begun,
when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question
to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.
Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?
They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads
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(via dallowayward)
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“This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.” — John Cleese shares 5 factors to make your life more creative in this classic 1991 talk. (via ninestories)
(Source: , via ninestories)
“Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.” —
from the New York Times Article “Does Language Shape How You Think?”.
such a fantastic read.
(via leftist-linguaphile)
You know what’s even more mind-blowing? Speaking a gendered language with a neuter. In Greek we can change the gender of a given referent to anything we want by adding suffixes such as ακι, αρα, ος (aki - neuter, ara - feminine, os - masculine). It’s such a rich language - your entire thoughtscape changes once you’re immersed in it.
(via bbthity)
interesting stuff.
(via torayot)
(via dallowayward)
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