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Just letting you know that notifications from this blog will cease at the end of October. 

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New post on Wordly Explorations - Enough

Hello AdjAngst readers

There's a new post on Wordly Explorations: Enough - when enuf isn't enauph. Check it out here.

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New on Wordly Explorations: The market - a solution to what? Part 2

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From Mark Twain

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There's a new post on Wordly Explorations: Wordly Inspiration from Mark Twain. Check it out here.

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The market - a solution to what?

Hello AdjAngst readers

There's a new post on the new blog: The market - a solution to what? Check it out here.

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TATKOP 126

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who 'want it fixed now!' and those who know there is no 'fix' to many problems. (I've worked for some of the former!)

If you haven't subscribed to the new blog yet, you can do it here: Wordly Explorations. Submit your preferred address to receive an email one a week with a new post - two articles per month and two shorter sayings or a TATKOP. You will receive a confirmation email soon after; click the link and you're set! 

Posts on AdjAngst will be ending soon!! (For a short time you may receive notifications from both AdjAngst and Wordly Explorations. Apologies for any duplication.)

The new blog is here!

Well 2020 has been a year! As you all know. My intended  revision, redesign and migration to a new blog took twice as long as anticipated, but... finally...  

The exciting news: announcing WORDLY EXPLORATIONS!

Here's the new blog design.

The good news

Wordly Explorations is everything you enjoyed about AdjAngst with an expanded set of topics. The new design makes it easier to read, and the font is larger (thanks for that feedback). It is a responsive site, so it should be better on devices too. Other feedback to enhance readability has also been integrated, so I do hope you enjoy. 

Probably the biggest change is that I am now (mainly) writing under my own name. That feels like a big step!

The bad news

I can't migrate the email subscribers from AdjAngst over to Wordly Explorations, so you will need to resubscribe to continue to receive weekly posts. I'll keep AdjAngst going for a while yet, with cross links to the new blog, so you have some time to resubscribe. 

You'll find the Follow by Email option on the left of every Wordly Explorations page (at the red arrow in this image).

I was able to migrate the AdjAngst Facebook community page over to Wordly Explorations, so if you follow the blog on Facebook, you don't have to do anything. 

And finally, MORE good news: the Wordly Explorations manifesto

I am really excited about starting a new phase of writing and exploring words. I look forward to your comments, feedback and company as we explore the everyday words we humans use, misuse and sometimes abuse.

From Mary Pipher

 Wordly Inspiration from Mary Pipher, the author of Writing to Change the World:

"A writer's job is to tell stories that connect readers to all the people on earth, to show these people as the complicated human beings they really are, with histories, families, emotions, and legitimate needs. We can replace one-dimensional stereotypes with multidimensional individuals with whom our readers can identify."

TATKOP 125

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who blame others and those who blame themselves.  

Is there a third: those who don't use blame as a way of understanding other people and the world?

See more in the TATKOP series.

Coronavirus - a story of semantic boundaries

We know a lot more now about pandemics than we used to.

Sure, we'd heard of The Plague - the big one in terms of numbers of deaths and social impact back in the 1300s. We know surprisingly little about The Spanish flu despite its global devastation one hundred years ago. Maybe we saw reports on Ebola, HIV, MERS and SARS; but they happened somewhere else to other people. They were managed and stayed outside our immediate sphere of concern. 

See full infographic at Visual Capitalist

But we've been educated recently. 

This snippet of an infographic from Visual Capitalist with disturbing fluffy things as the number of deaths reminds us we have had pandemics and plagues for at least as long as we've recorded human history. (It's worth a look at the full infographic.)

Personally and socially, pandemics and plagues are devastating, politically they are exploitable crises, environmentally they are warning bells about humanity's disregard for other life forms, and existentially they refuse our preference to ignore our mortality. 

But semantically they are all over the place. 

The naming of pandemics, including the coronavirus, is an intriguing story.

It's a story of semantic boundaries (try singing it to the Brady Bunch theme).

From Jorge Luis Borges

Wordly Inspiration from the brilliant and irreverent Jorge Luis Borges:

It is often forgotten that [dictionaries] are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.

Quiet - lauding the disengaged

Dismissing those who complain seems to be an Australian pastime. 

We sure have a lot of words for it: whinging poms, elitist ingrates, dole-bludgers, anti-jobs activists, professional troublemakers, idiot protestors who block the streets and make life difficult for everyone else. 

In contrast, the fabled Australian character is stoic, no-nonsense, easy going, just get it done, uncomplaining. Don't make a fuss, don't whinge, and don't - whatever you do - get involved in protests.

This fabled character recently resurfaced in Australian politics. In May 2019, Scott Morrison attributed his unexpected election victory to 'the Quiet Australians who have won a great victory tonight'. 

I wondered who these quiet Australians were and if I knew any of them; they're the majority judging by the political outcome.

If we go by the dictionary, a quiet Australian is: 

➣ marked by little or no motion or activity, gentle, easy going

➣ free from noise or uproar, unobtrusive, conservative taste 

So, are the Quiet Australians minimally active, gentle, easy-going, quiet, calm, unobtrusive people with conservative taste in clothing and food? Don't they even occasionally yell at their children?

Well no, the word quiet means something much more insidious in politics. 

TATKOP 124

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who illuminate reality and those who obscure it.

 

See more in the TATKOP series.

Diversity 2 - comfort, power and counting

By Fred Shivvin

In part 1, I explored the word diverse which means 'various or assorted' and what sits behind the misuse of diverse to mean 'different from me'.

 

Learning to value diversity in humanity involves positive interactions with a variety of people.

 

However, some individuals never have this experience. With their limited interactions, they can grow up to think people 'like me' (according to sex, race, economic status, ability, etc.) are 'us', and anyone 'different from me' is 'them' or 'the other'. 

 

The two mind maps in part 1 explained that these individuals see their 'self' as the 'default human' and the 'other' as a lesser human.

The idea that any person could claim to be the 'default human' is patently ludicrous but it operates subconsciously, deep below our awareness (except for white supremacists and others who promote this idea).

It is far from clear-headed and it spawns unfairness and injustice in the forms of racism, sexism, ableism etc.

 

How can some people never experience a real challenge to such a distorted view of the world that they are the 'default human'?

 

From Isaac Asimov

Wordly Inspiration from Isaac Asimov, who has long inspired me to write:

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers. 

Diversity - defeated by the default

By Fred Shivvin

Diversity (likewise inclusion) is a word I hear frequently. Diversity appears in technology, education, the arts, music, and science, sometimes accompanied by 'diversity' targets. We hear about the diversity of culture and opinion in Australia. Many companies have Diversity and Inclusion Divisions equipped with KPIs for their annual reports.

 

The driver for diversity is fairness. It entails welcoming all people, ensuring decision-making groups are representative of the broader society, and more people can participate in a greater range of life's opportunities.

But I think diversity and its adjective diverse are most often just buzz words: they make a 'buzz', but they communicate little (likewise inclusion and inclusive).

 

The word diversity should convey an important idea: diversity is a positive characteristic of societies and groups. But the word has been emptied of this idea in many uses. This has happened through a subtle linguistic 'shift' to use diverse to describe individual people, usually meaning a person from a minority group.

 

Is this just a normal change in meaning? Is it just the all too common loss of a useful word? (I've written previously about accepting that words can change meaning over time, even really useful words, see Alternate grief.)

 

Or is there something else going on here? Has this subtle linguistic 'shift' been engineered? Is this way of using the word diverse working to keep people out?

TATKOP 123

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who know democracy is messy and those who want their leaders to keep things clean and tidy. 

See more in the TATKOP series.

Uncertain 2 - our costly false comforts

By Mike Lundy

In the first part of this post, Uncertain about these uncertain times, I explored a contradiction at the centre of our humanity: wanting to be certain in an uncertain world.

Humans do whatever we can to avoid acknowledging the inherent uncertainty in our lives: cocooning ourselves in safe enclosures, limiting our lives, or planning obsessively to control the future.

We equate 'uncertain' with 'unsafe', to which our primal reaction is to run or make things safe again.

Our response when we perceive danger is emotional and compelling. Only rarely are our actions driven by an objective or factual assessment of information. We can even feel fear of imagined dangers, even when there is no imminent threat. Being told there really is no monster under the bed does not necessarily soothe our fear, and we continue to seek reassurance. We need to feel safe.

We do the same with the inherent uncertainty of life. The driver of our actions is emotion: we want a FEELING of certainty and safety. We want to FEEL reassured that things are certain and safe.

This means we are extremely vulnerable to any information that stirs our feelings of uncertainty and insecurity, regardless of actual threats, or to people who promise us certainty and safety in the face of real, imagined and even concocted threats.

Perversely, the emotional comfort of 'false' certainty is often more compelling than any facts of certainty and safety.

Every successful politician, marketing executive, con artist and cult leader knows this. And they exploit us with this knowledge.

Part 2 looks at the implications of our need to feel things are certain, and therefore safe, and what false promises we will happily accept in order not to feel the fear of uncertainty.

Why bother?

Wordly Inspiration (source unknown): it may be a wound, it may be a hunger, it may be a question, but writing is always worth the bother.

Uncertain about these uncertain times

By Mike Lundy

We are living in uncertain times.

Many of us feel very unsettled, even in the relative safety of Australia. When we are not searching out the latest pandemic news, we are flooding social media with our struggle to find focus or positivity, or we are comforting ourselves with nostalgia on travel, books and music, getting into gardening and busy work.

I sure feel a greater sense of uncertainty than I did this time last year.

The words: 'these uncertain times' are everywhere - news stories, ministerial announcements, articles on physical and mental health, reports, and advertisements for everything from cleaning products to insurance to dating apps. Some go so far as to call our times 'an era of uncertainty'. (Here's an Australian example from 2018.) An American report published in 2004, told us to expect that 2020 would be characterised by a 'pervasive sense of insecurity' related to concerns over job security, fears around migration, terrorism and internal conflicts, and military conflicts .

No prediction of a global pandemic though, the latest source of the ubiquitous statement that we are 'living in uncertain times'.

But are 'these times' truly more uncertain than other times? 

Interestingly, Oliver Burkeman says that every era describes itself as characterised by unprecedented uncertainties and lack of stability. 

Just a few of his examples:

 In 1951, Alan Watt highlighted a contemporary 'feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity'… referring to the impact of the breakdown of long-established family, social, economic  and belief traditions.

Writing about the Roman Republic and Empire over three centuries is replete with political instability and social unrest and the impact on people who felt their future was disturbingly uncertain.

The idea that earlier times were more certain and stable than our own experience of life is really nostalgia, based on an imagined and idealised past.

In fact, when you're fully engrossed in living your own life, you face uncertainty all the time.

Because life is irrevocably, constantly and most certainly uncertain. 

The global pandemic reveals a fundamental truth: we humans are deeply deluded that we are fully in control of ourselves, our future, our world. We desperately want to believe we can make our lives certain, set and fixed. 

TATKOP 122

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who can cope with uncertainty and those with the correct myth. 

See more in the TATKOP series.

Creative - of course you are

By Fred Shivvin

A pandemic is a lesson in living with reality. It will be a hard lesson, there will be grief and heartache.

For many across the world, the Covid-19 pandemic means financial and health insecurity. Fear of disease and death is compounded by loss of income or housing, and accompanied by unease about governments seeking only to seize more power.

For many of us in Australia right now, though, we are simply stuck at home. After the initial anxiety spike, the panic buying and the grief of ruined plans, we find ourselves facing a new reality of being in the one place, all the time, without our usual activities and distractions.

Those of us away from the 'front line' of Covid-19 have a sudden excess of time. It feels strange. 

I think this strange feeling is the lack of opportunity to consume.  

Snipped from the socials

Despite being relatively safe, having free time and a lack of opportunity to shop can pose a profound personal threat. It hits hard at our personal identity as a consumer. Some are struggling to cope, and calling for other people to put themselves at risk to allow them to buy things and services. They call it 'liberty'; I call it 'fear of facing who I am without shopping'.

But we could instead try to learn from this sense of threat to our personal identity based on what we buy.

We have a rare opportunity to reclaim our personal identity as creators. Making things is a fundamental human activity, but something few of us now do, apart from perhaps an occasional craft activity.

But, I don't just want us to reclaim this inherent aspect of our humanity. 

I want us to reclaim the concept of creativity itself.

TATKOP 121

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who look for the answer 'out there' and those who look 'in here'.

Check out all the posts in the TATKOP series by Fred Shivvin here.

Fear and writing

Not able to get my thoughts clear at the moment, so no new posts this week. I hope soon to be able to focus. But for now this.



Unfortunately, I am unable to find the source, but says everything I want to tell myself. 

From Georgia O'Keeffe

Wordly Inspiration, from Georgia O'Keeffe's letter to Sherwood Anderson about his doubts about his writing.

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you…”

From Toni Morrison

Introducing Wordly Inspiration, an occasional series of words and writing.

Our first Wordly Inspiration quote comes from Toni Morrison from her Nobel prize acceptance speech in 1993:

'Word-work is sublime … because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference — the way in which we are like no other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.'

TATKOP 120

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who know everything and those who know they know very little.

Check out all the posts in the TATKOP series by Fred Shivvin here.

Argument 2 - Offence as defence

By Mae Wright

In Part 1, I explored my perplexing fear reaction about arguing with someone on social media.

Well, I was not really arguing, I was just trying to engage. I asked people questions about their ideas. I was trying to step out of my own bubble.

But I failed completely. Several times. I wasn't really expecting a reasoned argument, but I was expecting some sort of answers to simple questions about their views. However, asking questions was seen as attack; my questions were met with outrage and offence.

I'm sure you've seen it too.

Fun? For some...

What gets called an 'argument' these days is actually a fight to hold 'territory', to defend firmly-held opinions, and to damage the other person as much as possible. No-one ever, ever, ever modifies their idea or changes their mind. People fling words at each other like a food fight. They hurl soggy information (simplistic memes), rotten comments (outrage and offence) and stale explanations ('that's what my grandparents did'). Simply pour over some vinaigrette of arrogance: 'Well, you have no idea', and a garnish of insults: 'Only an idiot could think that' and you have a mess no one wants to clean up.

When and why did my much-loved calm and respectful argument about differing ideas deteriorate into a word fight to defend territory?

We're making changes

By Fred Shivvin

At the end of last year, we had a good long hard look at the writing we'd done so far to see if we had a 'going thing' and to decide what we keep doing and what we might change.

The good news is that the blog is a 'going thing'. We want to expand the focus a little, but it will still be all about words.

In other news, we want to change the blog design, the post format, and the frequency of posts.

After a year of writing and thinking, we were able to clarify what motivates us, our aims and where we want to go. We had grappled a bit with the focus, and also our tendency to write such hilariously long posts. We had feedback from a few readers that was really helpful.

We've put our aims and motivations into our new blog manifesto!

As a result of what we have decided, we want to change the name of the blog as well. 'Angst' about adjectives might have been the organiser when we were getting the blog going, but our writing is more often prompted by curiosity, confusion, amusement or irritation. And we have found ourselves writing beyond adjectives for some time now.

So, the best way to update everything and create a new name is to set up a new blog, migrate all the posts and you - our readers - as well, and go from there. This will take time, so for the next few months (hopefully not too long), we will have fewer new posts while we build the new site and review and revise all the previous writing.

We have lots of new ideas as well; and we are feeling excited about the clarify that a year of writing has allowed.

We think you will really like the new blog. Stay tuned for more news!

What is this blog about?

By Fred Shivvin

This blog is about humans and how they use words. 

It looks at the way we use words to make sense of the world, to sort out our ideas, to share our thoughts with others, as well as whether the words we use make this easier or harder, clearer or messier.

The blog delves beneath everyday words to their origins, changes, value-loading, use, misuse and sometimes abuse. This often starts with linguistics, but also takes in psychology, sociology, cultural studies and philosophy - each of which can tell us something about ourselves.

Words can reveal our hang-ups, biases, fears, humour, aspirations, needs, reasoning, way of organising information about the world, social structures, ideas, values, and our interpersonal connections. 

The blog explores everyday words to see how well they serve us, what the use of those words tells us about ourselves and our society, and whether some words are loaded with problematic concepts or interpretations. 

Each post aims to find a small nugget of clarity amongst our word-filled days.

One word at a time. 

TATKOP 119

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who can live with ambiguity and those who avoid reality.

Check out all the posts in the TATKOP series by Fred Shivvin here. 

Argument 1 - Asking as attack

Mae Wright

I love a good argument. I don't mean an angry disagreement. I mean the curious and respectful exploration of opposing ideas to find the source of difference, see if there is some 'middle ground', and something new to learn.

But genuine arguments so rarely happen these days.

The so-called 'argument' these days is more like a vehement battle of opposing ideas. A battle to the death with tongues as weapons: 'I believe 'this' and I'm right.' 'Well no, you're wrong; I believe 'that'.' 'No way, how could you think 'that'? You are so brainwashed and stupid.' 

The aim of the contemporary 'argument' seems to be to beat your opponent's idea, and really, to conquer your opponent personally.

Nowhere is this more evident than on social media - platforms geared to witty and pithy comments which reward those who generate outrage (going viral). Social media platforms were born of a part of youth culture where verbal one-upmanship and scathing put-downs were a 'performance art' that replaced genuine conversation. Fun for some. Entertaining for some topics. But now, serious topics of discussion on social media get the same treatment.

Arguing on social media is so well known to be pointless, it has generated its own memes. A new golden rule for our times is never argue with someone online.

Recently, I broke that golden rule.

Long story short: it did not go well.

Long story, not short at all: the contemporary 'argument' remains pretty woeful. World harmony and understanding was not advanced. No agreement was reached. But I learnt a lot. Mainly about myself. And I learnt to pay attention to some red flags that can lurk in an argument.

In fact, I would go so far as to recommend it to you!

Mediocre tenniser, keen researcher

By Fred Shivvin

It's summer. Holidays at the beach: hassled driving, then relaxed dining, drinking, reading, sleeping, swimming, watching the cricket and playing it on the beach. (Or, for some, fighting bush fires).

The holiday game of beach cricket

When you do any of these you become: a (hassled) driver, diner, drinker, reader, sleeper, swimmer, watcher (or viewer), player and cricketer. ''I'll be the bowler first. Can you go fielder Fred?" (Or, for some, a fire-fighter).

I'm also watching and playing that other summer sport - tennis. And it occurs to me: why is there no word tenniser?

Rules in English almost always have exceptions. But the word tenniser doesn't break any English rules or conventions, so why don't we use it?

Over my summer holiday, I went to find out why.

TATKOP 118

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who relish others' knowledge and those who relish others' ignorance.

See all the posts in the TATKOP series by Fred Shivvin here.