star wars, nothing but star wars

There was a regretful and probably universally relatable, accessible piece written for BBC Magazine—though happily I never thought of selling my extensive collection of Star Wars action figures and have them with me still—about one youth’s remorse over having traded his assemblage away, mint-in-box or so claimed. It’s quite interesting to think about the challenges that we faced back then in terms of acquisition, planning, composing wish-lists—and readily sharing that encyclopædic knowledge of the cast and crew and correcting others in play when they strayed from character.

orthograph or parts of speech

The fantastic Æon magazine has a very fine retrospective essay on the singular strangeness of the English language that hits all the big, perplexing points for this, the only language that subjects its young and impressionable speakers to the rigours of spelling-bees (French students have dictation contests, which seems a more practical skill to develop).
This language (from an anglo-centric point of view) is the outlier in terms of using gendered nouns, declension, fails on intelligibility and has a very motley grammatical structure. Though others have been exposed to the say waves of conquest, English seemed one of the few clever and stubborn enough to survive in one form or another by adopting and incorporating the form and style of its invaders—the Romans, the Norse and the Normans. Whether these unsystematic traits make the language difficult or at a point unpenetrable is hard to say—it’s hard to argue, no matter one’s take on it, of English’s dominance and attempts to supplant those quirks with constructed, universal languages have not been met with overwhelming success.

copasetic

The ever-engrossing Mind Hacks performs quite a nimble triangulation on the nature and origin of the so-called safe-space—that is a social venue that’s set aside and made exclusive for any particular set of people that identify with one group or another, for which outsiders are excluded.
Self- segregation, rather than an ostracism that’s imposed from privileged sources, is supposed to open up a forum of discussion free from harassment but in theory, not free from dissent or controversy, but one has to wonder how balanced groupthink can hope to be when its sheltered and fostered. This concept seems very much couched in terms of modern political correctness, but the safe-space goes back further and is rooted in the ideas of corporate climate surveys and the research of psychologist Kurt Lewin, who while trying to avoid associations of reinforcement, did crucially acknowledge that concepts that Lewin imparted like (which can now sound like latter day office woo) sensitivity-training, feedback, input, toxicity in leadership, workplace morale needed to be engendered in an environment free of reprisal and openness. What do you think? Have these ideas been brought to a place where they improve social dynamics or have they become merely hallmarks of strife and censorship?

language laboratory oder verenglischen

The Local, Germany’s English language daily, profiles an Italian living in Berlin who, frustrated with obstacles to practising the German language properly and gaining a better mastery of it in an international office setting turned to inventing needful compound words to express contemporary, specific anxieties that no word exists for. Though this lexicon is by its nature a non-standard and idiosyncratic one, building it is a clever way to strenghten one’s vocabulary and imagination. For the nonce, verenglishchen is to rebuff a foreigner’s best efforts to address another in his or her native language by replying in English. I ought to embark on the same sort of project.