Knackered? Miffed? Read This.

Those of you who travel generously to places where the languages you already speak, are spoken, are bound to have encountered certain lexemes or syntactic structures that are unknown to you. That's the beauty of language, after all. Changes are actuated quickly and language always changes. It's one of the things we can basically always trust in: language changes regardless of our input. I quite like the caprice of language. Since it can get unpredictable, it'll always be interesting. If only more things were as interesting as language, but I digress.

If you ask a Bavarian: "Wie ist es Dir?", s/he will get the point and will most likely say: "Gut, gut, selbe[r]?" While 'Wie ist es Dir?' is quite an old saying, actually it's a modern German rendering of a question that Parzival asks his uncle Anfortas in the medieval narrative Parzival, but again, I digress. I suppose, deep down my desire for context always manages to rear its head somehow. But back to the topic.

If you're a Brit visiting the South of the US, let's say Louisiana, you'll notice that people are fixing to do this and that. No, they're not fixing or repairing things, per se. They're simply getting ready to embark on a task.

I illustrate: "Bobbie Sue, I'm fixing to go over to the mechanic and see about the car." One can imagine how the different layers of meaning can inform one another in a number of ways here.

Having said this, do read Roger Cohen's article on The Times. If you're philology-enamored, you will be entertained.

This article was perhaps the best thing I read today. It's the end of the day and I'm quite knackered myself, [hint: if you don't know this means, read the article!]

A bit says:

"A poet friend, Vincent Katz, was over for dinner the other night and asked me with a twinkle in his eye if I was “knackered.” Katz came to poetry via rock ’n roll, and to Oxford via the University of Chicago, and along the way he picked up some English vernacular.
...
Katz read classics at St. John’s College (viewed as a too-beautiful refuge of sporty underachievers by my own Balliol) and he summed up the experience this way: “I began to realize (what I should have known all along) that I was living in a completely different culture. It was just as alien to me as France would have been, or Spain, or Italy, or Germany. There is the illusion that we speak the same language, but we really don’t.”
Read it all here.

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graph per http://www.class.csupomona.edu/colorfulflags/Webpage/Images/wheelconcept.jpg

Beauty

Apparently one of my high-frequency cluster of lexemes is something that goes like this: 'beauty/aesthetics is never inconsequential.'
As it is the case more often than not, we tend to repeat that which we consider the most and spend much time masticating. Philosophically, the study of aesthetics is as fecund as it could be. But philosophy is not the only discipline where aesthetics enters with a splash. It is also a permanent inhabitant of literature, religion and so forth.

I just recorded two new episodes for both of my podcast series, Gendering the Media and De Amore and in both episodes I mention the concept of beauty from a philosophical as well as literary perspective. Obviously, our understanding of and attitudes towards beauty and aesthetics have shifted dramatically from the times of the Greeks, Romans, St. Augustine, Early Christianity and so on.

In earlier times, aesthetic beauty was code for inner goodness. The more beautiful a person, the better the soul/nature of that person. In this regard, the form was, in many ways, that which clarified the weight/importance of content.

Might I recommend this article from the Times which appears on today's issue?

A paragraph says:

"Are models perhaps the last silent film stars? A preview of “The Model as Muse” suggests they are. A model’s face on a magazine cover may sell fewer issues than that of the latest hot actress, but they are ultimately a lot more compelling to look at and this is because we hardly ever have to hear about their private lives or be burdened with their thoughts.

It cannot be accidental that Kate Moss, the most persuasive contemporary example of a model as an artistic catalyst, has assiduously guarded what she says throughout her career. Ms. Moss is no dummy. She knows that the basic requirement of her particular job is silence. A model is a muse to the precise extent that a model is mute."

Yes, a shift has definitely occurred but one thing is certain: aesthetics is so consequential.

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