The Japanese have all these great concepts that I keep hearing about. Danny tells me about the idea of "umami," the indefinable taste of deliciousness. A few years ago I heard about "wabi sabi" from Melissa which is something akin to "jolie laide" but more significant. Kevin says that the whole Eskimo having a billion words for snow thing is a bunch of hooey. He says they have a lot of words for snow, but really we have just as many. My wife has always been a beauty but don't try telling her that. She seems to have it in mind that she has lost a step. She was once a beautiful woman in her twenties, that time being the bulk I have spent with her being beautiful. I knew her only passing when she was a beautiful girl in her teens, which is a different beauty than her subsequent beauty. She knows this. She knows that her beauty now is different than her beauty then and she laments it. Its funny to hear someone lament their beauty.
There is a song out there called "Dignified and Old."
4 comments:
i get better looking every day.
I've always said that.
I got a little worried that I might be wrong about the linguistic point I'd made. so I looked it up. My memory served me well as I googled "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis." Interesting stuff, but mostly dismissed as fallicious these days.
Among the most frequently cited examples of linguistic determinism is Whorf's study of the language of the Inuit people, who were thought to have numerous words for snow. He argues that this modifies the world view of the Eskimo, creating a different mode of existence for them than, for instance, a speaker of English. The notion that Arctic people have an unusually large number of words for snow has been shown to be false by linguist Geoffrey Pullum; in an essay titled "The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax", he tracks down the origin of the story, ultimately attributing it largely to Whorf and suggesting the triviality of Whorf's observations.
Booyaw Whorf! He probably thought no one would do fact checking if they had to go to the arctic.
Once again, the Ok, Oh. blog brings light to an otherwise dark and scary place.
Thanks Kiv.
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