Taking Steps

Spent the week feeling slightly depressed at having to carry around a new smart phone which does a million and two things I'm not interested in. However, always one to make the best of things I found some small solace in getting the thing to count my steps each day. The results as follows: Monday - 9,313; Tuesday - 10,752; Wednesday - 12,422; Thursday - 10,208; Friday - 12,748. Who says I don't get around much? Not bad for an old geezer, eh?

What's In A Word?

Found myself commenting in class this morning on a particularly Singaporean use of the word elderly. The term is used frequently as a noun here, as in, I was talking to an elderly, or, The elderlies suffer from short term memory loss. I'd say the usage of the word in this sense qualifies as educated Singaporean English - as opposed to being an uneducated error. I've noticed that even when 'corrected' or informed of the Standard English usage most students are resistant to bothering to take care over its use.

It's interesting to speculate as to how the local usage came about. I can see three contributory factors. The 'correct' use as an uncountable noun - as in, In a civilised society the elderly are treated with respect and cared for - is likely to have influenced the adoption of the word as a countable noun, and I'd guess would have been the most important factor involved. Then there's the slight clumsiness of needing to say, The elderly people were crossing the road. Substituting elderlies seems so much pithier. And finally I think there's a good chance that the perfectly acceptable countable noun elder is involved in all this - perhaps as a kind of mishearing, or possibly because it feels a bit prissy to say, The elders were crossing the road.

All this reminded me of the current POTUS's noticeable habit of using modifiers as nouns. The other day we got, If we had bi-partisan in his puzzling reflections on the failure of Trumpcare (or Ryancare, not sure which) to make it into law. I presume he was expressing a desire for bi-partisan support, though it's difficult to tell where this president's thoughts are leading him, if anywhere. 

Oh, and I should confess that I might have forgotten the linguistic excitement of the morning were it not for the fact that a colleague described me, with grammatical accuracy and, sadly, a bitter regard for the truth, as a lean and elderly figure, later in the day. Ouch.

Reductionism

Am going through agony at the moment trying to decide which of the Bobster's songs to include in my talk on His Bobness due in early May. The time's so short I reckon I can only fit in comments on 3 or 4 at most. So which is it to be?

Like A Rolling Stone, or the first verse at least, makes the impossibly cruel cut since I'm intending to use it to illustrate the necessity of hearing Dylan's lyrics sung (by Dylan, preferably) to experience of the totality of the 'text', if that word makes sense here. But as for the two (or just maybe three) others? I change my mind everyday.

Today it's Isis (partly because I can illustrate it with the storming live version that featured in Reynaldo & Clara) (but, doh!!!, that misses the first verse.) And Everything Is Broken for almost late period minimalism and a great 'list' song (but I'm conflicted as to which version to use, and it's not exactly really late so it hardly does justice to the magnificent run of albums starting from Time Out Of Mind and continuing to this day) (and what about the early protest songs?) (and what about the foolishly neglected 'born again' songs?) (and, and, and?)

This is impossible. But sort of fun.

Purely Visual

I'm quite a fan of the McCafe section that can sometimes be found in your common or garden neighbourhood McDonalds. The big cappuccino (needed spell-check for that one!) tastes pretty good to me and they do a delightfully unhealthy brownie. In fact, all the eatables look good, both on the shelves and in the big pictures behind the counters.

But here's the thing. All the big pictures have got this gnomic observation written somewhere, quite unobtrusively, on them: Visuals are for illustration purposes only. Now I'm profoundly puzzled as to what this means and why it is so carefully recorded on every picture. It seems to me utterly tautological. What else can a visual be for except as an illustration of sorts?

I assume it's some kind of legal disclaimer. Let's face it, nothing goes on behind those golden arches that isn't in the corporation's rule book. But what exactly is it disclaiming? Is it a kind of apology for any food item that doesn't look exactly like the picture depicts it, in case any one sues on the grounds that their sad ordinary brownie doesn't look like the super-brownie emblazoned above?

The odd thing is that the food is all on display. And looks good. Well, to my tired old eyes it does. This all goes to illustrate something; I just don't know what that something is.

Farce Then Tragedy

Watched a few things on youtube earlier this evening related to the fiasco that passes for politics in the U.S. of A. at this point in history. The idea that history replays itself moving from tragedy to farce came to mind. And with that reminiscence came the troubling thought that we may eventually have the dubious privilege of being able to watch the process in reverse.

The Needful

I'd intended to hit the gym on Friday evening, but I somehow contrived to tweak a muscle in my left side, at the top of the leg, round the back, taking the ablution at Friday Prayers and decided it would be foolhardy to risk damaging whatever had been damaged further by overdoing it. In fact, completing prayers on Friday and Saturday was a bit of a trial, but the difficulty seemed to have disappeared by afternoon prayers today, so I decided to put in an appearance on the elliptical trainer just now.

Disappointingly my numbers fell well below those of just a week ago which seems to go to show just how steeply whatever fitness I've got goes into decline the moment I stop doing the needful. On the other hand, there's an element of inspiration involved here in the realisation that if I don't stay reasonably active I'm probably facing major deterioration at a rapid rate. Having no real choice is an excellent way to focus the mind.

Not So Funny

It's odd how very clever people can go wrong in the theatre in terms of their grasp of what will work on stage and what won't. I came across a striking example of this in Marjorie Garber's excellent Shakespeare Above All, her magisterial run-down on all the plays. What's particularly striking about this is that she so often has an excellent sense of the plays as theatre, yet she writes this, apropos the sequence involving Hermia raging against Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream: Surely the scene would be even more comical if the difference between the two women were slight or non-existent.

Nope. Completely wrong. The laughter, and it's big and lots of it if you get the scene right, comes from the simple and obvious fact that Lysander now sees his beloved as being unattractively short and the shorter the actress is, the better. It's impossible for the actress playing Hermia to look suitably outraged in the sequence if she doesn't have an understandable sense of vulnerability over being vertically challenged, in some sense.

There's a temptation putting something on stage of adding extra layers, partly because it's the clever thing to do. In most cases keeping it at the level of the obvious is the better option - especially so with Shakespeare who clearly knew very well exactly what would work and saw no point in being clever for its own sake.

Changing For The Better

Came across an excellent piece In praise of cliché by Stig Abell at the website for the TLS today, his response to the recent terror attack in London. It chimes oddly with my own mild encomium for cliché in yesterday's post. It's only in the last couple of weeks that I've been visiting the website of a publication that for quite a number of years, back in the 70s and 80s, I used to purchase on a weekly basis. When I checked out the website some time back I'd been sorely disappointed and never bothered to include it in my list of Freebie Material on the Web that Needs to be Checked Out on a Regular Basis. It now makes the list - which could be a bit of a problem as there's just too much good stuff out there. Oh well, I'll just have to cope.

Having to cope with the problem of having too much interesting stuff to deal with is what my younger self signally failed to do. Even at this distance of years I'm still vaguely aware of the guilt engendered by having a pile of issues of the Times Literary Supplement of which quite a number remained unread. Wonder what I did with them all?

By the way, I assume it's since the very able Mr Abell took over the editorship of this hoary old publication that the improvement in its website came about, though I might be wrong. I first noticed the chap as a regular contributor to the Press Review on Sky News when he was the editor of The Sun and was astonished that any editor of that publication could be so reasonable and intelligent. Sometimes, against all the odds, the world seems to mildly improve.

Unwelcome News

Enjoyed a jolly evening yesterday in the company of David & Shirley, who are passing through to attend the wedding of David's son in Australia. An opportunity, among other things, to catch up with news from my old stomping grounds in Rawmarsh. Sadly, inevitably, some of the news was not good. Hearing of the death of one old colleague in particular came as a bit of a shock, for the old colleague was not exactly old in the usual sense. The problem is that I've reached that stage of life in which such news is becoming routine. 

Mind you, the latest news regarding Osman's chemotherapy here on this island sounds very promising indeed. As Peter reminded me the other day at work, when telling me some more bad news about one of our current colleagues: we need to count our blessings. Utterly clichéd because it's so entirely true and sane.

Safe Spaces

Disheartened to read in a recent issue of Philosophy Now of an attempt by the student union at Bristol University to prevent Sir Roger Scruton from speaking there on the grounds that his offensive views on gay marriage (offensive, that is, to those who support the idea) render gay students less safe (due to their sheer offensiveness. I think that's the way the argument goes.) It seems this is known as no-platforming, a ghastly neologism for a spectacularly dumb idea.

Astonishing. If I were a gay student supporting the concept of gay marriage, or a straight student supporting the concept, or an asexual student supporting the concept, I surely would want to listen to such an accomplished speaker and thinker to hear his arguments and engage with him to show where he is going wrong and creating the offence I might be feeling. I might even be humble enough to accept the idea I might learn something from him, even if it's only learning exactly what his perspective is. Who knows, I might even find I'm no longer quite so offended. Sometimes those whom we regard as being in the wrong can be in the wrong in interesting and illuminating ways. Isn't this the kind of civilised dialogue and exchange of ideas that universities were created for?

It worries me that in seeking to keep students safe we may render them safe from actually learning anything.