The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher, r. May 2023

 

Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher, r. Nov. 2015

p. 30 For someone used to the doldrums and ditchwater of latter-day academic writing, reading Gladstone's chapter on color comes as rather a shock - that of meeting an extraordinary mind. One is left in awe by the originiality, the daring, the razor-sharp analysis, and that breathless feeling that however fast one is trying to run through the argument in one's own mind, Gladstone is always two steps ahead, and, whatever objection one tries to raise, he has preempted several pages before one has even thought of it.

p. 202 Why does the German feminine sun (die Sonne) light up the masculine day (der Tag), and the masculine moon (der Mond) shine in the feminine night (die Nacht)? After all, in French, he (le jour) is actually illuminated by him (le soleil), whereas she (la nuit) by her (la lune). German cutlery famously spans the whole gamut of gender roles: Das Messer (knife) may be an it, but on the opposite side of the plate lies the spoon (der Löffel) in his resplendent masculinity, and next to him, bursting with sex appeal, the feminine fork (die Gabel). But in Spanish, it's the fork (el tenedor) that has a hairy chest and gravelly voice, and she, the spoon (la cuchara), a curvaceous figure.

p. 239 But ye readers of posterity, forgive us our ignorances, as we forgive those who were ignorant before us. The mystery of heredity has been illuminated for us, but we have seen this great light only because our predecessors never tired of searching in the dark. So if you, O subsequent ones, ever deign to look down at us from your summit of effortless superiority, remember tha you have only scaled it on the back of our efforts. For it is thankless to grope in the dark and tempting to rest until the light of understanding shines upon us. But if we are led into this temptation, your kingdom will never come.

Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace, r. Oct. 2014

p. 59 [minutia that a creative writing teacher must be sensitive to beyond straight-up quality of fiction]…straightforward mechanics of traditional fiction production like fidelity to point-of-view, consistency of tense and tone, development of character, verisimilitude of setting, etc. Faults or virtues that cannot quickly be identified or discussed between bells – little thing like interestingness, depth of vision, originality, political assumptions and agendas, the question whether deviation from norm is in some cases OK – must, for sound Program-pedagogical reason, be ignored or discouraged.

p. 61 A sheepheaded willingness to toe any line just because it’s the most comfortable way to survive is contemptible in any student.

p. 111 Wittgenstein by life’s end conceived meaningful human brain-activity (i.e., philosophy) as exactly & nothing more than “…a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

p. 211 “Vocational Travelogue” is a very shorthand way of acknowledging that for a long time one reason people used to read fiction was for a kind of imaginative tourism to places and cultures they’d never get to really see; that modernity’s jetliners, TV, etc. have pretty well obsoleted this function; but that modern tech has also created such extreme vocational specialization that few people anymore are in a position to know much about any professional field but their own; and thus that a certain amount of fiction’s “touristic” function now consists in giving readers dramatized access to the nuts and bolts of different professional disciplines and specialties.

p. 261 … “formal writing” does not mean gratuitously fancy writing; it means clean, clear, maximally considerate writing.

p. 269 Unique: This is one of a class of adjectives, sometimes called “uncomparables,” that can be a little tricky. Among other incomparables are precise, exact, correct, entire, accurate, preferable, inevitable, possible, false; there are probably two dozen in all. These adjectives all describe absolute, non-negotiable states: something is either false or it’s not; something is either inevitable or it’s not.

p. 288 But Borges’s stories are very different. They are designed primarily as metaphysical arguments; the are dense, self-enclosed, with their own deviant logics. Above all, they are meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness – “to be incorporated,” as Borges puts it, “like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written.”

p. 293 Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one for whom reading is essentially – consciously – a creative act.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, r. Sep. 2013

p. 15 The Marquesa would even have been astonished to learn that her letters were very good, for such authors live always in the noble weather of their own minds and those productions which seem remarkable to us are little better than a day's routine to them.

p. 47 ...many people would never have fallen in love if they had not heard about it.

p. 63 ...the silence of the three of them had made a little kernel of sense in a world of boasting, self-excuse and rhetoric.

p. 68 "We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn't for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You'll be surprised at the way time passes."

p. 74 He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer - a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon.

p. 116 But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, r. Nov. 2012

p. 269 Some computer scientists, inspired by the infant, believe that a good robot should learn an internal software model of its articulators by observing the consequences of its own babbling and flailing.

p. 301 Thus language acquisition might be like other biological functions. The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age is the price we pay for the vigor of youth.

p. 336 And quantitative research corroborates the hundreds of anecdotes. Not only are general traits like IQ, extroversion, and neuroticism partly heritable, but so are specific ones like degree of religious feeling, vocational interests, and opinions about the death penalty, disarmament, and computer music.

p. 387 As for outlawing sentences that end with a preposition - as Winston Churchill would have said, it is a rule up with which we should not put.

p. 416 Overcoming one's natural egocentrism and trying to anticipate the knowledge state of a generic reader at every stage of the exposition is one of the most important tasks in writing well.

p. 448 The banter among New Guinean highlanders in the film of their first contact with the world, the motions of a sign language interpreter, the prattle of little girls in a Tokyo playground - I imagine seeing through the rhythms to the structures underneath, and sense that we all have the same minds.

The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien, r. Jun. 2012

p. 1122 The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.

p. 1186 'A great Shadow has departed,' said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sounds was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known.

p. 1210 And Gandalf said: 'Many folk like to know beforehand what is to be set on the table; but those who have laboured to prepare the feast like to keep their secret; for wonder makes the words of praise louder.'

p. 1276 In the Southfarthing the vines were laden, and the yield of 'leaf' was astonishing; and everywhere there was so much corn that at Harvest every barn was stuffed. The Northfarthing barley was so fine that the beer of 1420 malt was long remembered and became a byword. Indeed a generation later one might hear an old gaffer in an inn, after a good pint of well-earned ale, put down his mug with a sigh: 'Ah! that was proper fourteen-twenty, that was!'

p. 1283 I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. But you are my heir: all that I had and might have had I leave to you.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, r. Oct. 2011

p. 113: Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.

p. 116: Then what John considers maybe the worst type, because it can cunningly masquerade as patience and humble frustration. You've got the Complacent type, who improves radically until he hits a plateau, and is content with the radical improvement he's made to get to the plateau, and doesn't mind staying at the plateau because it's comfortable and familiar, and he doesn't worry about getting off it, and pretty soon you find he's designed a whole game around compensating for the weaknesses and chinks in the armor the given plateau represents in his game, still - his whole game beating him, locating the chinks of the plateau, and his rank starts to slide, but he'll say he doesn't care, he says he's in it for the love of the game, and he always smiles but there gets to be something tight and hangdog about his smile, and he always smiles and is real nice to everybody and real good to have around but he keeps staying where he is while other guys hop plateaux, and he gets beat more and more, but he's content. Until one day there's a quiet knock at the door.

p. 445: He leans in more toward Gately and shouts that the one he was talking about was: This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ' What the fuck is water?' and swim away.

p. 680: For, you, if you attain your goal and cannot find some way to transcend the experience of having that goal be your entire existence, your raison de faire, so, then, one of two things we see will happen. [essentially, suicide or fatal celebration]

p. 900: The dedication and sustained energy that go into true perspicacity and expertise were exhausting even to think about. It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something. maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These room blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose?

p. 1040: Cliches earned their status as cliches because they were so obviously true.

p. 1048: The "vailed warning" (typo?) you refer to in my postal response to you is simply that you have to take what Orin says in a fairly high-sodium way.... it is a pose of poselessness.... Spend a little time with Orin's Uncle Charles a.k.a. "Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Dairy Cow" Tavis if you want to see real openness in motion, and you will see that genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.