A Plague of Optical Mice

To my intense relief I managed to track down my old laptop yesterday. I wasn’t very impressed with the shop; they didn’t give me a receipt (I vaguely thought I should ask for one but I was distracted) they said they’d give me a ring and didn’t, and it was clear when I got there that they hadn’t even looked at it. So I took it away again and a different shop will get my custom. There are three shops on the same street in Loughborough, all offering the same services, and I had to trawl them all before I found it. Anyway it’s back home and will be sorted when I have the money. Today a friend of ours is filling in some holes in the downstairs bedroom (the estate agent told us not to bother but people have said the house needs too much work so we thought it would help.) We’re having the drains looked at tomorrow to check for any subsidence and we have reduced the price slightly so we’re hopeful of moving things on.

So with the laptop still not sorted I’m back on the old chrome book and slowly getting to grips with google docs. It’s like a foreign country; they do things differently there. Otherwise things are OK except for my mouse. I have an optical mouse; not just any mouse either but a left-handed one specially moulded for us south-paws and with the buttons reversed. I got it from freecycle – a real find. We understand each other very well, this mouse and me, but for some reason it doesn’t get on with the chrome book. I changed the batteries yesterday but the cursor is still refusing to move until I jiggle the mouse whereupon it jumps about in an arbitrary manner. So I’m having to use the mouse pad which I’m not so keen on.

In other news I actually slept well last night! I decided to banish OH and the Persistent Snore to the spare room and I slept brilliantly; didn’t wake till nearly eight. So I think I’ll hold off on contacting the doc for now. It’s lovely sleeping on your own once in a while; a few nights of this and I’ll be human again instead of half-Dalek and half-Triffid. I always think it’s funny how the word Dalek has penetrated the language without exterminating it; I often wonder whether it’s known in other English-speaking nations. I suspect not; Doctor Who is, as I’ve mentioned before, a peculiarly British phenomenon. Which brings us to the other flaw in the world-view of Nineteen Eighty-Four which I forgot to mention: in the novel English is being reduced word by word and replaced by NewSpeak. But language is not a block to chip away at; language is a river, ever-changing, ever-evolving, where words are lost and new words being added all the time. Which is why organisations like the Academie Francaise which try to ossify la langue, are on such a losing wicket. Just look at this list of English neologisms from last year:

Neologisms 2023 – New Words

… from which I am delighted to see that the Simpsons-invented word ‘cromulent’ which OH and I often use, has made it into the dictionary. Neologisms are not just the province of the educated but are the product of inventive minds; some of the best ones relate to very ordinary things. Mither and gradely are two of my favourite dialect verbs and cockney rhyming slang is brilliantly inventive. Chalfonts is probably my top word there (Chalfont St Giles – piles) though I’m not entirely sure if that was original or made up by the scriptwriters of Minder. Anyway, my point is that language is always evolving and no matter how much the Party may delete words from it, neologisms will always pop up. And in my opinion the Proles are the most likely people to be inventing them.

I’ve lost my thread now. But no matter. Today I am 99% human with shades of Martian and a touch of Cyberman. Tomorrow, 100% human. On Saturday (my birthday) a demigoddess. Onwards and upwards.

Kirk out

Orwell and Words

As a writer and poet, I spend a lot of time thinking about words: not just how to use them, but what they are and how they are put together.  I once studied linguistics (quite unsuccessfully, I might add) and a part of that subject is Morphology, the study of what a word actually is.  I can’t claim to have mastered Morphology – in fact I’d much rather have spent the time watching this:

http://amazingmorph.com

but it set me off on a path; the path of thinking about words.  Crosswords are another good way to think about words: how they work, how they are put together, what anagrams can be made from what, and so on.  And it seems to me that words are the stuff of life.  Words are special: words are holy.

I’m not alone in this, I’m sure.  It’s no coincidence that the central plank of state oppression in Orwell’s ‘1984’ is the language.  INGSOC spends its time in reducing the number of words in the dictionary and citizens are punished for using obsolete ones; whilst the government renders meaningless those which are left (‘War is peace; freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength’).

http://humansarefree.com/2013/01/what-means-war-is-peace-freedom-is.html

Words are never mere words, though Hamlet might seem to say so: words are holy; words are precious.  The Bible starts with one and so does the Biblical version of history: (‘in the beginning was the word’)

http://biblehub.com/niv/john/1.htm

The word was not only there in the beginning, it was ‘with God’ and it ‘was God’.  You can’t get much clearer than that.

And yet what does it really mean?  Orthodox Christians would presumably say that ‘the word’ refers to Scripture, though nothing was Scripted for a long while after.  But I think it means something much more esoteric to do with the fundamental nature of truth and the holiness of words.  Mantras are words; prayers are words and poems are words, and at their best they all approach each other.  This is not to say that what a poet writes is somehow ex cathedra, but that poetry, like prayer and scripture, approaches sublimity.

Words are powerful.  In Harry Potter, the most powerful part of a spell is the incantation, or form of words, used to cast it.  Names, as my other half will attest, are deeply significant; they are the word which is you.  Words are important: words can cast light or darkness; they can lift up or cast down.  Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can finish me off.

As a poet, I try to master words.  But in order to master anything, you have to first go along with it.  You have to listen, to understand and to know what it is you are dealing with.  So that, when I split words up to make new ones I always do it along fault-lines.  It’s like working with flints: you have to understand how the thing is made; where it came from and what its range of allusion is.  Then you can start to work.

OK that’s enough for today, me lovelies.  See you on the other side…

Kirk out

 

Words, Words, Words…

Polonius:   What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet:   Words, words, words…

(Hamlet, Act 2 scene II)

As I’ve told you before – in fact you’re probably sick of hearing it by now – my almost-first word was ‘hernia’.  Incidentally, did you hear the one about … no, I can’t tell you that, it’s a bit dodgy; suffice it to say it’s a joke about a kid whose brother thinks he’s said his first half-word: the half-word being ‘mother’.

Hmm…

Anyway, words are problematic, aren’t they?  What exactly is a word -and when is a word not a word?  At University I got a few yards into the subject of Morphology before bailing out of Linguistics altogether and studying something much more sensible – Morphology being the study of words.  We bent our heads around the knotty question of what a word is, a question I had hitherto thought not worth the trouble of asking.  But the more you think about it, the more problematic you realise it is.  Of course you could just sidestep the whole process, skip to the end of this post, stick a smug ‘TLDR’ sticker on it and get on with your life.  Or you could take a few minutes just to ask: ‘What is a word?  Is slithy a word?  Or toves?  or borogroves? or other nonsense words?  It seems straightforward enough, you’d think – a word is a bundle of letters with a space before and after it.  All right then, what about ‘sllt’?  Or ‘pfft’?  Are they words?  What about glmp?  Must a word in English always have at least one vowel?

Then again, must a word have a clear meaning?  Something like ‘pfft’ is an onomatopoeic syllable, denoting an exclamation – so does that make it a word or not a word?  Doesn’t it have some mind of meaning?

What is a word?

If you find out, let me know.  I’d better stop now before I put a TLDW sticker right here…

Kirk out