Always.

Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you're going.

Norton Juster, from The Phantom Tollbooth

Overlap.

I wandered down a "intellectual craftsmanship" rabbit hole found in this week's essay from Ari Weinzweig ...

Perhaps you may object that the ordinary words of common usage are often loaded with feelings and values, and that accordingly it might be well to avoid them in favour of new words or technical terms. Here is my answer: it is true that ordinary words are often so loaded. But many technical terms in common use in social science are also loaded. To write clearly is to control these loads, to say exactly what you mean in such a way that this meaning and only this will be understood by others. Assume that your intended meaning is circumscribed by a six-foot circle, in which you are standing; assume that the meaning understood by your reader is another such circle, in which he is standing. The circles, let us hope, do overlap. The extent of that overlap is the extent of your communication. In the reader’s circle the part that does not overlap - that is one area of uncontrolled meaning: he has made it up. In your circle the part that does not overlap - that is another token of your failure: you have not got it across. The skill of writing is to get the reader’s circle of meaning to coincide exactly with yours, to write in such a way that both of you stand in the same circle of controlled meaning.

Wittgenstein said, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

Schubert, Der Schmetterling (The Butterfly), D 633

The BUTTERFLY

Why should I not dance?

It costs me no effort,

and enchanting colours

shimmer here amid the verdure.

Ever lovelier

my brightly-coloured wings glisten;

ever sweeter is the scent

from each tiny blossom.

I sip from the blossoms;

you cannot protect them.

How great my joy,

be it early or late,

to flit so blithely

over hill and dale.

When the evening murmurs

you see the clouds glow;

when the air is golden

the meadows are more radiantly green.

I sip from the blossoms;

you cannot protect them.

Franz Schubert

According to medieval superstitions, witches turned into butterflies at night to spoil or steal cream or milk. Schmetten, Schmette (Slav. Smetana) is the old east/central German word of Slavic origin for sour cream or butter.

Dustsceawung.

There is a word in Old English which belongs wholly to that civilization - "dustsceawung," meaning contemplation of dust. It is a true image of the Anglo-Saxon mind, or at least an echo of that consciousness which considered transcience and loss to be part of the human estate; it was a world in which life was uncertain and the principal diety was fate or destiny or "wyrd."

Peter Ackroyd

Transcendent.

I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what mythology does for you.

I mean a vocabulary in the form of not words but acts and adventures, which connotes something transcendent of the action here so that you always feel in accord with the universal being.

Joseph Campbell, from The Power of Myth

Consequential.

The culture loves the simplicity of labels. 

Like its sibling catch-alls passionate, awesome and kind, smart is a word that is misunderstood, misused, and inappropriately labelled.  

We have surrendered one of our most consequential words.

“Smart” once described a rare and admirable combination of quick pattern-recognition, sound judgment, deep understanding, and intellectual courage. 

Coffee makers are smart.  Doorbells are smart.  Thermostats, scales, toothbrushes, refrigerators, and even trash cans are now smart.  Today it is a hollow compliment applied to almost anything that moves, sells, or flatters our self-image.  A toddler who stacks two blocks is “so smart!”  An adult who can parallel-park receives the same adjective.

When everything is smart, nothing is.

Worse still, we have begun to use “smart” where intrinsic value is lacking.. Calling someone “smart” now frequently substitutes for saying they are good, wise, honest, or brave. The implication is clear and corrosive: intelligence (or any cheap counterfeit) is the only virtue that really matters. Decency, integrity, humility, and perseverance have been demoted to secondary traits—if they are noticed at all.

The result is an overvalue of discernible cleverness. We celebrate people who are quick, shiny, and rhetorically flashy while growing blind to those who are slow, deep, awkward, and true; I admiringly call this group the "crooked trees."  We have convinced ourselves that being “smart” is the same thing as being useful. It's not.

Language is a tool used to shape reality. When we continue to culturally degrade language that once pointed toward something difficult and valuable, we devalue the very thing it pointed toward. We no longer have a reliable way to name genuine excellence because we have spent the word on light bulbs, algorithmic patterns, and passive-aggressive comebacks.

It is time to retire “smart” from this type of casual drivel.

Let it rest until we're able use it to describe a mind that sees the wonder others dismiss, holds conclusions lightly but courageously, changes its mind when the evidence demands it, and remains humble in the face of what it does not yet understand.

I move that we abolish the cult of smart.  Instead, especially where kids are concerned, try using ...

1. Hard-working
2. Enthusiastic
3. Determined
4. Poetic
5. Perceptive
6. Shrewd
7. Discerning
8. Experienced
9. Well-read
10. Critical
11. What else?

These still carry weight. They still cost something to say, a reminder that not every convenience, not every quick reply, not every small optimization deserves to be canonized with the same adjective we once reserved for the keenest forms of understanding.

What matters for recognizing high levels of performance is that a person is challenged, requiring attitudes that are perceptive and receptive to being challenged, if not actively seeking out challenge and eagerly facing and admitting the prospect of misadventure, even failure. 

That may be the most important thing a parent, a mentor, or even a teacher can impart.

James Hamblin explains ...

People are born with some innate cognitive differences, but those differences are eclipsed by early achievement, Boaler argues. When people perform well (academically or otherwise) at early ages and are labeled smart or gifted, they become less likely to challenge themselves. They become less likely to make mistakes, because they stay in their comfortable comfort zone and stop growing. And their fixed mindset persists through adulthood. The simple and innocent praising of a smart kid feeds an insidious problem that some researchers track all the way up to gender inequality in STEM careers.

From Inc. ...

Our society is obsessed with the label of being smart. Even more so, we're obsessed with how smart you are compared to others. Historically, these measurements started in early education as a way to place children in the "right" class levels. As a result, our society has become overly focused on intelligence, so much so, that in the business world it's common to innocently describe others as smart without much thought. Being smart is defined in the dictionary as having or showing a quick-witted intelligence. This just tells someone they're fast thinking, but what value does it ultimately provide in the workplace?

The proclivity to use this label can cause long-lasting damage. Below are some reasons why being labeled "smart" is actually a hindrance rather than a help.

Hamblin continues ...

At whatever age smart people develop the idea that they are smart, they also tend to develop vulnerability around relinquishing that label. So the difference between telling a kid “You did a great job” and “You are smart” isn’t subtle. That is, at least, according to one growing movement in education and parenting that advocates for retirement of “the S word.”

The idea is that when we praise kids for being smart, those kids think: Oh good, I'm smart. And then later, when those kids mess up, which they will, they think: Oh no, I'm not smart after all. People will think I’m not smart after all. And that’s the worst. That’s a risk to avoid, they learn.“Smart” kids stand to become especially averse to making mistakes, which are critical to learning and succeeding.

“Mistakes grow your brain,” as the professor of mathematics education at Stanford University Jo Boaler put it on Monday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by The Atlantic. I wondered why, then, my brain is not so distended that it spills out of my ears and nose. I should have to stuff it back inside like a sleeping bag, and I should have to carry Q-tips around during social events as stuffing implements. Boaler notes, more eloquently, that at least a small part of the forebrain called the thalamus can appreciably grow after periods of the sort of cognitive stimulation involved in mistake-making. What matters for improving performance is that a person is challenged, which requires a mindset that is receptive to being challenged—if not actively seeking out challenge and failure. And that may be the most important thing a teacher can impart.

Psychology Today looks closely at the culture's neutering obsession with "smart"...

The other aspect of "smart" is an evaluative one. It says, roughly, that this display of intelligence is one that the speaker considers praiseworthy, or which accords with the speaker's values. If there is a cleverly worded advertisement in favor of a political cause that I support, or a thoughtfully posed objection that supports my point of view, that is "smart." But if there is a cleverly worded advertisement in support of my political opponent, or an objection which undermines my favored theory, that is not smart at all.

This account of the meaning of "smart," if it is on the right track, encourages a degree of caution. Thick concepts are notorious for the way they build evaluative views into purportedly neutral language. Consider "chaste." This term has a certain descriptive content to it, but it also tacitly accepts a certain view of gender and sexual morality, one which many of us would now reject. We are therefore rightly reluctant to describe people as "chaste," and I think we should show a measure of reluctance toward "smart" as well, which is not as descriptive as it seems to be. 

Let’s stop using smart.

Grants.

EMBARKING on the STUDY of ANGLO-SAXON GRAMMAR

I, after fifty generations

(Time opens such gulfs out to us all)

Return to the far bank of a mighty river

The Norsemen's longships never reached,

To the harsh, hard-wrought words

Which, with a tongue now long gone to dust,

I used in the days of Northumbria and Mercia

Before becoming Haslam1 or Borges.

Last Saturday, we read how Julius Cæsar

Was the first to come from Romeburg to unveil Britain;

Before the grapes grow back, I shall have heard

The nightingale of the riddle

And the elegy spoken by the twelve

Warriors round their king's burial mound.

To me, these words seem symbols of other symbols,

Variants of German or English-to-be,

But they were once images of the actual

Used by a man to proclaim a sword or the sea;

Tomorrow they will come alive again,

Tomorrow, fyr will not be fire, but rather that lot

Of tamed and changeling god

Whom none can face without feeling an ancient fear.

Glory be to the unending weft

Of cause and effect

Which, before showing me the mirror

In which I shall see no one or some other,

Grants me this perfect contemplation

Of a language at its dawn.

Jorge Luis Borges, 

Deliberately.

In culture news, my favorite pastime has been recognized as Oxford's Word of the Year ...

[I]t has become shorthand for content designed to elicit anger by being frustrating, offensive, or deliberately divisive in nature, and a mainstream term referenced in newsrooms across the world and discourse amongst content creators. It’s also a proven tactic to drive engagement, commonly seen in performative politics. As social media algorithms began to reward more provocative content, this has developed into practices such as rage-farming, which is a more consistently applied attempt to manipulate reactions and to build anger and engagement over time by seeding content with rage bait, particularly in the form of deliberate misinformation of conspiracy theory-based material.

Thank you, Jess, not only for recognizing my talent, but for keeping me abreast of essential current events.

Large.

Bone-Fires.

Kasamatsu, Bonfire, 1959

Prepare Ye ...

To the early Anglo-Saxons, November was “wint-monath”, or wind month, the start of the storm season. It was sacred to the weather god Thunor, the Anglo-Saxon name for Thor, whose hammering made the thunder – Thunor is Old English for thunder. His popularity was reflected in the widespread presence of hammer-shaped ornaments in Anglo-Saxon graves.

Thunor was honoured in November with huge fires to drive away evil spirits. These bone-fires or bonfires also had a practical function: animals had been slaughtered to provide food for winter, and the fires turned the bones into fertiliser. German pagans sometimes put a straw effigy of Thor on top of their bonfires, and Anglo-Saxons may have done the same with Thunor.

Choose.

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where -" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"- so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough.”

Lewis Carroll, from Alice in Wonderland

If you mishandle a firearm, you could hurt yourself.  How are the expectations of any smart device different?

The word "addiction" comes from the Latin addicere, meaning to give over, to sacrifice, or devote.   

If you're struggling with devices, don't give yourself, your choices, and your precious time over to them.  It's not the device's fault. 

Choose to be more and more curious.  Choose not to click the ad, choose not to become a statistic in the algorithm, choose to put it down.

Choose to live a life astounded by the unexpected.

Deserve.

van Gogh, Glass with Carnations, 1890

We are not alive in order to be happy, but we must try to deserve happiness.

 

Vincent van Gogh, from a letter to Theo van Gogh, Sunday, 10 December 1882

Intensities.

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

Stephen Fry

Toughen up, kids.  Go have fun.

Minutely.

Perhaps the first step in renewing a relationship between language and world is the simplest: fix attention on an ordinary object, the most banal and familiar, and describe it minutely, as if it were the newest and most interesting thing in the universe.

Italo Calvino, from The Written World and the Unwritten World

Dynamize.

In the word vast, the vowel /a/ retains all the virtues of an enlarging vocal agent. Considered vocally, therefore, this word is no longer merely dimensional. Like some soft substance, it receives the balsamic powers of infinite calm. With it, we take infinity into our lungs, and through it, we breathe, cosmically, far from human anguish. Some may find these minor considerations. But no factor, however slight, should be neglected in the estimation of poetic values. And indeed, everything that contributes to giving poetry its decisive psychic action should be included in a philosophy of the dynamic imagination. Sometimes, the most varied, most delicate perceptive values relay one another, in order to dynamize and expand a poem. 

Gaston Bachelard, from The Poetics of Space

Agreement.

Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one.  We tend to associate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet every day total strangers, who will never say a single word to one another, can share an intimacy. An intimacy contained in the exchange of a glance, a nod of the head, a smile, a shrug of a shoulder. A closeness which lasts for a second or for the duration of a song being sung and listened to together. An agreement about life. An agreement without clauses. A conclusion spontaneously shared between the untold stories gathered around the song.

John Berger, from Confabulations

Expediency.

With due expediency, Sir?

Corrosions.

Jessa Crispin on how the artist became the creative and other corrosions of character (and language) ...

And thus began an empire of self-help, classroom curricula, conventions and coaches, podcasts, nutritional supplements, books, gadgets, organizers, and stickers with cute little motivational mottoes to paste on your mirror, all designed to help you unleash your creativity.

Patience.

Ari Weinzweig on patience and positivity ...

The absence of patience is making the importance of its presence ever more clear. Impatience under pressure can lead to reckless actions that can exacerbate issues rather than calm them down. Like so many important things though, it’s easier to promote the idea of patience than it is to practice it, all the more so when we’re under extreme pressure. Commenting on the current state of the world, writer Wendell Berry says, "You can describe the predicament that we're in as an emergency," he says, "and your trial is to learn to be patient in an emergency." Whether we’re leading companies, countries, corner stores, or classrooms, it seems important, now more than ever, to pull patience, and ourselves in the process, back from the brink. 

Language makes a difference ...

The language we use has a big influence on the way we think. More nuanced names for what a simplistic approach sees as the same thing encourages a meaningful increase in attention and awareness. As one example, Irish author Manchán Magan, who like Patience Gray lives in a remote rural setting, writes about 32 words for field in the Irish language—the list includes different words for, say, a field of corn-grass, a field for cattle at night, a field for games or dancing, a field with a fairy-dwelling, and 28 others. Perhaps, I started to see, we would do well to say the same for patience. Patience with people you work with; patience with relatives; patience with close friends and patience with people just met; patience with ourselves; patience with things way outside your influence, like the weather or world affairs; patience with delivery people not showing up; patience with learning a new skill; and patience with the inevitable reality of Natural Law #11 that it takes a lot longer to make something great happen than most people think. Thinking culinarily, there might be patience for making stock or patience for pounding (as Patience Gray liked to do) basil and pine nuts for pesto. 

Somehow.