Complicated English Quotes

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.

Sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there's music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who've read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavors, and I haven't even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet... There's plenty out there.

Say it just like that. Let the words slide out and don’t be so uptight about it. It’s just English, not too complicated.

The moment one learns English, complications set in.

So what? German or French, friend or enemy, he's first and foremost a man and I'm a woman. He's good to me, kind, attentive. . .that's good enough for me. I'm not looking for anything else. Our lives are complicated enough with all these wars and bombings. Between a man and a woman, none of that's important. I couldn't care less if the man I fancy is English or black - I'd still offer myself to him if I got the opportunity.

The period is one of the most complicated and concepts of classical rhetoric. Nobody in the ancient world could quite decide what it meant, but they were united in the belief that it was terribly, terribly important.

They say saudade is unique to Portuguese, impossible to define in English. Nostalgia gets pretty close, but saudade is more complicated. It's the remnant of gratitude and bliss that something happened, but the simultaneous devastation that it has gone and will never happen again. It marries the feelings of happy wistfulness and poignant melancholy, anticipation, and hopelessness. it's universally understood by a cross-ocean culture with a constant feeling of absence, a yearning for the return of something now gone.

I was sitting in a plastic desk-chair contraption in an English classroom in Minnesota, tapping out the meter of lines from Pound's Cantos, wearing a baseball shirt with a small hole in the armpit. But I was also roiling with feelings and thoughts and doubts and conjectures and worries and layers of complication...If so much happened in my head, didn't I have to conclude that it was the same way with everyone else? I had to look down again. The world was too big.

It's not entirely absurd to think that somewhere in the past of mankind someone, for the first time, did in his mind the equivalent of putting an adjective to a noun, and saw, not only a relationship, but this special relationship between two things of different kinds....In sum, all the seemingly complicated kinds of modification in English are just ways of thinking and seeing how things go with each other or reflect each other. Modifiers in our language are not aids to understanding relationships; they are the ways to understand relationships. A mistake in this matter either comes from or causes a clouded mind. Usually it's both.

The end of his great project was in sight, and then he encountered the verb take, with its remarkable number of senses. He had had to deal with complicated verbs before: come had ended up with 56 senses, go had 68 and put had 80. But take was going to require an unprecedented 124.

Defining words properly is a fine and peculiar craft. There are rules—a word (to take a noun as an example) must first be defined according to the class of things to which it belongs (mammal, quadruped), and then differentiated from other members of that class (bovine, female). There must be no words in the definition that are more complicated or less likely to be known that the word being defined. The definition must say what something is, and not what it is not. If there is a range of meanings of any one word—cow having a broad range of meanings, cower having essentially only one—then they must be stated. And all the words in the definition must be found elsewhere in the dictionary—a reader must never happen upon a word in the dictionary that he or she cannot discover elsewhere in it. If the definer contrives to follow all these rules, stirs into the mix an ever-pressing need for concision and elegance—and if he or she is true to the task, a proper definition will probably result.

Every day, priests minutely examine the Dharma And endlessly chant complicated sutras. Before doing that, though, they should learn How to read the love letters sent by The wind and rain, the snow and moon.

Millions of books have been published in English language. Can you merge them all into one book? Sounds impossible? Merge all the words of all the books in a single file, delete multiple occurrences of the same word, arrange the words in alphabetical order. What do you get? A small book with list of all English words. A book smaller than a dictionary. This world seems so complex. More outward you go, more complex it gets. More inward you go, simpler it gets. At the origin, it’s so simple that we can’t describe it using complicated human language.

As far as Stephen could see they were tolerably shipshape already. The bare little rooms had been sanded and scrubbed; various neat lockers economized space; a complication of white cordage in the corner showed that a hanging chair, that most comfortable of seats, was being made; and hammocks lashed up with seven perfectly even turns and covered with a rug formed a not inelegant sofa. Jack Aubrey had spent most of his naval life in quarters very much more confined than this; he had also a good deal of experience of French and American prisons, to say nothing of English sponging houses, and it would have been a hard gaol indeed that found him at a loss.

It is not enough for a population or a section of the population to have Christian faith and be docile to the ministers of religion in order to be in a position properly to judge political matters. If this population has no political experience, no taste for seeing clearly for itself nor a tradition of initiative and critical judgment, its position with respect to politics grows more complicated, for nothing is easier for political counterfeiters than to exploit good principles for purposes of deception, and nothing is more disastrous than good principles badly applied. And moreover nothing is easier for human weakness than to merge religion with prejudices of race, family or class, collective hatreds, passions of a clan and political phantoms which compensate for the rigors of individual discipline in a pious but insufficiently purified soul. Politics deal with matters and interests of the world and they depend upon passions natural to man and upon reason. But the point I wish to make here is that without goodness, love and charity, all that is best in us—even divine faith, but passions and reason much more so—turns in our hands to an unhappy use. The point is that right political experience cannot develop in people unless passions and reason are oriented by a solid basis of collective virtues, by faith and honor and thirst for justice. The point is that, without the evangelical instinct and the spiritual potential of a living Christianity, political judgment and political experience are ill protected against the illusions of selfishness and fear; without courage, compassion for mankind and the spirit of sacrifice, the ever-thwarted advance toward an historical ideal of generosity and fraternity is not conceivable.

How simple it could be! The answer to the problem of being anything was being it. How admirable Teddy was! From the ashes of his broken childhood he had formed a decision to be a cheerful person, a do-gooding scientific type with knowledge of English literature. That he had undercurrents of sadness as long and deep as a river was not the point. He had claimed a territory for himself and did not think too much about the complications.

John Milton (December 9, 1608 – November 8, 1674) was an English poet, prose polemicist, and civil servant for the English Commonwealth. Most famed for his epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton is celebrated as well for his eloquent treatise condemning censorship, Areopagitica. Long considered the supreme English poet, Milton experienced a dip in popularity after attacks by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis in the mid 20th century; but with multiple societies and scholarly journals devoted to his study, Milton’s reputation remains as strong as ever in the 21st century. Very soon after his death – and continuing to the present day – Milton became the subject of partisan biographies, confirming T.S. Eliot’s belief that “of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions…making unlawful entry.” Milton’s radical, republican politics and heretical religious views, coupled with the perceived artificiality of his complicated Latinate verse, alienated Eliot and other readers; yet by dint of the overriding influence of his poetry and personality on subsequent generations—particularly the Romantic movement—the man whom Samuel Johnson disparaged as “an acrimonious and surly republican” must be counted one of the most significant writers and thinkers of all time. Source: Wikipedia

They say saudade is unique to Portuguese, impossible to define in English. Nostalgia gets pretty close, but saudade is more complicated. It’s the remnant of gratitude and bliss that something happened, but the simultaneous devastation that it has gone and will never happen again. It marries the feelings of happy wistfulness and poignant melancholy, anticipation, and hopelessness. It’s universally understood by a cross-ocean culture with a constant feeling of absence, a yearning for the return of something now gone.

As you can imagine, figuring out the possible motivations for why someone would have allied with Bruce or Comyn (and the English), given all these interrelations, can be a puzzle of its own. But there is another consequence of all these intermarriages that I really didn’t “get” at first, which also complicated the decision for many of Scottish nobles. We think of Scotsmen or Englishmen as either/or. But the practical effect of all these marriages was a class of nobles who had significant land interests on both sides of the border.

You're probably thinking the same thing we were: where did Jane get the rope to tie the prisoners? We researched this very conundrum thoroughly, and after two weeks we can say, without a doubt : nobody knows. It's a question that has baffled historians and archaeologists alike. Professor Herbert Halprin explains: "Ropes have been a mystery to scholars throughout the ages. The first ropes were thought to appear as far back as 17,000 BC and made of vines. Unfortunately, being made of vines, none of those early examples survived. Later, da Vinci drew sketches for a rope-making machine, but it was never built. In medieval times, there were secret societies, called Rope Guilds, whose rope-twisting practices were protected via a complicated series of handshakes and passwords -" Okay. Your narrators are interrupting the dear professor, for reasons of boredom. Plus, his English accent sounded sketchy and forced. We asked him where Jane could've gotten the rope, but maybe he thought we asked him where anyone could've gotten any rope at any given point in history. Trust us, we are as frustrated as you must be about the lack of a definitive answer.

Were the world just and Swedish-speaking, Scheele would have enjoyed universal acclaim. Instead credit has tended to lodge with more celebrated chemists, mostly from the English-speaking world. Scheele discovered oxygen in 1772, but for various heartbreakingly complicated reasons could not get his paper published in a timely manner. Instead credit went to Joseph Priestley, who discovered the same element independently, but latterly, in the summer of 1774. Even more remarkable was Scheele’s failure to receive credit for the discovery of chlorine. Nearly all textbooks still attribute chlorine’s discovery to Humphry Davy, who did indeed find it, but thirty-six years after Scheele had.

To haste as a cause of confusion must be added distraction. Normally, except for those who work in the early hours of the morning, or who live up a long country lane, it is almost impossible to avoid being disturbed by incidental noises of traffic, industry, schools, and the wireless, or by the telephone, or by callers. Few people can immediately switch their minds from one complicated subject to another, and presently switch back again, without losing something in the process. Most business men and journalists claim that they are accustomed to noise and can ‘work through anything’. But this does not mean that they are not affected by noise: part of the brain must be employed in sorting out the noises and discounting them. The intense concentration achieved when one writes in complete silence, security and leisure, with the mental senses cognizant of every possible aspect of the theme as it develops—this was always rare and is now rarer than ever. Modern conditions of living encourage habitual distraction and, though there are still opportunities for comparative quiet, most people feel that they are not really alive unless they are in close touch with their fellow men—and close touch involves constant disturbance. Hart Crane, a leading American poet of the Nineteen-Twenties, decided that he could not write his best except with a radio or victrola playing jazz at him and street-noises coming up through the open window. He considered that distraction was the chief principle of modern living; he cultivated it, distractedly, and committed suicide in his early thirties.

It is appalling how complicated it can be to make oatmeal in the jungle. First, I had to make two trips to the river to haul the water, Next, I had to prime my kerosene stove with alcohol to get it burning, a tricky procedure when you are trying to mix powdered milk and fill a coffee pot at the same time. The alcohol prime always burned out before I could turn the kerosene on, and I would have to start all over. Or, I would turn the kerosene on, optimistically hoping that the Coleman element was still hot enough to vaporize the fuel, and start a small fire in my palm-thatched hut as the liquid kerosene squirted all over the table and walls and then ignited. Many amused Yanomamo onlookers quickly learned the English phrase “Oh, shit!” and, once they discovered that the phrase offended and irritated the missionaries, they used it as often as they could in their presence.

In what way can it act as master? Through scores of incarnations, the ‘self ’ we end up with is derived from the attributes with which we endow our God, the abstract Ego or conceptive principles. All conception is a denial of the Kiã, and hence we human beings are its opposition, our own evil. As we are the offspring of ourselves, we are the conflict between whatever we deny and assert of the Kiã. It would seem that we cannot be too careful in our choice, for it determines the body we inhabit. Thus forever from ‘self ’ do I fashion the Kiã, which may be without likeness, but which may be regarded as the truth. From this process is the bondage made, and not through intellect shall we be free from it. The law of Kiã is always its own original purpose, undetermined by anything else, and its emanations are unchanging. Through our own conceptive process things materialize, and take their nature from that duality. Human beings take their law from this refraction, and their ideas create their reality. With what do they balance their ecstasy? They pay measure for measure with intense pain, sorrow, and miseries. With what do they balance their rebellion? Of necessity, with slavery! Duality is the law, and realization by experience relates and opposes by units of time. Ecstasy for any length of time is difficult to obtain, and takes a lot of work. The conditions of consciousness and existence would seem to be various degrees of misery alternating with gusts of pleasure and some more subtle emotions. Consciousness of existence consists of duality in some form or other. From it are created the illusions of time, size, entity, etc.: the world’s limit. The dual principle is the quintessence of all experience, and no ramification has enlarged its primordial simplicity, but can only be its repetition, modification or complexity: its evolution can never be complete. It can never go further than the experience of self, so returns and unites again and again, ever an anti-climax. Its evolution consists of forever returning to its original simplicity by infinite complication. No man shall understand its ‘reason why’ by looking at its workings. Know it as the illusion that embraces the learning of all existence. It is the most aged one who grows no wiser, and is the mother of all things. Therefore believe all ‘experience’ to be an illusion, and the result of the law of duality. Just as space pervades an object both inside and outside it, similarly within and beyond this ever-changing cosmos, there is this single principle.

FRENCH original Il y a trois sortes de violence. La première, mère de toutes les autres, est la violence institutionnelle, celle qui légalise et perpétue les dominations, les oppressions et les exploitations, celle qui écrase et lamine des millions d’Hommes dans ses rouages silencieux et bien huilés. La seconde est la violence révolutionnaire, qui naît de la volonté d’abolir la première. La troisième est la violence répressive, qui a pour objet d’étouffer la seconde en se faisant l’auxiliaire et la complice de la première violence, celle qui engendre toutes les autres. Il n’y a pas de pire hypocrisie de n’appeler violence que la seconde, en feignant d’oublier la première, qui la fait naître, et la troisième qui la tue. ENGLISH translation There are three kinds of violence. The first, mother of all the others, is institutional violence. It legalises and perpetuates domination, oppression, and exploitation. It crushes and eliminates millions of people in its silent and well-oiled cogs. The second is revolutionary violence, which is born of the will to abolish the first. The third is repressive violence, which stifles the second, by making itself the helper and accomplice of the first violence- the one that causes all the others. There is no worse hypocrisy than only calling the second 'violence', while pretending to forget the first one, that gives it life, and the third, that kills it.

A striking example from the history of writing is the origin of the syllabary devised in Arkansas around 1820 by a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah, for writing the Cherokee language. Sequoyah observed that white people made marks on paper, and that they derived great advantage by using those marks to record and repeat lengthy speeches. However, the detailed operations of those marks remained a mystery to him, since (like most Cherokees before 1820) Sequoyah was illiterate and could neither speak nor read English. Because he was a blacksmith, Sequoyah began by devising an accounting system to help him keep track of his customers’ debts. He drew a picture of each customer; then he drew circles and lines of various sizes to represent the amount of money owed. Around 1810, Sequoyah decided to go on to design a system for writing the Cherokee language. He again began by drawing pictures, but gave them up as too complicated and too artistically demanding. He next started to invent separate signs for each word, and again became dissatisfied when he had coined thousands of signs and still needed more. Finally, Sequoyah realized that words were made up of modest numbers of different sound bites that recurred in many different words—what we would call syllables. He initially devised 200 syllabic signs and gradually reduced them to 85, most of them for combinations of one consonant and one vowel. As one source of the signs themselves, Sequoyah practiced copying the letters from an English spelling book given to him by a schoolteacher. About two dozen of his Cherokee syllabic signs were taken directly from those letters, though of course with completely changed meanings, since Sequoyah did not know the English meanings. For example, he chose the shapes D, R, b, h to represent the Cherokee syllables a, e, si, and ni, respectively, while the shape of the numeral 4 was borrowed for the syllable se. He coined other signs by modifying English letters, such as designing the signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively. Still other signs were entirely of his creation, such as , , and for ho, li, and nu, respectively. Sequoyah’s syllabary is widely admired by professional linguists for its good fit to Cherokee sounds, and for the ease with which it can be learned. Within a short time, the Cherokees achieved almost 100 percent literacy in the syllabary, bought a printing press, had Sequoyah’s signs cast as type, and began printing books and newspapers. Cherokee writing remains one of the best-attested examples of a script that arose through idea diffusion. We know that Sequoyah received paper and other writing materials, the idea of a writing system, the idea of using separate marks, and the forms of several dozen marks. Since, however, he could neither read nor write English, he acquired no details or even principles from the existing scripts around him. Surrounded by alphabets he could not understand, he instead independently reinvented a syllabary, unaware that the Minoans of Crete had already invented another syllabary 3,500 years previously.

There is no natural safeguard in the English language against the faults of haste, distraction, timidity, dividedness of mind, modesty. English does not run on its own rails, like French, with a simply managed mechanism of knobs and levers, so that any army officer or provincial mayor can always, at a minute’s notice, glide into a graceful speech in celebration of any local or national event, however unexpected. The fact is that English has altogether too many resources for the ordinary person, and nobody holds it against him if he speaks or writes badly. The only English dictionary with any pretension to completeness as a collection of literary precedents, the Oxford English Dictionary, is of the size and price of an encyclopedia; and pocket-dictionaries do not distinguish sufficiently between shades of meaning in closely associated words: for example, between the adjectives ‘silvery’, ‘silvern’, ‘silver’, ‘silvered’, ‘argent’, ‘argentine’, ‘argentic’, ‘argentous’. Just as all practising lawyers have ready access to a complete legal library, so all professional writers (and every other writer who can afford it) should possess or have ready access to the big Oxford English Dictionary. But how many trouble about the real meanings of words? Most of them are content to rub along with a Thesaurus—which lumps words together in groups of so-called synonyms, without definitions—and an octavo dictionary. One would not expect a barrister to prepare a complicated insurance or testamentary case with only Everyman’s Handy Guide to the Law to help him; and there are very few books which one can write decently without consulting at every few pages a dictionary of at least two quarto volumes—Webster’s, or the shorter Oxford English Dictionary—to make sure of a word’s antecedents and meaning.

The old order types were simple and straightforward and mainly sensible. The new order types that accompanied the explosion of high-frequency trading were nothing like them, either in detail or spirit. When, in the summer of 2012, the Puzzle Masters gathered with Brad and Don and Ronan and Rob and Schwall in a room to think about them, there were maybe one hundred fifty different order types. What purpose did each serve? How might each be used? The New York Stock Exchange had created an order type that ensured that the trader who used it would trade only if the order on the other side of his was smaller than his own order; the purpose seemed to be to prevent a high-frequency trader from buying a small number of shares from an investor who was about to crush the market with a huge sale. Direct Edge created an order type that, for even more complicated reasons, allowed the high-frequency trading firm to withdraw 50 percent of its order the instant someone tried to act on it. All of the exchanges offered something called a Post-Only order. A Post-Only order to buy 100 shares of Procter & Gamble at $80 a share says, “I want to buy a hundred shares of Procter & Gamble at eighty dollars a share, but only if I am on the passive side of the trade, where I can collect a rebate from the exchange.” As if that weren’t squirrely enough, the Post-Only order type now had many even more dubious permutations. The Hide Not Slide order, for instance. With a Hide Not Slide order, a high-frequency trader—for who else could or would use such a thing?—would say, for example, “I want to buy a hundred shares of P&G at a limit of eighty dollars and three cents a share, Post-Only, Hide Not Slide.” One of the joys of the Puzzle Masters was their ability to figure out what on earth that meant. The descriptions of single order types filed with the SEC often went on for twenty pages, and were in themselves puzzles—written in a language barely resembling English and seemingly designed to bewilder anyone who dared to read them. “I considered myself a somewhat expert on market structure,” said Brad. “But I needed a Puzzle Master with me to fully understand what the fuck any of it means.” A Hide Not Slide order—it was just one of maybe fifty such problems the Puzzle Masters solved—worked as follows: The trader said he was willing to buy the shares at a price ($80.03) above the current offering price ($80.02), but only if he was on the passive side of the trade, where he would be paid a rebate. He did this not because he wanted to buy the shares. He did this in case an actual buyer of stock—a real investor, channeling capital to productive enterprise—came along and bought all the shares offered at $80.02. The high-frequency trader’s Hide Not Slide order then established him as first in line to purchase P&G shares if a subsequent investor came into the market to sell those shares. This was the case even if the investor who had bought the shares at $80.02 expressed further demand for them at the higher price. A Hide Not Slide order was a way for a high-frequency trader to cut in line, ahead of the people who’d created the line in the first place, and take the kickbacks paid to whoever happened to be at the front of the line.

First, I will suck you." I'm not sure whether this direct statement was just the European way, or if his English was inadequate to express anything more complicated, but in any case he dropped to his knees and started unbuttoning my fly.

Yet the sources of their fanaticism are left undefined. The “last night” letter of the terrorists is posted on a wall, but without any English translation. And so the deeper truth that religious fanaticism was the whole of their horrible cause—that, in the last-night letter, God is cited a hundred and twenty-one times—is elided. It is disquieting to be reminded that the women-in-paradise promise, which sophisticates have widely thought to be a claim made by Western propagandists, is right there, too. The terrorists did not hate us for our freedom; they hated us for our lack of faith. (There’s a complicated sense in which the two go together, but they weren’t capable of making the complicated case.) Their godliness does not exhaust the meanings of religion, any more than Pol Pot’s atheism exhausts the meanings of doubt. But it is a central fact of the occasion, not illuminated by being ignored.

The most complicated letters in English, like E and W, have four strokes. Many Japanese characters have more than 15 strokes

Creoles tend to express variations in time by having a string of helping verbs rather than by having complicated word formation rules. In other words, they are more like English in this respect than like a language such as Italian: English: I thought she might have been sleeping. Italian: Pensavo che dormisse. The idea of potential (in the English "might"), completed or whole action (in the English "have"), and stretched-out activity (in the English "been") that go with "sleeping" are all expressed in the ending on the Italian verb dormisse. (Dorm is the root for "sleep"; isse is the ending that carries all the meaning about the time frame.)

24When Jesus saw that he grieved he said, “How difficult for those that assets exist for them to enter the kingdom of God! 25Is-it less-complicated in searing a camel-nose-ring for a camel, or for the rich-ones to enter the kingdom of God?

Buchanan tried to whip the devil out of me. “Find your tongue, lad!” Forgive this regression, but the man hated English. He may have hated everything by then, including me, but he was uncommon prickly when it came to English. You could tell by the way he bullied it. “The bastarde English,” the old man roared. “The verie whoore of a tongue.” We did our best to mimic him note for note, gesture for gesture. He hated that, too. The verie whoore. Old Greek before Breakfast Latin by Noon himself. The point is, what English I had was beaten or twisted into me. We were orphaned and crowned before we could speak or take our first step. No father. No mother. Too many uncles. Hounds for baying. Buchanan was the most religious of my keepers, and the unkindest of spirits among them. We have been told the young queen of Scots was once his student, and that he loved her. Just before giving her over to wreckage, methinks. Pious frauds. Their wicked Jesus. Then occasion smil’d. We were thirteen. The affection of Esme Stuart was one thing, lavished, as it was, so liberally upon us, but the music of his voice was another. We empowered our cousin, gave him name, station, a new sense of gravity, height, and reach, all the toys of privilege. We were told he spoke our mother’s French, the way it flutters about your neck like a small bird. But it was his English that moved us. For the first time, there was kindness in it, charity, heat and light. We didn’t know language could do such things, that could charm with such violence, make such a disturbance in us. Our cousin was our excess, our vice, our great transgression according to some, treason according to others. They came one night and stole him from us, that is, from me. They tore me out of his arms, called me wanton. Better that bairns should weepe, they said. Barking curs. We never saw our cousin again and were never the same after. But the charm was wound up. If we say we can taste words, we are not trying to be clever. And we are an insatiable king. Try now, if you can, to understand the nature of our thoughts touching the translation, its want of a poet. We will consult with Sir Francis. He is closer to the man, some say, than a brother. English is mistress between them. There, Bacon says, is empire. There, a great Britain. Where it is dull, where the glow . . . gleam . . . where the gleam of Majestie is absent or mute . . . When occasion smiles again, we will send for the man, Shakespere. Majestie has left its print on his art. After that hideous Scottish play, his best, darkest, and most complicated characters are . . . us. Lear. Antony. Othello. Fools all. All. The English language must be the best that is in us . . . We are but names, titles, antiquities, forgotten speeches, an accident of blood and historical memory. Aye . . . but this marvelously unexceptional little man. No more of this. By the unfortunate title of this history we must, it seems, prepare ourselves for a tragedy. Some will escape. Some will not. For bully Ben can never suffer a true rival. He killed an actor once for botching his lines. Actors. Southampton waits in our chambers. We will let him. First, to our thoughts. Only then to our Lord of Southampton.

Lerner held that Brigadoon was one of Minnelli’s least vivacious efforts, despite the potential offered by CinemaScope. Only the wedding scene and the chase that follows reveal Minnelli’s unique touch. Before shooting began, Freed rushed to inform Lerner that “Vincente is bubbling over with enthusiasm about Brigadoon.” But, evidently, his heart was not in this film. Early on, Minnelli made a mistake and confessed to Kelly that he really hadn’t liked the Broadway show. As a film, Brigadoon was curiously flat and rambling, lacking in warmth or charm, and the direction lacks Minnelli’s usual vitality and smooth flow. Admittedly, Lerner’s fairy-tale story was too much of a wistful fancy. Two American hunters go astray in the Scottish hills, landing in a remote village that seems to be lost in time. One of the fellows falls in love with a bonnie lass from the past, which naturally leads to some complications. Minnelli thought that it would be better to set the story in 1774, after the revolts against English rule had ended. For research about the look of the cottages, he consulted with the Scottish Tourist Board in Edinburgh. But the resulting set of the old highland village looks artificial, despite the décor, the Scottish costumes, the heather blossoms, and the scenic backdrops. Inexplicably, some of the good songs that made the stage show stand out, such as “Come to Me, Bend to Me,” “My Mother’s Wedding Day,” and “There But for You Go I,” were omitted from the film. Other songs, such as “The Heather on the Hill” and “Almost Like Being in Love,” had some charm, though not enough to sustain the musical as a whole. Moreover, the energy of the stage dances was lost in the transfer to the screen, which was odd, considering that Kelly and Charisse were the dancers. For some reason, their individual numbers were too mechanical. What should have been wistful and lyrical became an exercise in trickery and by-now-predictable style. With the exception of “The Chase,” wherein the wild Scots pursue a fugitive from their village, the ensemble dances were dull. Onstage, Agnes de Mille’s choreography gave the dance a special energetic touch, whereas Kelly’s choreography in the film was mediocre at best and uninspired at worst. It didn’t help that Kelly and Charisse made an odd, unappealing couple. While he looks thin and metallic, she seems too solemn and often just frozen. The rest of the cast was not much better. Van Johnson, as Kelly’s friend, pouts too much. As Scottish villagers, Barry Jones, Hugh Laing, and Jimmy Thompson act peculiarly, to say the least.

To understand this, you need frist to Know some words which are formed from Arabic to English by me : 1- farcashize (V) : يُفركش 2- farcashization (N) : الفركشة 3- farcashized/farcashizational (Adj) : مُفركش 4- farcashizationally (Adv) : مُفركشآ The logic of the dating does not express the relationship, it is the relationship, otherwise the time that I spend with special someone is a neutral phenomenon and the observation of the neutral phenomenon in the term of the relationships changes its nature. Like every single Sudanese man, I know that I would like to be a one-man multinational fashion phenomenon but to be described as farcashizational man by some students is something I don't expect it at all. The phenomenon of farcashization becomes a part of Sudanese girl's speech, unfortunately it is like gossiping, I was chicken-hearted when my closed friend told me that many female students at EDC said that we were in love together and then you were farcashized by me. At that time we were laughing but deeply inside myself, an idea was rambling which was "maybe I am one of their desires" because when one has achieved the object of one's desires, it is evident that one's real desire was not the ignorant possession of the desired object but to know it as possessed as actually contemplated as within one, so maybe I was farcashizationally farcashized by my friend in thier mind as a wish that the same thing to be done with me by them and that leads to say "girls are dangerous creatures especially when they are your students". When there is both love and friendship, we dwell in the realm of the relationship and when there is neither love nor friendship, we exist in a vacuity of relationships, we can feel and we can express feelings but the more we feel, the further off we are, so what is not yet felt can't be shown and what is already desired can't be hidden so farcashization and desire are not distant, it's their principle that can't be seen. It would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that every beautiful girl is an impossible creature to be got or to accept the man as he is and she is always going to embarrass and farcashize him, as if she is an indocile black wild cat, the beautiful girl is not a unique and homogeneous but she is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different ways of beauty, so the phenomenons which we find in our certain relationships such as farcashization are not transferable with all people but the attitude of the relationship, therefore the dating of two people is like the contact of two chemical substances, if there is any reaction between them depending on that attitude, both are transformed. Finally there is no relationship between any two partners looks like what we really see, yours doesn't, mine doesn't and people are much more complicated than what we imagine, then their relationships are more perplexing too, so you can't judge any relationship according the actions of the relationship's partners, it is true of every relation.

The rules of magic are complicated, confusing, and sometimes contradictory. Magic is basically the English language of universal constants.

Suppose I’m flying a very small aircraft like a Colomban Cri-Cri (wingspan: 16') over southern England right when Brexit happens. For complicated legal reasons, this means I need to land in France. Unfortunately, I’m a vampire who can’t cross the water of the English Channel. Could I fly through the 25'-diameter Chunnel?

She met Bonnie's eyes with her own surge of admiration. Everything she knew or suspected about the girl was swamped by a sense that here was a very special person, with talents in abundance. Her understanding of human complications had doubtless been gained through hard experience, giving her a core of steel beneath her fragile exterior. At the same time, this was balanced by an alarming tendency to ignore authority, to march into situations that she couldn't control and to lie her way out of trouble if it suited her.

Josie said. “We almost gave up several times,” Dora admitted, shaking her head.  “But maybe the quilt did keep us from going home earlier than we had planned.” “I like the name Rolling Stones,” Josie commented. “Hey, that’s kind of like us. We didn’t use wagons, but we managed to tour part of the country.” “You’re right. I believe we should just keep the quilt.” “Won’t it remind us of all the anxious moments?” “Maybe, but we showed courage and persevered,” Dora said, soundly.  “Hey, where’s the bonus they promised us?” “Well, I don’t know.” Dora searched the box and held up a blue envelope. “Let’s see.” Josie whipped it out of her hand. She broke the seal and took out two airplane tickets. “Airplane tickets?” Dora asked in disbelief. “What do we do with tickets?” “Here’s a note between the tickets.” Josie opened it.  “It says the tickets are for a quilt show in Philadelphia. Milton wants us to attend.  He says he will meet us there and answer more questions for us.” “But we’re afraid to fly,” Dora protested. “Could we send the tickets back?” Josie suggested. “I don’t think so. Milton will be out his money.” “When is it?” Dora took the tickets and examined them. “In September. Only a month away.” Josie tapped her chin in thought. “If we decided to do more touring, we could extend our trip from there to the New England States.” “We could see the autumn leaves,” Dora said, excitement rising in her voice. “Anthony wanted us to visit him in Iowa,” Josie reminded Dora. “How are we going to work all this in?” “I have no idea. Why does traveling have to be so complicated and so full of surprises?”   ______   MDora looped a bright red scarf around her neck while glancing out her bedroom  window. The wind swirled bits of trash down the sidewalk of their Hedge City, Nebraska, home. She sighed, wishing she could stay at home today and read.  Buzzie looked up at her and meowed, expressing the same sentiments. She reached down and patted her softly.  But she didn’t have that luxury today. She had agreed to substitute teach for the current English teacher who would be out for at least a week.  Josie called from the kitchen. “Want more coffee?” “Yes, please.  Fill my mug.  I’ll drink it on my way to school.” She reached into the closet and pulled out a beige sweater. A glance in the mirror confirmed the bright red scarf did wonders for the nondescript sweater’s color. Josie joined her at the door dressed in russet slacks and matching jacket and handed Dora her mug.  “A little blustery today.” “For sure.” Dora eyed Josie, wishing she had the sense of style Josie displayed. The sisters would walk together and then would split to their separate ways, Josie to fill in at the

In the American colonies, the first laborers were European indentured servants. When African laborers were forcibly brought to Virginia beginning in 1619, status was defined by wealth and religion, not by physical characteristics such as skin color. But this would change. Over time, physical difference mattered, and with the development of the transatlantic slave trade, landowners began replacing their temporary European laborers with enslaved Africans who were held in permanent bondage. Soon a new social structure emerged based primarily on skin color, with those of English ancestry at the top and African slaves and American Indians at the bottom. By 1776, when “all men are created equal” was written into the Declaration of Independence by a slaveholder named Thomas Jefferson, a democratic nation was born with a major contradiction about race at its core. As our new nation asserted its independence from European tyranny, blacks and American Indians were viewed as less than human and not deserving of the same liberties as whites. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the notion of race continued to shape life in the United States. The rise of “race science” supported the common belief that people who were not white were biologically inferior. The removal of Native Americans from their lands, legalized segregation, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II are legacies of where this thinking led. Today, science tells us that all humans share a common ancestry. And while there are differences among us, we’re also very much alike. Changing demographics in the United States and across the globe are resulting in new patterns of marriage, housing, education, employment, and new thinking about race. Despite these advances, the legacy of race continues to affect us in a variety of ways. Deeply held assumptions about race and enduring stereotypes make us think that gaps in wealth, health, housing, education, employment, or physical ability in sports are natural. And we fail to see the privileges that some have been granted and others denied because of skin color. This creation, called race, has fostered inequality and discrimination for centuries. It has influenced how we relate to each other as human beings. The American Anthropological Association has developed this exhibit to share the complicated story of race, to unravel fiction from fact, and to encourage meaningful discussions about race in schools, in the workplace, within families and communities. Consider how your view of a painting can change as you examine it more closely. We invite you to do the same with race. Examine and re-examine your thoughts and beliefs about race. 1

Every social situation is fraught with ambiguity, knee-deep in complication, hidden meanings, veiled power-struggles, passive-aggression and paranoid confusion.

God almighty, involve a female and a situation was never simple. Involve a rich, spoiled, aristocratic English one who felt she was above everyone else on God’s green earth and it made things even more complicated. And amusing. He enjoyed baiting her. Making her angry. Thawing the ice in her lovely blue eyes and watching her try to maintain her composure, probably thinking he didn’t notice when he couldn’t help but notice ever damned thing about her. Like her pretty pink mouth that he ached to kiss—and almost had. The willowy elegance of her body that he longed to mold with his hands. The curve of her cheek and the shade of her hair, like wheat bleached by the late summer sun or the sand on a Connemara beach.

There is not, I believe, in the history of this or of the neighbouring countries, an instance of more extensive and perfect organization than the late Catholic Association. Its ramifications were as minute, as general, as connected, as the most complicated portion of the muscular system. In this country, the more prominent results, the more obvious actions only, of the body were conspicuous. An election of Waterford or of Clare alone, evinced to the English people the existence of such a power; but they were for the greater part as ignorant of the principle and process of the movement, as the spectator who gazes on a steam-vessel from shore without inquiring into the properties or power of steam. It was only when the effect of these powerful impulses began to be felt by the entire community, that every class at last awoke to their causes, and commenced comparing them with their effects. But as usual in such abrupt investigations, men judged only after preconceived opinions. They squared every thing to their own creed.

had a reputation in Athens for being a meticulous interpreter. When I was at a job, I tried to stop thinking and become a conduit, a bridge that let conversation flow between deaf and hearing cultures. If I wasn’t focused, getting it exactly right could be tricky, especially since not all deaf people use ASL. Some rely on finger spelling or signed English or their own invented system of home signs or combinations of all these things. To complicate matters, ASL is not at all structured like English. In fact, a hearing person given a flat word-for-word interpretation would probably think the deaf speaker was uneducated. Literal translations are about as user-friendly as those instruction manuals that come with some Japanese electronics, because ASL isn’t a way to speak English. It’s a separate language with its own structure and idiom, a whole-body language that relies as much on physical nuance as it does on signs. Interpreting ASL comes very naturally to me, because it is my native language as surely as English is. It’s the language I learned first, signing with my mother months before I said an intelligible word to anyone else.

idea of Occam’s razor, a rule of thumb in problem-solving that recommends a preference for simplicity. When choosing between alternative explanations or solutions to a problem, embrace the less complicated: it will probably be more accurate than an intricate or elaborate answer with lots of parts. The idea was set forth (in a somewhat different form) by the English friar William of Ockham in the fourteenth century; the “razor” is to shave away the unnecessary to focus on the essential.

In the rein of ignorance, the constant state of war which lasted for twenty years did not stop a certain amount of rationality that allowed this writings. pg200 And young men are accustomed from the first to idleness, effeminacy and frivolity, coming eventually to the business of life with empty heads and hearts crammed with false ideals…less credit and wealth, less dignity and prestige. They display vanity, but legitimate pride never. The men of pleasure are well received in society because they are light-hearted, gay, witty, dissipated, easy-going, amateurs of every pleasure. Pg224 The fair dames of the period resorted to every means to stimulate their sensibilities. They seek excitement in dissecting dead bodies. “The young Contesse de Coigny was so passionately fond of this dreadful study (Anatomy), that she would never start on a journey without taking in the boot of her traveling carriage a corpse to dissect, just as one takes with one a book to read.” – Mme. de Gengis, Mémoires, vol I. This mania for dissection was for some time extremely fashionable with ladies of quality. Pg226 On these ridiculous types was built up the whole school of impotent and despairing lovers, who under a nauseous pretence of being so romantic and interesting, prolonged for half a century longer the silly affectation of sentimental melancholy, in other words, a green-sickness of skepticism complicated with pulmonary consumption! Pg227 A familiar axiom of economic science declares that “every vicious act is followed by diminution of force.” Pg229 The Mousquetaires had began by displaying a most laudable zeal, but it was soon discovered that these gentlemen were better at noise than real work. Pg230 “The deterioration of type among noble families,” says Moreau de Tours, “is noted in numerous writers; Pope remarks to Spencer on the sorry looks of members of the English aristocracy in his day; and in the same way physiologists had even earlier noted the short stature of the Spanish grandees at the court of Philip V.” As for Frenchmen, long before 1789, they were amongst the poorest specimens of humanity, according to the testimony of many witnesses. Pg237 The practices of the man of pleasure, the libertine modes, in full completeness, count at most only some forty years of life, – after which the reign of hypocrisy sets in. Thus ends the Sword. A progress of degradation with glowing phraseology, cajoleries and falsity. They put on exaggerated airs of mock-modesty, and assume a scornful pose before their admirers, all the time longing to be noticed. The old punctilious sense of honor have ceased to exist while finally the practices of the man of pleasure, the libertine modes, in full completeness, count at most only some forty years of life, – after which the reign of hypocrisy sets in.

The most important mystery of ancient Egypt was presided over by a priesthood. That mystery concerned the annual inundation of the Nile flood plain. It was this flooding which made Egyptian agriculture, and therefore civilisation, possible. It was the centre of their society in both practical and ritual terms for many centuries; it made ancient Egypt the most stable society the world has ever seen. The Egyptian calendar itself was calculated with reference to the river, and was divided into three seasons, all of them linked to the Nile and the agricultural cycle it determined: Akhet, or the inundation, Peret, the growing season, and Shemu, the harvest. The size of the flood determined the size of the harvest: too little water and there would be famine; too much and there would be catastrophe; just the right amount and the whole country would bloom and prosper. Every detail of Egyptian life was linked to the flood: even the tax system was based on the level of the water, since it was that level which determined how prosperous the farmers were going to be in the subsequent season. The priests performed complicated rituals to divine the nature of that year’s flood and the resulting harvest. The religious elite had at their disposal a rich, emotionally satisfying mythological system; a subtle, complicated language of symbols that drew on that mythology; and a position of unchallenged power at the centre of their extraordinarily stable society, one which remained in an essentially static condition for thousands of years. But the priests were cheating, because they had something else too: they had a nilometer. This was a secret device made to measure and predict the level of flood water. It consisted of a large, permanent measuring station sited on the river, with lines and markers designed to predict the level of the annual flood. The calibrations used the water level to forecast levels of harvest from Hunger up through Suffering through to Happiness, Security and Abundance, to, in a year with too much water, Disaster. Nilometers were a – perhaps the – priestly secret. They were situated in temples where only priests were allowed access; Herodotus, who wrote the first outsider’s account of Egyptian life the fifth century BC, was told of their existence, but wasn’t allowed to see one. As late as 1810, thousands of years after the nilometers had entered use, foreigners were still forbidden access to them. Added to the accurate records of flood patters dating back centuries, the nilometer was an essential tool for control of Egypt. It had to be kept secret by the ruling class and institutions, because it was a central component of their authority. The world is full of priesthoods. The nilometer offers a good paradigm for many kinds of expertise, many varieties of religious and professional mystery. Many of the words for deliberately obfuscating nonsense come from priestly ritual: mumbo jumbo from the Mandinka word maamajomboo, a masked shamanic ceremonial dancer; hocus pocus from hoc est corpus meum in the Latin Mass. On the one hand, the elaborate language and ritual, designed to bamboozle and mystify and intimidate and add value; on the other the calculations that the pros make in private. Practitioners of almost every métier, from plumbers to chefs to nurses to teachers to police, have a gap between the way they talk to each other and they way they talk to their customers or audience. Grayson Perry is very funny on this phenomenon at work in the art world, as he described it in an interview with Brian Eno. ‘As for the language of the art world – “International Art English” – I think obfuscation was part of its purpose, to protect what in fact was probably a fairly simple philosophical point, to keep some sort of mystery around it. There was a fear that if it was made understandable, it wouldn’t seem important.

we simplify the process of our thinking as much as possible, using shortcuts when we can, cribbing from past memories if we have them, and ignoring minor details and nuances if they complicate the task.

person anywhere in Europe would have had a solid grounding in the classics. Certainly the coiner of addict did. Is it an exaggeration to say that Latin and Greek were known quantities in households with more books than a lone family bible? Probably, but if a member of such a household completed any kind of undergraduate or postgraduate work, there would have been significant accumulated exposure to the classical languages, and the cultures they represented, and their stories, their myths and their legends. Obviously old Gabriel Fallopius knew all that stuff. Certainly Friedrich Sertürner knew all about the Greek god of dreams. (And was probably ready to argue for forty-five minutes why it was indeed dreams, not sleep.) In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, anyone educated in Germany as a pharmacist would have known that kind of thing. Which meant Felix Hoffmann did, too. So why did he call it heroin? Even before I learned it was so, I always vaguely assumed ‘hero’ was ancient Greek. It just sounded right. I further vaguely assumed even in modern times the word might signify something complicated, central and still marginally relevant in today’s Greek heritage. Naively I assumed I was proved right, the first time I came to New York, in 1974. I ate in Greek diners with grand and legacy-heavy names like Parthenon and Acropolis, and from Greek corner delis, some of which had no name at all, but every single establishment had ‘hero sandwiches’ on the menu. This was partly simple respect for tradition, I thought, like the blue-and-white take-away coffee cups, and also perhaps a cultural imperative, a ritual genuflection, but probably most of all marketing, as if to say, eat this mighty meal and you too could be a legend celebrated for millennia. Like Wheaties, the breakfast of champions. But no. ‘Hero’ was a simple phonetic spelling in English of the Greek word ‘gyro’. It was how New Yorkers said it. A hero sandwich was a gyro sandwich, filled with street-meat thinly carved from a large wad that rotated slowly against a source of heat. Like the kebab shops we got in Britain a few years later. Central to modern culture, perhaps, but not to ancient heritage. Even

Then came the French vocabulary onslaught. The earliest borrowings were quickly assimilated to the English way. French final-syllable stress became English first-syllable stress: monTAGNE-MOUNtain, jarDIN-GARden, forÊT-FORest, citÉ-CIty, monNAIE-MONey, jourNÉE-JOURney. But later borrowings often didn’t adjust (maCHINE, diVORCE, balLOON). They kept their French ways but still became fully English words. (French stress rules are more complicated than “final-syllable stress,” but to the English ear words appear final stressed.)

They say saudade is unique to Portuguese, impossible to define in English. Nostalgia gets pretty close, but saudade is more complicated. It's the remnant of gratitude and bliss that something happened, but the simultaneous devastation that it has gone and will never happen again.

J.R. Nyquist: “And how will Bukovsky’s tale of Western complicity in communist crimes, and Western obliviousness—and the bungled ‘end of the Cold War’—be received in the English-speaking world?” Mr. Bukovsky: “It is a lonely struggle I have conducted since the age of 16. And the struggle will continue to be lonely. The real problem is the elite in the West, the forces of ‘peace and progress.’ The Western elite is socialist. They were never serious about fighting Soviet power.

I mean, who even are the English? The descendants of the Germanic tribes? We're a great hotchpotch really, aren't we? A mishmash of Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, et cetera, et cetera, to a complicatedly hybrid ancestry, barely united for centuries, and our borders always shifting. We're not a pure, homogenous race sprung from English soil, are we? When people talk about Englishness, I often get a whiff of frowsty Victorian velvet," she mused, articulating more expansively with her hands as she warmed to her theme. "It makes me think of paintings of King Alfred, Ivanhoe and Tennyson, people putting on dressing-up clothes to do archery, and William Morris tapestries. Perhaps Englishness is less about geography and historical dates and more about symbols and emotions? There are lots of tripwires and misty hollows between the lions and unicorns, aren't there? When you begin to think about what Englishness means--- and, by extension, English food--- it all starts to become rather precarious and complicated, doesn't it?

One of my greatest cultural pet peeves is the belief that watching, playing, and talking about sports are more prestigious and valuable than taking an interest in beauty or fashion. I once worked at a beauty magazine where most of the staff was female but several of the higher-ups were men. It was hard not to notice how tirelessly these guys worked to assert their manliness by making sports references in all their company-wide presentations, only to immediately suggest that they were surely going over our silly female heads. Objectively, there is nothing more complicated or of greater consequence about discussing who won the World Series than there is about discussing who put on the most beautiful show at New York Fashion Week; it’s simply that the former is generally a more male-centric endeavor and thus perceived as more important.

Can an eighteen-year-old Yemeni, with a Yemeni accent, who speaks a specific tribal dialect and doesn't speak English, really be an English-speaking middle-aged Egyptian general who's also the leader of an experienced Arab army? They tried for years to hammer a square into a circle, but they couldn't. Here was my own puzzle: How could this have been so complicated?

Translators of the Apocrypha faced a more complicated set of choices. Translators generally used the base text presented in the Göttingen Septuagint. For those books not yet published in the fascicles of the Göttingen Septuagint, translators used the 2006 revised edition of Rahlfs' Septuaginta, edited by Robert Hanhart. However, in those instances in which Hebrew texts have survived and offer a better reading (e.g., in Sirach and Tobit), the translator noted alternative readings to the Greek Septuagint. Second Esdras presents a special problem, explained in a footnote about the Latin text.

A further complication is encountered due to the length of the year itself. The historical ramifications of the inability of man to exactly measure this length have been appalling. The trouble began when Julius Caesar, advised by a Greek astronomer, established the Julian Calendar, based on the assumption that the year was exactly three hundred and sixty-five and one-quarter days long, and that all we had to do was add an extra day every fourth year. This was discovered to be wrong by none other than the Venerable Bede (a medieval English historian) who announced to the world in the eighth century that the Julian year was eleven minutes and fourteen seconds too long.

semiquaver skinned the feelings of the manifold.” Certainly the division of words into grammatical categories such as nouns, adjectives, and verbs is not our sole guide concerning the use of words in producing English text. What does influence the choice among words when the words used in constructing grammatical sentences are chosen, not at random by a machine, but rather by a live human being who, through long training, speaks or writes English according to the rules of the grammar? This question is not to be answered by a vague appeal to the word meaning. Our criteria in producing English sentences can be very complicated indeed. Philosophers and psychologists have speculated about and studied the use of words and language for generations, and it is as hard to say anything entirely new about this as it is to say anything entirely true. In particular, what Bishop Berkeley wrote in the eighteenth century concerning the use of language is so sensible that one can scarcely make a reasonable comment without owing him credit. Let us suppose that a poet of the scanning, rhyming school sets out to write a grammatical poem. Much of his choice will be exercised in selecting words which fit into the chosen rhythmic pattern, which rhyme, and which have alliteration and certain consistent or agreeable sound values. This is particularly notable in Poe’s “The Bells,” “Ulalume,” and “The Raven.

The true structure of the Welsh grammar will be revealed only when we look at sentences slightly more complicated than its basic VSO pattern. Welsh is no different from the rest of the world: it does involve an extra step, but even that isn't all that unusual. Welsh is like Shakespearean English on acid: the verb always - not just in questions - moves to the beginning. Alternatively, it can be viewed as taking the French grammar a step further. While the verb stops at tense in French, it moves further in Welsh to a position that traditional grammarians call the complementizer (don't ask).

The English language contains the words "poignant" and "bittersweet," but it is challenging to find other words to describe the complex emotional states we feel as we run out of time. Our inner experience is too complicated to label. Without language to express the nuances, we often resort to using single words to describe complicated feelings, but emotions frequently occur in combinations, such as sorrow and rage, anger and fear, or love, sadness, and bitterness all at the same time. We do not usually feel this or that, but rather, both this and that and three or four other emotions as well.

A majority of both Americans and English people describe themselves as middle-class. However, as we have seen, just because they use the same words doesn’t mean that Americans and the English are thinking the same way. In America, the middle class is more an economic category than a state of mind, and membership in it is not predicated on as many complicated and specific class markers. Where Americans shop, what they buy, and how they entertain themselves are only mild predictors of whether they will identify as middle-class. The same is not true in England, where membership in the middle class is more dependent upon being the product of specific types of families and schools, and the shared tastes that one develops as a result.

I found a tin of English chocolate biscuits and decided to have some. Half an hour later, my veins pumping with sugar and caffeine, my brain started to work and I had the brilliant idea of beginning the day by complicating my existence even further, if that was possible.

But, as noted in chapter 4, even structured sentences like ‘Flying planes can be dangerous’ are ambiguous, in spite of English’s elaborate syntax. One could eliminate or at least reduce ambiguity in a given language, but the means for doing so always include making the grammar more difficult or the list of words longer. And these strategies only make the language more complicated than it needs to be, by and large. So this is why, in all languages, ambiguous sentences are interpreted through native speaker knowledge of the context, the speaker and their culture.

Software,” as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has proclaimed, “is eating the world.” It’s true. You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. There’s the obvious stuff, like your phone, your laptop, email and social networking and video games and Netflix, the way you order taxis and food. But there’s also less-obvious software lurking all around you. Nearly any paper book or pamphlet you touch was designed using software; code inside your car helps manage the braking system; “machine-learning” algorithms at your bank scrutinize your purchasing activity to help spy the moment when a criminal dupes your card and starts fraudulently buying things using your money. And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer—someone precisely like Ruchi Sanghvi or Mark Zuckerberg. Odds are high the person who originally thought of the product was a coder: Programmers spend their days trying to get computers to do new things, so they’re often very good at understanding the crazy what-ifs that computers make possible. (What if you had a computer take every word you typed and, quietly and constantly and automatically in the background, checked it against a dictionary of common English words? Hello, spell-check!) Sometimes it seems that the software we use just sort of sprang into existence, like grass growing on the lawn. But it didn’t. It was created by someone who wrote out—in code—a long, painstaking set of instructions telling the computer precisely what to do, step-by-step, to get a job done. There’s a sort of priestly class mystery cultivated around the word algorithm, but all they consist of are instructions: Do this, then do this, then do this. News Feed is now an extraordinarily complicated algorithm involving some trained machine learning; but it’s ultimately still just a list of rules. So the rule makers have power. Indeed, these days, the founders of high-tech companies—the ones who determine what products get created, what problems get solved, and what constitutes a “problem” in the first place—are increasingly technologists, the folks who cut their teeth writing endless lines of code and who cobbled together the prototype for their new firm themselves. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet.