Oral Reading Quotes

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By the time you read this, you'll be older than you remember.
Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)
Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
Jorge Luis Borges
For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.
Angela Carter
Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but–further–she left no trace of effort, you weren't aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, I heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral; it had the vivid orderliness that I imagined would belong to conversation if one were so fortunate as to be born from the head of Zeus and not from the Grecos, the Cerullos.
Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend (My Brilliant Friend, #1))
I once read a book by a former alcoholic where she described giving oral sex to two different men, men she'd just met in a restaurant on a busy London high street. I read it and thought, I'm not that bad. This is where the bar is set.
Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train)
...So I put it out of its misery, if it really was miserable, and tried not to think about it. That was another thing they taught us at Willow Creek: don't write their eulogy, don't try to imagine who they used to be, how they came to be here, how they came to be this. I know, who doesn't do that, right? Who doesn't look at one of those things and just naturally start to wonder? It's like reading the last page of a book... your imagination just naturally spinning. And that's when you get distracted, get sloppy, let your guard down and end up leaving someone else to wonder what happened to you.
Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)
Picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your place. You pick up the book and open the pages to a scene too early or late, but never exactly where you’d been reading.
Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)
Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies.
Jonathan Franzen (How to Be Alone)
Before two years of age, human interaction and physical interaction with books and print are the best entry into the world of oral and written language and internalized knowledge, the building blocks of the later reading circuit.
Maryanne Wolf (Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World)
NO NOTES. This was truly an oral event. Storytellers didn’t read their stories; they told them, which allowed for eye contact.
John C. Maxwell (Everyone Communicates, Few Connect: What the Most Effective People Do Differently)
I don’t think that the young people who will be [reading] this will know the same freedom I knew growing up.
Garrett M. Graff (The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11)
Unlike most readers in Antiquity who read their books aloud, we have developed the convention of reading silently. This lets us read more widely but often less well, especially when what we are reading—such as the plays of Shakespeare and Holy Scripture—is a body of oral material that has been, almost but not quite accidentally, captured in a book like a fly in amber.
Jaroslav Pelikan (Whose Bible Is It? A Short History of the Scriptures)
The new pornography would combine sexual excitement with an interest in other human ideals. The usual animalistic categories and hackneyed plots, replete with stock characters seemingly incapable of coherent speech, would give way to pornographic images and scenarios based aorund such qualities as intelligence (showing people reading or wandering the stacks in libraries), kindness (people performing oral sex on one another with an air of sweetness and regard) or humility (people caught looking embarrassed, shy or self-conscious).
Alain de Botton (How to Think More About Sex)
Blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly — there! climbing down clauses and passing through ‘and’ as it opens — there — there — we’re here!... in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love — the ones which love us and themselves as well — incestuous sentences — sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech... ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, and mindful Sublime.
William H. Gass (On Being Blue)
After the stock market crash, some New York editors suggested that hearings be held: what had really caused the Depression? They were held in Washington. In retrospect, they make the finest comic reading. The leading industrialists and bankers testified. They hadn’t the foggiest notion what had gone bad. You read a transcript of that record today with amazement: that they could be so unaware. This was their business, yet they didn’t understand the operation of the economy. The only good witnesses were the college professors, who enjoyed a bad reputation in those years. No professor was supposed to know anything practical about the economy.
Studs Terkel (Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression)
The trick is not to find the story of the century. You won’t miss that story when it happens. No one will miss it. The trick is to find the story of the day and for that day make whoever reads it or hears it care about it so intensely that it doesn’t leave them. Then it becomes a story of their life. Maybe even the story of their life.
John Scalzi (Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome (Lock In, #0.5))
Creators of literary fairy tales from the 17th-century onward include writers whose works are still widely read today: Charles Perrault (17th-century France), Hans Christian Andersen (19th-century Denmark), George Macdonald and Oscar Wilde (19th-century England). The Brothers Grimm (19th-century Germany) blurred the line between oral and literary tales by presenting their German "household tales" as though they came straight from the mouths of peasants, though in fact they revised these stories to better reflect their own Protestant ethics. It is interesting to note that these canonized writers are all men, since this is a reversal from the oral storytelling tradition, historically dominated by women. Indeed, Straparola, Basile, Perrault, and even the Brothers Grimm made no secret of the fact that their source material came largely or entirely from women storytellers. Yet we are left with the impression that women dropped out of the history of fairy tales once they became a literary form, existing only in the background as an anonymous old peasant called Mother Goose.
Terri Windling
Now fairy stories are at risk too, like the forests. Padraic Column has suggested that artificial lighting dealt them a mortal wound: when people could read and be productive after dark, something fundamental changed, and there was no longer need or space for the ancient oral tradition. The stories were often confined to books, which makes the text static, and they were handed over to children.
Sara Maitland (Gossip from the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairytales)
It was the encounter between the printed page and the oral culture, of which he was one embodiment, that led Menocchio to formulate -first for himsel, later for himself, later for his fellow villagers, and finally for the judges- the "opinions ... (that) came out of his head.
Carlo Ginzburg (The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller)
Language as a Prison The Philippines did have a written language before the Spanish colonists arrived, contrary to what many of those colonists subsequently claimed. However, it was a language that some theorists believe was mainly used as a mnemonic device for epic poems. There was simply no need for a European-style written language in a decentralized land of small seaside fishing villages that were largely self-sufficient. One theory regarding language is that it is primarily a useful tool born out of a need for control. In this theory written language was needed once top-down administration of small towns and villages came into being. Once there were bosses there arose a need for written language. The rise of the great metropolises of Ur and Babylon made a common written language an absolute necessity—but it was only a tool for the administrators. Administrators and rulers needed to keep records and know names— who had rented which plot of land, how many crops did they sell, how many fish did they catch, how many children do they have, how many water buffalo? More important, how much then do they owe me? In this account of the rise of written language, naming and accounting seem to be language's primary "civilizing" function. Language and number are also handy for keeping track of the movement of heavenly bodies, crop yields, and flood cycles. Naturally, a version of local oral languages was eventually translated into symbols as well, and nonadministrative words, the words of epic oral poets, sort of went along for the ride, according to this version. What's amazing to me is that if we accept this idea, then what may have begun as an instrument of social and economic control has now been internalized by us as a mark of being civilized. As if being controlled were, by inference, seen as a good thing, and to proudly wear the badge of this agent of control—to be able to read and write—makes us better, superior, more advanced. We have turned an object of our own oppression into something we now think of as virtuous. Perfect! We accept written language as something so essential to how we live and get along in the world that we feel and recognize its presence as an exclusively positive thing, a sign of enlightenment. We've come to love the chains that bind us, that control us, for we believe that they are us (161-2).
David Byrne (Bicycle Diaries)
All poetry is oral, delivered by the voice, not read, and, so far as we are told, not written either. And all poetry is musical. The poet delivers it to the accompaniment of some instrument
C.S. Lewis (A Preface to Paradise Lost)
Hip-hop has had the most sophisticated vocabulary of any American musical genre. I read endlessly its poetic text. But parents and grandparents did not see us listening to and memorizing gripping works of oral poetry and urban reporting and short stories and autobiographies and sexual boasting and adventure fantasies. They saw—and still see—words that would lead my mind into deviance.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials))
In October of 1973, when the Arab sneak attack almost drove us into the Mediterranean, we had all the intelligence in front of us, all the warning signs, and we had simply “dropped the ball.” We never considered the possibility of an all-out, coordinated, conventional assault from several nations, certainly not on our holiest of holidays. Call it stagnation, call it rigidity, call it an unforgivable herd mentality. Imagine a group of people all staring at writing on a wall, everyone congratulating one another on reading the words correctly. But behind that group is a mirror whose image shows the writing’s true message. No one looks at the mirror. No one thinks it’s necessary. Well, after almost allowing the Arabs to finish what Hitler started, we realized that not only was that mirror image necessary, but it must forever be our national policy. From 1973 onward, if nine intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to disagree. No matter how unlikely or far-fetched a possibility might be, one must always dig deeper. If a neighbor’s nuclear power plant might be used to make weapons-grade plutonium, you dig; if a dictator was rumored to be building a cannon so big it could fire anthrax shells across whole countries, you dig; and if there was even the slightest chance that dead bodies were being reanimated as ravenous killing machines, you dig and dig until you stike the absolute truth.
Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)
Furthermore, Professor Uzzi-Tuzii had begun his oral translation as if he were not quite sure he could make the words hang together, going back over every sentence to iron out the syntactical creases, manipulating the phrases until they were not completely rumpled, smoothing them, clipping them, stopping at every word to illustrate its idiomatic uses and its commutations, accompanying himself with inclusive gestures as if inviting you to be content with approximate equivalents, breaking off to state grammatical rules, etymological derivations, quoting the classics. but just when you are convinced that for the professor philology and erudition mean more than what the story is telling, you realize the opposite is true: that academic envelope serves only to protect everything the story says and does not say, an inner afflatus always on the verge of being dispersed at contact with the air, the echo of a vanished knowledge revealed in the penumbra and in tacit allusions. Torn between the necessity to interject glosses on multiple meanings of the text and the awareness that all interpretation is a use of violence and caprice against a text, the professor, when faced by the most complicated passages, could find no better way of aiding comprehension than to read them in the original, The pronunciation of that unknown language, deduced from theoretical rules, not transmitted by the hearing of voices with their individual accents, not marked by the traces of use that shapes and transforms, acquired the absoluteness of sounds that expect no reply, like the song of the last bird of an extinct species or the strident roar of a just-invented jet plane that shatters the sky on its first test flight. Then, little by little, something started moving and flowing between the sentences of this distraught recitation,. The prose of the novel had got the better of the uncertainties of the voice; it had become fluent, transparent, continuous; Uzzi-Tuzii swam in it like a fish, accompanying himself with gestures (he held his hands open like flippers), with the movement of his lips (which allowed the words to emerge like little air bubbles), with his gaze (his eyes scoured the page like a fish's eyes scouring the seabed, but also like the eyes of an aquarium visitor as he follows a fish's movement's in an illuminated tank).
Italo Calvino (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler)
Neddy Nelson: Have you read that Kissinger report he's supposed to have submitted to the National Security Council in 1974? The one where Henry Kissinger warns that the greatest threat to the future of Americans is overpopulation in Third World countries? How's it go? We need the minerals and natural resources of Africa? Pretty quick now, those banana republics will fall apart as their populations rise too high? The only way America can protect its prosperity and political stability will be to depopulate the Third World? Should we be surprised that the AIDS virus showed up about 1975? Do you understand what the term "depopulate" means?
Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)
She expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but – further – she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, the confusion of the oral.
Elena Ferrante
I once read a book by a former alcoholic where she described giving oral sex to two different men, men she’d just met in a restaurant on a busy London high street. I read it and I thought, I’m not that bad. This is where the bar is set.
Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train)
Though she cannot read, she knows well that what gets committed to the page, what gets translated into the code of letters and locked in the coffin of a book, becomes truth while everything else dissolves into the abyss of history lost.
Lindsey Drager (The Archive of Alternate Endings)
Mary Clay said it: “I chose to define reading as a message-getting, problem-solving activity, and writing as a message-sending, problem-solving activity. Both activities involve linking invisible patterns of oral language with visible symbols.
Lois Letchford (Reversed: A Memoir)
I’ve read all the briefing materials they sent. Do you have any insights beyond that?” “I’ve heard that the first physical training isn’t quite impossible, and that the integrative abilities the FS requires make advanced study oral exams seem extraordinarily simple-minded.
L.E. Modesitt Jr. (The Octagonal Raven)
It might be instructive to try seeing things from the perspective of, say, a God-fearing hard-working rural-Midwestern military vet. It's not that hard. Imaging gazing through his eyes at the world of MTV and the content of video games, at the gross sexualization of children's fashions, at Janet Jackson flashing her aureole on what's supposed to be a holy day. Imagine you're him having to explain to your youngest what oral sex is and what it's got to do with a US president. Ads for penis enlargers and HOT WET SLUTS are popping up out of nowhere on your family's computer. Your kids' school is teaching them WWII and Vietnam in terms of Japanese internment and the horrors of My Lai. Homosexuals are demanding holy matrimony; your doctor's moving away because he can't afford the lawsuit insurance; illegal aliens want driver's licenses; Hollywood elites are bashing America and making millions from it; the president's ridiculed for reading his Bible; priests are diddling kids left and right. Shit, the country's been directly attacked, and people aren't supporting our commander in chief.
David Foster Wallace (Consider the Lobster and Other Essays)
I learned later on that sometimes the body reacts to high doses of radiation by blocking the function of certain organs. At the time I thought of my mother, who’s seventy-four and can’t smell, and I figured this had happened to me too. I asked the others, there were three of us: “How do the apple trees smell?” “They don’t smell like anything.” Something was happening to us. The lilacs didn’t smell—lilacs! And I got this sense that everything around me was fake. That I was on a film set. And that I couldn’t understand it. I’d never even read about anything like it.
Svetlana Alexievich (Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster)
Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but—further—she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, I heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face: it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral; it
Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend (The Neapolitan Novels, #1))
In that state I was captured. On the last day before I was captured, both of my legs got broken… I lay there and peed under myself… I don’t know where I found strength to crawl away by night to the forest… The partisans chanced to pick me up. I’m sorry for those who will read this book, and for those who won’t…
Svetlana Alexievich (The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II)
It is easy to imagine a world where not only can few people read, few need to or want to. Serious reading can become the preserve of a s mall group of specialists, just as shoe-making or farming is for us. Think how much time would be saved. We send children to school and they spend most of their time learning to read and then, when they leave, they never pick up another book for the rest of their lives. Reading is only important if there is something worthwhile to read. Most of it is ephemeral. That means an oral culture of tales told and remembered. People can be immensely sophisticated in thought and understanding without much writing.
Iain Pears (Arcadia)
The ruinous deeds of the ravaging foe (Beowulf) The best-known long text in Old English is the epic poem Beowulf. Beowulf himself is a classic hero, who comes from afar. He has defeated the mortal enemy of the area - the monster Grendel - and has thus made the territory safe for its people. The people and the setting are both Germanic. The poem recalls a shared heroic past, somewhere in the general consciousness of the audience who would hear it. It starts with a mention of 'olden days', looking back, as many stories do, to an indefinite past ('once upon a time'), in which fact blends with fiction to make the tale. But the hero is a mortal man, and images of foreboding and doom prepare the way for a tragic outcome. He will be betrayed, and civil war will follow. Contrasts between splendour and destruction, success and failure, honour and betrayal, emerge in a story which contains a great many of the elements of future literature. Power, and the battles to achieve and hold on to power, are a main theme of literature in every culture - as is the theme of transience and mortality. ................ Beowulf can be read in many ways: as myth; as territorial history of the Baltic kingdoms in which it is set; as forward-looking reassurance. Questions of history, time and humanity are at the heart of it: it moves between past, present, and hope for the future, and shows its origins in oral tradition. It is full of human speech and sonorous images, and of the need to resolve and bring to fruition a proper human order, against the enemy - whatever it be - here symbolised by a monster and a dragon, among literature's earliest 'outsiders'. ....... Beowulf has always attracted readers, and perhaps never more than in the 1990s when at least two major poets, the Scot Edwin Morgan and the Irishman Seamus Heaney, retranslated it into modern English. Heaney's version became a worldwide bestseller, and won many awards, taking one of the earliest texts of English literature to a vast new audience.
Ronald Carter (The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland)
A study of kindergartens in Germany compared fifty play-based classes with fifty early-learning centers and found that the children who played excelled over the others in reading and mathematics and were better adjusted socially and emotionally in school. They also excelled in creativity and intelligence, oral expression, and industry.8
Ainsley Arment (The Call of the Wild and Free: Reclaiming Wonder in Your Child's Education)
The organopsychedelic muscimole, an isoxazole-alkaloid derived from Amanita muscaria, a.k.a. the fly agaric mushroom—by no means, Michael Pemulis emphasizes, to be confused with phalloides or verna or certain other kill-you-dead species of North America’s Amanita genus, as the little kids sit there Indian-style on the Viewing Room floor, glassy-eyed and trying not to yawn—goes by the structural moniker 5-aminomethyl-3-isoxazolol, requires about like maybe ten to twenty oral mg. per ingestion, making it two to three times as potent as psilocybin, and frequently results in the following alterations in consciousness (not reading or referring to notes in any way): a kind of semi-sleep-like trance with visions, elation, sensations of physical lightness and increased strength, heightened sensual perceptions, synesthesia, and favorable distortions in body-image.
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce and James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelais was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through ‘and’ as it opens—there—there—we’re here! . . . in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech . . . ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful Sublime.
William H. Gass (On Being Blue)
Listening and oral communication Adaptability and creative responses to setbacks and obstacles Personal management, confidence, motivation to work toward goals, a sense of wanting to develop one’s career and take pride in accomplishments Group and interpersonal effectiveness, cooperativeness and teamwork, skills at negotiating disagreements Effectiveness in the organization, wanting to make a contribution, leadership potential10 Of seven desired traits, just one was academic: competence in reading, writing, and math.
Daniel Goleman (Working With Emotional Intelligence)
I’ll get down on my knees to beg you—please, find our Anna Sushko. She lived in our village. In Kozhushki. Her name is Anna Sushko. I’ll tell you how she looked, and you’ll type it up. She has a hump, and she was mute from birth. She lived by herself. She was sixty. During the time of the transfer they put her in an ambulance and drove her off somewhere. She never learned how to read, so we never got any letters from her. The lonely and the sick were put in special places. They hid them. But no one knows where. Write this down . . .
Svetlana Alexievich (Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster)
Oral teaching was to a great extent ruled out; a large number of books on many subjects were set for reading in morning school-hours; so much work was set that there was only time for a single reading; all reading was tested by a narration of the whole or a given passage, whether orally or in writing. Children working on these lines know months after that which they have read and are remarkable for their power of concentration (attention); they have little trouble with spelling or composition and become well-informed, intelligent persons.
Charlotte Mason, Towards A Philosophy of Education
Jeff Ament: The minute we started rehearsing and Ed started singing -- which was within an hour of him landing in Seattle -- was the first time I was like, "Wow, this is a band that I'd play at home on my stereo." What he was writing about was the space Stone and I were in. We'd just lost one of our friends to a dark and evil addiction, and he was putting that feeling to words. I saw him as a brother. That's what pulled me back in [to making music]. It's like when you read a book and there's something describing something you've felt all your life.
Mark Yarm (Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge)
but—further—she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, I heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face: it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral; it had the vivid orderliness that I imagined would belong to conversation if one were so fortunate as to be born from the head of Zeus and not from the Grecos, the Cerullos. I was ashamed of the childish pages I had written to her, the overwrought tone, the frivolity, the false cheer, the false grief.
Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1))
The problem in both cases can be attributed to poor connections between the greenfield and the mainstream. Indeed, when people operate in silos, companies may miss innovation opportunities altogether. Game-changing innovations often cut across established channels or combine elements of existing capacity in new ways. CBS was once the world’s largest broadcaster and owned the world’s largest record company, yet it failed to invent music video, losing this opportunity to MTV. In the late 1990s, Gillette had a toothbrush unit (Oral B), an appliance unit (Braun), and a battery unit (Duracell), but lagged in introducing a battery-powered toothbrush.
Harvard Business Publishing (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation (with featured article "The Discipline of Innovation," by Peter F. Drucker))
To write about that now, when only ten years have gone by. Write about it? I think it's senseless. You can't explain it, you can't understand it. We’ll still try to imagine something that looks like our own lives now. I've tried it and it doesn’t work. The Chernobyl explosion gave us the mythology of Chernobyl. The papers and magazines compete to see who can write the most frightening article. People who weren't there love to be frightened. Everyone read about mushrooms the size of human heads, but no one actually found them. So instead of writing, you should record. Document. Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl—there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.
Svetlana Alexievich (Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster)
So many of his proposals looked crazy at first glance, but once you peeled back the first layer, you realized that underneath there existed a core of irrefutable logic. Take the new punishment laws, those really set me off. Putting people in stocks? Whipping them in town squares!?! What was this, Old Salem, the Taliban’s Afghanistan? It sounded barbaric, un-American, until you really thought about the options. What were you going to do with thieves and looters, put them in prison? Who would that help? Who could afford to divert able-bodied citizens to feed, clothe, and guard other able-bodied citizens? More importantly, why remove the punished from society when they could serve as such a valuable deterrent? Yes, there was the fear of pain—the lash, the cane—but all of that paled when compared to public humiliation. People were terrified of having their crimes exposed. At a time when everyone was pulling together, helping each other out, working to protect and take care of one another, the worst thing you could do to someone was to march them up into the public square with a giant poster reading “I Stole My Neighbor’s Firewood.” Shame’s a powerful weapon, but it depended on everyone else doing the right thing. No one is above the law, and seeing a senator given fifteen lashes for his involvement in war profiteering did more to curb crime than a cop on every street corner.
Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)
But enslaved people were not uncritical or gullible in their appropriation of the biblical text. John Jea, already quoted as an example of early black reverence for the Scripture, also illustrates the ability of some slaves to distinguish between the reliability of the Bible’s content itself and the unreliable teaching of the Bible in the hands of some white masters. Jea recalls: After our master had been treating us in this cruel manner [severe floggings, sometimes unto death], we were obliged to thank him for the punishment he had been inflicting on us, quoting that Scripture which saith, “Bless the rod, and him that hath appointed it.” But, though he was a professor of religion, he forgot that passage which saith “God is love, and whoso dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” And, again, we are commanded to love our enemies; but it appeared evident that his wretched heart was hardened.8 Jea’s account and others like it teach us that African-American Christians trusted the Bible while they suspected the self-serving motives and Scripture-twisting actions of white preachers and slave owners. It’s fascinating to consider that a highly oral people revered the Scriptures they could not read even while they rejected the oracles of co-opted preachers they could hear. One could say that African-American Christianity began with an unread Bible placed on the center of the church’s ecclesial coffee table.
Thabiti M. Anyabwile (Reviving the Black Church)
Or is it the opposite-that the US has moved so far and so fast toward cultural permissiveness that we've reached a kind of apsidal point? It might be instructive to try seeing things from the perspective of, say, a God-fearing hard-working rural-Midwestern military vet. It's not that hard. Imagine gazing through his eyes at the world of MTV and the content of video games, at the gross sexualization of children's fashions, at Janet Jackson flashing her aureole on what's supposed to be a holy day. Imagine you're him having to explain to your youngest what oral sex is and what it's got to do with a US president. Ads for penis enlargers and Hot Wet Sluts are popping up out of nowhere on your family's computer. Your kids' school is teaching them WWII and Vietnam in terms of Japanese internment and the horrors of My Lai. Homosexuals are demanding holy matrimony; your doctor's moving away because he can't afford the lawsuit insurance; illegal aliens want driver's licenses; Hollywood elites are bashing America and making millions from it; the president's ridiculed for reading his Bible; priests are diddling kids left and right. Shit, the country's been directly attacked, and people aren't supporting our commander in chief. Assume for a moment that it's not silly to see things this man's way. What cogent, compelling, relevant message can the center and left offer him? Can we bear to admit that we've actually helped set him up to hear "We 're better than they are" not as twisted and scary but as refreshing and redemptive and true? If so, then now what?
David Foster Wallace (Consider the Lobster and Other Essays)
That's a good point. But, some flexibility, some openness... I mean, imagine Virginia Woolf coming for treatment. She's deeply depressed, suicidal. Let's say I'm a neo-Freudian psychotherapist, she even liked Freud so there, and I'm offering her smart neo-Freudian comments. But they don't stick, somehow. What I do doesn't work, she gets even more depressed, even more suicidal. She's about to end her life. So tell me: how arrogant would it be not to try anything that might work? How would I not say to myself: 'Okay, for some reason, the interpretations about her early sexual life and the fact that she's stuck in the oral stage - they don't seem to work, she keeps getting worse... Let's try something else.' Maybe she's more of an intersubjective type, a relationship type, a moment-to-moment person. Or maybe, I should do something like this: 'Virginia, I know that Tuesdays are really tough. God damn these Tuesday mornings... Why don't you go visit your sister, you like her daughter, don't you? Play with her a little... Read her a book, I don't know. Just don't be home by yourself.
Valery Hazanov (The Fear of Doing Nothing: Notes of a Young Therapist)
This journey by time capsule to the early 1940s is not always a pleasant one. It affords us a glimpse at the pre-civil rights South. This was true in the raw copy of the guidebooks as well. The Alabama guidebook copy referred to blacks as “darkies.” It originally described the city of Florence struggling through “the terrible reconstruction, those evil days when in bitter poverty, her best and bravest of them sleep in Virginia battlefields, her civilization destroyed . . . And now when the darkest hour had struck, came a flash of light, the forerunners of dawn. It was the Ku Klux Klan . . .” The Dover, Delaware, report stated that “Negroes whistle melodiously.” Ohio copy talked of their “love for pageantry and fancy dress.” Such embarrassingly racist passages were usually edited out, but the America Eats manuscripts are unedited, so the word darkies remains in a Kentucky recipe for eggnog. In the southern essays from America Eats, whenever there is dialogue between a black and a white, it reads like an exchange between a slave and a master. There also seems to be a racist oral fixation. Black people are always sporting big “grins.” A description of a Mississippi barbecue cook states, “Bluebill is what is known as a ‘bluegum’ Negro, and they call him the brother of the Ugly man, but personal beauty is not in the least necessary to a barbecue cook.
Mark Kurlansky (The Food of a Younger Land: The WPA's Portrait of Food in Pre-World War II America)
Questions and Topics for Discussion This book is written in an oral history format. Why do you think the author chose to structure the book this way? How does this approach affect your reading experience? At one point Daisy says, “I was just supposed to be the inspiration for some man’s great idea….I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else’s muse.” How does her experience of being used by others contribute to the decisions she makes when she joins The Six? Why do you think Billy has such a strong need to control the group, both early on when they are simply the Dunne Brothers and later when they become Daisy Jones & The Six? There are two sets of brothers in The Six: Eddie and Pete Loving, and Billy and Graham Dunne. How do these sibling relationships affect the band? Daisy, Camila, Simone, and Karen are each very different embodiments of female strength and creativity. Who are you most drawn to and why? Billy and Daisy become polarizing figures for the band. Who in the book gravitates more toward Billy’s leadership, and who is more inclined to follow Daisy’s way of doing things? How do these alliances change over time, and how does this dynamic upset the group’s balance? Why do you think Billy and Daisy clash so strongly? What misunderstandings between them are revealed through the “author’s” investigation? What do you think of Camila’s decision to stand by Billy, despite the ways that he has hurt her through his trouble with addiction and wavering faithfulness?
Taylor Jenkins Reid (Daisy Jones & The Six)
Headed, appropriately enough, by the succinct title “BREVITY,” the minute began: “To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.” He set out four ways for his ministers and their staffs to improve their reports. First, he wrote, reports should “set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs.” If the report involved discussion of complicated matters or statistical analysis, this should be placed in an appendix. Often, he observed, a full report could be dispensed with entirely, in favor of an aide-mémoire “consisting of headings only, which can be expanded orally if needed.” Finally, he attacked the cumbersome prose that so often marked official reports. “Let us have an end to phrases such as these,” he wrote, and quoted two offenders: “It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…” “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect…” He wrote: “Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.” The resulting prose, he wrote, “may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.
Erik Larson (The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz)
We have so little in common, but we were both avid readers growing up. I read almost nonstop when I was little, and it saved me in school. I hated classes, hated teachers. They always wanted me to do things I didn't want to do. But because I was a reader, they knew I wasn't stupid, just different. They cut me slack. It got me through. Reading couldn't help me make friends, though. I never got the hang of it. I would talk to kids, and over the years a handful of them even seemed to like me enough to ask to come over, but after that first visit to the house they never lasted. Ma told me what I did wrong but I could never manage to do it right. 'Act interested in what they say,' she said, but they never said anything interesting. 'Don't talk too much,' she said, but it never seemed like too much to me. So it wasn't like people threw tomatoes at me, or dipped my pigtails in inkwells, or stood up to move their desks away from mine, but I never really managed to make friends that I could keep. And I got used to it. I got used to a lot of things. Writing extra papers to make up for falling short in class participation. Volunteering to do the planning and the typing up whenever we had group work assigned, because I knew I could never really work right with a group. And the coping always worked. Up until three years into college, where despite Ma's repeated demands to try harder, I stalled. Every semester since, I was always still trying to finish that last Oral Communications class, which I had repeatedly failed. This semester I only made it six weeks in before it became obvious I wouldn't pass. I think we'd both finally given up.
Jael McHenry (The Kitchen Daughter)
On Friday, August 9, for example, amid a rising tide of urgent war matters, he found time to address a minute to the members of his War Cabinet on a subject dear to him: the length and writing style of the reports that arrived in his black box each day. Headed, appropriately enough, by the succinct title “BREVITY,” the minute began: “To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.” He set out four ways for his ministers and their staffs to improve their reports. First, he wrote, reports should “set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs.” If the report involved discussion of complicated matters or statistical analysis, this should be placed in an appendix. Often, he observed, a full report could be dispensed with entirely, in favor of an aide-mémoire “consisting of headings only, which can be expanded orally if needed.” Finally, he attacked the cumbersome prose that so often marked official reports. “Let us have an end to phrases such as these,” he wrote, and quoted two offenders: “It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…” “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect…” He wrote: “Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.” The resulting prose, he wrote, “may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.” That evening, as he had done almost every weekend thus far, he set off for the country.
Erik Larson (The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz)
Besides, it’s not as big a deal as people make it out to be. You just have to be prepared to answer any question on any of the four hundred books you’ve read so far in graduate school. And if you get it wrong, they kick you out,” she said. He fixed her with a look of barely contained awe while she stirred the salad around her plate with the tines of her fork. She smiled at him. Part of learning to be a professor was learning to behave in a professorial way. Thomas could not be permitted to see how afraid she was. The oral qualifying exam is usually a turning point—a moment when the professoriate welcomes you as a colleague rather than as an apprentice. More infamously, the exam can also be the scene of spectacular intellectual carnage, as the unprepared student—conscious but powerless—witnesses her own professional vivisection. Either way, she will be forced to face her inadequacies. Connie was a careful, precise young woman, not given to leaving anything to chance. As she pushed the half-eaten salad across the table away from the worshipful Thomas, she told herself that she was as prepared as it was possible to be. In her mind ranged whole shelvesful of books, annotated and bookmarked, and as she set aside her luncheon fork she roamed through the shelves of her acquired knowledge, quizzing herself. Where are the economics books? Here. And the books on costume and material culture? One shelf over, on the left. A shadow of doubt crossed her face. But what if she was not prepared enough? The first wave of nausea contorted her stomach, and her face grew paler. Every year, it happened to someone. For years she had heard the whispers about students who had cracked, run sobbing from the examination room, their academic careers over before they had even begun. There were really only two ways that this could go. Her performance today could, in theory, raise her significantly in departmental regard. Today, if she handled herself correctly, she would be one step closer to becoming a professor. Or she would look in the shelves
Katherine Howe (The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane)
What a joy this book is! I love recipe books, but it’s short-lived; I enjoy the pictures for several minutes, read a few pages, and then my eyes glaze over. They are basically books to be used in the kitchen for one recipe at a time. This book, however, is in a different class altogether and designed to be read in its entirety. It’s in its own sui generis category; it has recipes at the end of most of the twenty-one chapters, but it’s a book to be read from cover to cover, yet it could easily be read chapter by chapter, in any order, as they are all self-contained. Every bite-sized chapter is a flowing narrative from a well-stocked brain encompassing Balinese culture, geography and history, while not losing its main focus: food. As you would expect from a scholar with a PhD in history from Columbia University, the subject matter has been meticulously researched, not from books and articles and other people’s work, but from actually being on the ground and in the markets and in the kitchens of Balinese families, where the Balinese themselves learn their culinary skills, hands on, passed down orally, manually and practically from generation to generation. Vivienne Kruger has lived in Bali long enough to get it right. That’s no mean feat, as the subject has not been fully studied before. Yes, there are so-called Balinese recipe books, most, if I’m not mistaken, written by foreigners, and heavily adapted. The dishes have not, until now, been systematically placed in their proper cultural context, which is extremely important for the Balinese, nor has there been any examination of the numerous varieties of each type of recipe, nor have they been given their true Balinese names. This groundbreaking book is a pleasure to read, not just for its fascinating content, which I learnt a lot from, but for the exuberance, enthusiasm and originality of the language. There’s not a dull sentence in the book. You just can’t wait to read the next phrase. There are eye-opening and jaw-dropping passages for the general reader as Kruger describes delicacies from the village of Tengkudak in Tabanan district — grasshoppers, dragonflies, eels and live baby bees — and explains how they are caught and cooked. She does not shy away from controversial subjects, such as eating dog and turtle. Parts of it are not for the faint-hearted, but other parts make you want to go out and join the participants, such as the Nusa Lembongan fishermen, who sail their outriggers at 5.30 a.m. The author quotes Miguel Covarrubias, the great Mexican observer of the 1930s, who wrote “The Island of Bali.” It has inspired all writers since, including myself and my co-author, Ni Wayan Murni, in our book “Secrets of Bali, Fresh Light on the Morning of the World.” There is, however, no bibliography, which I found strange at first. I can only imagine it’s a reflection of how original the subject matter is; there simply are no other sources. Throughout the book Kruger mentions Balinese and Indonesian words and sometimes discusses their derivations. It’s a Herculean task. I was intrigued to read that “satay” comes from the Tamil word for flesh ( sathai ) and that South Indians brought satay to Southeast Asia before Indonesia developed its own tradition. The book is full of interesting tidbits like this. The book contains 47 recipes in all, 11 of which came from Murni’s own restaurant, Murni’s Warung, in Ubud. Mr Dolphin of Warung Dolphin in Lovina also contributed a number of recipes. Kruger adds an introduction to each recipe, with a detailed and usually very personal commentary. I think my favorite, though, is from a village priest (pemangku), I Made Arnila of the Ganesha (Siwa) Temple in Lovina. water. I am sure most will enjoy this book enormously; I certainly did.” Review published in The Jakarta Globe, April 17, 2014. Jonathan Copeland is an author and photographer based in Bali. thejakartaglobe/features/spiritual-journey-culinary-world-bali
Vivienne Kruger
In my youth . . . my sacred youth . . . in eaves sole sparowe sat not more alone than I . . . in my youth, my saucer-deep youth, when I possessed a mirror and both a morning and an evening comb . . . in my youth, my pimpled, shame-faced, sugared youth, when I dreamed myself a fornicator and a poet; when life seemed to be ahead somewhere like a land o’ lakes vacation cottage, and I was pure tumescence, all seed, afloat like fuzz among the butterflies and bees; when I was the bursting pod of a fall weed; when I was the hum of sperm in the autumn air, the blue of it like watered silk, vellum to which I came in a soft cloud; O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, I sang then, knowing naught, clinging to the tall slim wheatweed which lay in a purple haze along the highway like a cotton star . . . in my fumbling, lubricious, my uticated youth, when a full bosom and a fine round line of Keats, Hart Crane, or Yeats produced in me the same effect—a moan throughout my molecules—in my limeade time, my uncorked innocence, my jellybelly days, when I repeated Olio de Oliva like a tenor; then I would touch the page in wonder as though it were a woman, as though I were blind in my bed, in the black backseat, behind the dark barn, the dim weekend tent, last dance, date's door, reaching the knee by the second feature, possibly the thigh, my finger an urgent emissary from my penis, alas as far away as Peking or Bangkok, so I took my heart in my hand, O my love, O my love, I sighed, O Christina, Italian rose; my inflated flesh yearning to press against that flesh becoming Word—a word—words which were wet and warm and responsive as a roaming tongue; and her hair was red, long, in ringlets, kiss me, love me up, she said in my anxious oral ear; I read: Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; for I had oodles of needs, if England didn't; I was nothing but skin, pulp, and pit, in my grapevine time, during the hard-on priesthood of the poet; because then—in my unclean, foreskinned, and prurient youth—I devoutly believed in Later Life, in Passion, in Poetry, the way I thought only fools felt about God, prayer, heaven, foreknowledge, sin; for what was a poem if not a divine petition, a holy plea, a prophecy: [...] a stranger among strangers, myself the strangest because I could never bring myself to enter adolescence, but kept it about like a bit of lunch you think you may eat later, and later come upon at the bottom of a bag, dry as dust, at the back of the refrigerator, bearded with mold, or caked like sperm in the sock you've fucked, so that gingerly, then, you throw the mess out, averting your eyes, just as Rainer complained he never had a childhood—what luck!—never to have suffered birthpang, nightfear, cradlecap, lake in your lung; never to have practiced scales or sat numb before the dentist's hum or picked your mother up from the floor she's bled and wept and puked on; never to have been invaded by a tick, sucked by a leech, bitten by a spider, stung by a bee, slimed on by a slug, seared by a hot pan, or by paper or acquaintance cut, by father cuffed; never to have been lost in a crowd or store or parking lot or left by a lover without a word or arrogantly lied to or outrageously betrayed—really what luck!—never to have had a nickel roll with slow deliberation down a grate, a balloon burst, toy break; never to have skinned a knee, bruised a friendship, broken trust; never to have had to conjugate, keep quiet, tidy, bathe; to have lost the chance to be hollered at, bullied, beat up (being nothing, indeed, to have no death), and not to have had an earache, life's lessons to learn, or sums to add reluctantly right up to their bitter miscalculated end—what sublime good fortune, the Greek poet suggested—because Nature is not accustomed to life yet; it is too new, too incidental, this shiver in the stone, never altogether, and would just as soon (as Culp prefers to say) cancer it; erase, strike, stamp it out— [...]
William H. Gass (The Tunnel)
This extended reflection on the Scriptures’ uses of “gospel” allows us to now offer a provisional definition. It must remain provisional until we explore the other part of our definitions discussion, the related question of the Gospels’ genre. But for now we can observe that the New Testament authors, building especially on the Isaianic vision, define the “gospel” as Jesus’s effecting the long-awaited return of God himself as King, in the power of the Spirit bringing his people back from exile and into the true promised land of a new creation, forgiving their sins,[42] and fulfilling all the promises of God and the hopes of his people. This Isaianic vision is itself based on God’s work at the exodus, which the prophets take up and reappropriate to describe God’s future work.[43] Because of this vision, described as the proclamation of good news, the apostles call their kerygma “gospel,” and it is why the evangelists likewise describe the work of Jesus and the narratives about him as euangelion. In this there is univocality; Paul and the Gospel writers all understand their message to be one of God’s reign coming in the person of Jesus through the power of the Spirit.[44] The “gospel,” whether in oral or written form, is the message of God’s comprehensively restorative kingdom.
Jonathan T. Pennington (Reading the Gospels Wisely: A Narrative and Theological Introduction)
On average, schools employing a solely oral approach graduate students at eighteen who read at a fourth-grade level; students from Bi-Bi schools often read at grade level. Spoken English is taught as a useful tool, but is not a primary focus.
Laurie Calkhoven (Far from the Tree: Young Adult Edition--How Children and Their Parents Learn to Accept One Another . . . Our Differences Unite Us)
It was a great opportunity to get oral transmission; you can read and read the text to get some ideas, but you can be misled by written words. It is best if done orally.
Eric Weiner
Then we started reading books, and would go out and pretend what we had read about, emulating some hero or heroine.
Karen Brewster (Boots, Bikes, and Bombers: Adventures of Alaska Conservationist Ginny Hill Wood (Oral history series))
The Gospels are also anonymous, and the names attached to them come to us from early church tradition. Likely none was an eyewitness. The writers relied on stories of Jesus that were circulating orally, perhaps (or probably) going back to what eyewitnesses had seen.
Peter Enns (The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It)
But this is not all. Even in a lively oral narration, it is not unusual to introduce persons in conversation with each other, and to give a corresponding variety to the tone and the expression. But the gaps, which these conversations leave in the story, the narrator fills up in his own name with a description of the accompanying circumstances, and other particulars. The dramatic poet must renounce all such expedients; but for this he is richly recompensed in the following invention. He requires each of the characters in his story to be personated by a living individual; that this individual should, in sex, age, and figure, meet as near as may be the prevalent conceptions of his fictitious original, nay, assume his entire personality; that every speech should be delivered in a suitable tone of voice, and accompanied by appropriate action and gesture; and that those external circumstances should be added which are necessary to give the hearers a clear idea of what is going forward. Moreover, these representatives of the creatures of his imagination must appear in the costume belonging to their assumed rank, and to their age and country; partly for the sake of greater resemblance, and partly because, even in dress, there is something characteristic. Lastly, he must see them placed in a locality, which, in some degree, resembles that where, according to his fable, the action took place, because this also contributes to the resemblance: he places them, i.e., on a scene. All this brings us to the idea of the theatre. It is evident that the very form of dramatic poetry, that is, the exhibition of an action by dialogue without the aid of narrative, implies the theatre as its necessary complement. We allow that there are dramatic works which were not originally designed for the stage, and not calculated to produce any great effect there, which nevertheless afford great pleasure in the perusal. I am, however, very much inclined to doubt whether they would produce the same strong impression, with which they affect us, upon a person who had never seen or heard a description of a theatre. In reading dramatic works, we are accustomed ourselves to supply the representation.
August Wilhelm von Schlegel (Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature)
Something critical happens when the cadre of bilinguals learns to read imported scrolls: they gain entry into a library. I use the word "library" to refer not to a physical building but, more broadly, to the collectivity of accumulated writings. . . . humans possess an ever-increasing store of writings, the totality of which I call the library. The transformation of an oral culture into a written one means, first and foremost, the potential entry of bilinguals into a library.
Minae Mizumura (The Fall of Language in the Age of English)
Many children with dyslexia are extremely bright, and often their pattern of weaknesses and strengths leaves them highly functional in many areas, even though they struggle in others. For example, your child may read very slowly, but with excellent comprehension, and she may have a strong ability to retain information learned from oral instruction and class demonstrations. Through hard work and determination, your child may be able to keep up in class and generally earn B's and C's in classwork. With such a child, you may find it difficult to qualify for school services, even with a diagnosis of dyslexia — the school may take the position that the dyslexia is mild and does not affect her ability to learn.
Jody Swarbrick (The Everything Parent's Guide To Children With Dyslexia: All You Need To Ensure Your Child's Success (Everything® Series))
Secondly, [in your study of the Bible,] you should meditate, that is, not only in your heart, but also externally, by actually repeating and comparing oral speech and literal words of the book, reading and rereading them with diligent attention and reflection, so that you may see what the Holy Spirit means by them. And take care that you do not grow weary or think that you have done enough when you have read, heard, and spoken them once or twice, and that you have complete understanding. You will never be a particularly good theologian if you do that, for you will be like untimely fruit which falls to the ground before it is half ripe. Thus you see in this same Psalm [119] how David constantly boasts that he will talk, meditate, speak, sing, hear, read, by day and night and always, about nothing except God’s Word and commandments. For God will not give you his Spirit without the external Word; so take your cue from that. His command to write, preach, read, hear, sing, speak, etc., outwardly was not given in vain.6
Robert L. Plummer (40 Questions About Interpreting the Bible (40 Questions Series))
kerisl n. the sorrow of imagining the wealth of knowledge forever lost to history-knowing we'll never hear the language of the Etruscans, the battle cry of the Sea Peoples, or the burial chants of the Neanderthals; that we'll never read any more than a fragment of the works of Blake, Sappho, Aristotle, or Jesus; or enjoy the untold treasures of so many burned libraries and forgotten oral traditions and unrecorded songs-any of which might have made up the cornerstone of canon, that we'd all be able to quote by heart and couldn't imagine living without.
John Koenig (The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)
The first known published text of the classic fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast" was written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740 and collected in her compilation La Jeune Américaine et les contes marins. To say that the story met with favor is an understatement. By 1756, "Beauty and the Beast" was so well known that Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont wrote an abridged edition of it that would become the popular version included in collections of fairy tales throughout the nineteenth century (although Andrew Lang went back to de Villeneuve's original for his groundbreaking anthology The Blue Fairy Book, first published in 1891 as the beginning of a twelve-book series that would revolutionize the anthologizing of fairy tales for young read ers). Fifteen years later. Jean-François Marmontel and André Ernest Modeste Grétry adapted de Villeneuve's story as the book for the opera Zémire et Azor. the start of more than two centuries of extraliterary treatments that now include Jean Cocteau's famous 1946 film La Belle et la Bête, Walt Disney's 1991 animated feature Beauty and the Beast, and countless other cinematic, televi sion, stage, and musical variations on the story's theme. More than 4,000 years after it became part of the oral storytelling tradi tion, it is easy to understand why "Beauty and the Beast" continues to be one of the most popular fairy tales of all time, and a seemingly inexhaustible source of inspiration for artists working in all mediums. Its theme of the power of unconditional love is one that never grows old.
Various (Beauty and the Beast and Other Classic Fairy Tales)
We didn’t need to read the puranas or epics, we just grew up listening to the stories narrated by our grandmothers. It caught our fancy, it fired and enriched our imagination, gave ideas and metaphors, and colour to our language! It is sad that the oral tradition kept alive by grandmothers is slowly dying! Though there are exceptions! I was pleasantly surprised when I heard my daughter-in-law sing Krishna songs in her mother tongue Gujarati, and Ashtapati while bathing her babies or when putting them to sleep!
Lalitha Ganesan (Vergal: A Memoir)
There is something primal about oral storytelling. We humans have been listening to stories far longer than we’ve been reading them. Sound matters. The written word excels at conveying information, the spoken word at conveying meaning. The written word is inert. The spoken word is alive, and intimate. To hear someone speak is to know them. This explains the popularity of NPR, podcasts, and audio books. It also explains why my mother insists on phone calls, not emails, each Monday.
Eric Weiner (The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers)
The fifteen thousand lines of The Iliad and the twelve thousand of The Odyssey that we now read as if they were novels occupy a liminal space between orality and the new world.
Irene Vallejo (Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World)
Because the Bible is God’s message, it has eternal relevance; it speaks to all humankind, in every age and in every culture. Because it is the word of God, we must listen — and obey. But because God chose to speak his word through human words in history, every book in the Bible also has historical particularity; each document is conditioned by the language, time, and culture in which it was originally written (and in some cases also by the oral history it had before it was written down). Interpretation of the Bible is demanded by the “tension” that exists between its eternal relevance and its historical particularity.
Gordon D. Fee (How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth)
Learning to read and write disables the oral poet, Lord found: it introduces into his mind the concept of a text as controlling the narrative and thereby interferes with the oral composing processes, which have nothing to do with texts but are ‘the remembrance of songs sung
Walter J. Ong (Orality and Literacy (New Accents))
In this there is univocality; Paul and the Gospel writers all understand their message to be one of God’s reign coming in the person of Jesus through the power of the Spirit.[44] The “gospel,” whether in oral or written form, is the message of God’s comprehensively restorative kingdom.
Jonathan T. Pennington (Reading the Gospels Wisely: A Narrative and Theological Introduction)
study, they looked at 100 classes of 10 year-olds. Fifty of those classes had been play-based during their pre-K and kindergarten years – and 50 were involved with early academics classes during these same two years. The study concluded that, “By age ten, the children who had played excelled over the others. . . . They were more advanced in reading and mathematics and they were better adjusted socially and emotionally in school. They excelled in creativity and intelligence, oral expression, and industry.” As a result, Germany returned to play-based pre-K and kindergartens.
Terry Marselle (Perfectly Incorrect: Why The Common Core Is Psychologically And Cognitively Unsound)
Home Remedies For Chapped Lips Home Remedies For Chapped Lips Dry and chapped lips occur all of the time without warning. It might cause annoyance and affect the way that people live their lives, although this really is not life threatening. There are different indications that may be observed, for example, existence of one or several of these symptoms: sores, tenderness, flaking, cracking, redness and dryness. When left untreated, dry and chapped lips can worsen and affect the other elements of the oral orifice. Causes Reasons for developing dryness on the lips comprise an excessive amount of exposure to sunlight licking of lips, smoking, dehydration, allergy, vitamin deficiency and rigorous climate. Home Remedies for Chapped Lips There are over-the-counter ointments to remedy chapped lips, but there also other home remedies which are thought to be more effective and safer. Among them are: Natural oils Natural oils like olive oil, coconut oil or mustard oil are excellent in keeping the affected area moist. These oils are best for those instances where the offender is either dry or cold weather. Cucumber Slathering the area that is affected with the liquid and juicing cucumber slices is an excellent means of alleviating the discomfort of dry lips. It's recommended to keep the lips moistened by doing this several times per day. Aloe vera There is no doubt about the healing properties of aloe vera although its scent and taste are disagreeable. It'll be easy enough lather the lips with the juice and to simply pluck a leaf when the need arises. Rose petals When there's no aloe vera plant available, rose petal infusion is a great choice for relief of chapped lips. This extract mixed with raw milk can serve as a moisturizing agent. The recommended regimen is always to apply the mixture two to three times a day prior to going to bed, and after that once. If raw milk isn't accessible, glycerin is a great replacement. Water The calming and hydrating effects of water can alleviate the pain. Petroleum Jelly Petroleum jelly could be utilized several times a day before climbing the bed and also once. Coating the lips with honey before cleaning with petroleum may only do just fine if the concentrated greasiness of petroleum feels uneasy or if it's causing more pain. Milk cream Milk cream is a superb skin softener, and it has the aptitude hasten the elimination of dead skin. Judgment The key is to moisturize chapped lips as soon as possible to help hasten the healing by avoiding the thing that is certainly causing it in the first place. Keep hydrated, eat succulent foods or cruciferous, avoid sunlight and keep warm within your room during chilly nights. Must Read More ALL Friends tkplanet.com
Jessica
I’d always known his grammar wasn’t stellar, but neither was mine. The irony of being a literature nerd. I read all the time, but actually following the rules of grammar in my methods of oral and written communication? Epic fail.
K.R. Grace (The Phoenix (Daughters of Destiny #4))
in the end, I found that the proportions obtain­ing in Colebrooke (British Orientalist, d. 1837)’s 1818 donation to the India Office Library generally held up. Out of a total of some twenty thousand manuscripts listed in these catalogs on Yoga, Nyaya­ Vaisheshika, and Vedanta philoso­phy, a mere 260 were Yoga Sutra manuscripts (in­cluding commentaries), with only thirty­ five dating from before 1823 ; 513 were manuscripts on Hatha or Tantric Yoga, manuscripts of works attributed to Ya­jnavalkya, or of the Yoga Vasistha; 9,032 were Nyaya manuscripts, and 10,320 were Vedanta manuscripts. (...) What does this quantitative analysis tell us ? For every manuscript on Yoga philosophy proper (excluding Hatha and Tantric Yoga) held in major Indian manu­script libraries and archives, there exist some forty Ve­danta manuscripts and nearly as many Nyaya­ Vaisheshika manuscripts. Manuscripts of the Yoga Sutra and its commentaries account for only one­ third of all manuscripts on Yoga philosophy, the other two­ thirds being devoted mainly to Hatha and Tantric Yoga. But it is the figure of 1.27 percent that stands out in highest relief, because it tells us that after the late sixteenth century virtually no one was copying the Yoga Sutra because no one was commissioning Yoga Sutra manuscripts, and no one was commissioning Yoga Sutra manuscripts because no one was interested in reading the Yoga Sutra. Some have argued that instruction in the Yoga Sutra was based on rote memorization or chanting : this is the position of Krishnam­acharya’s biographers as well as of a number of critical scholars. But this is pure speculation, undercut by the nineteenth­ century observations of James Ballantyne, Dayananda Saraswati, Rajendralal Mitra, Friedrich Max Müller, and others. There is no explicit record, in either the commentarial tradition itself or in the sa­cred or secular literatures of the past two thousand years, of adherents of the Yoga school memorizing, chanting, or claiming an oral transmission for their traditions. Given these data, we may conclude that Cole­brooke’s laconic, if not hostile, treatment of the Yoga Sutra undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that by his time, Patanjali’s system had become an empty signifier, with no traditional schoolmen to expound or defend it and no formal or informal outlets of instruction in its teachings. It had become a moribund tradition, an object of universal indifference. The Yoga Sutra had for all intents and purposes been lost until Colebrooke found it.
David Gordon White (The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography)
Exquisitely sensitive to her infant’s nonverbal messages, the “good” mother empathically divines the needs of her baby with near clairvoyant accuracy, relying on her capacity to regressively revive in herself this early communication channel that, Spitz felt, is lost to most adults. She senses why her infant is crying, a mystery to others, and is able to respond correctly. Each accurate reading and satisfying intervention—picking him up, feeding him, jostling him, soothing him—becomes another interaction in the essential cycle of meaning-making. Spitz saw these repetitions as also helping the infant sort out feeling states into discernible, sequential categories with beginnings and endings (for example: I was upset, then I felt better), contributing to the laying down of memory traces of recognizable experience. Thus Spitz offered psychoanalysis a very different kind of developmental progression, adding to the unfolding psychosexual sequence of drive discharge (from oral to anal to phallic to oedipal) the increasing structuralization of ego capacities which emerge, in the first year of life, within crucial transformations in the relationship to the libidinal object.
Stephen A. Mitchell (Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought)
Handling Resignations   In the course of an organization’s work, boards and officers may be confronted with the resignation of a fellow officer, board member, or committee chairman. There are two reasons people resign from office. The first reason is that something arises in the personal life of the officer that demands his or her time and attention. The officer feels at this time that he or she can’t fulfill the duties of the office and do justice to the organization, so the officer submits a resignation. The second reason is that there is a rift or severe disagreement within the organization. An officer may become angry, disheartened, or vengeful, so he or she submits a resignation. The first thing that the organization should do after it receives a resignation is to figure out why the person is resigning. If the organization really needs this person’s active input, it should find a way to keep him or her. If the person is resigning because of lack of time, then perhaps the organization can appoint an assistant to help with the work. If the person is resigning because he or she can’t attend the meetings, the organization should consider changing the meeting date and time. If the person submits his or her resignation because of organizational problems, the organization needs to look at how its members communicate with each other. Perhaps the members need to be more willing to allow disagreements and hear what others are saying. If an organization strictly obeys the principle of majority rule while protecting the rights of the minority, it can resolve problems in an intelligent, kind, and civil way. A resignation should be a formal letter that includes the date, the name of the person to whom it is addressed, the reason for the resignation, and the person’s signature. The person resigning can mail his or her letter to the secretary or hand it to the secretary in person. Under no circumstance should the secretary or president accept an oral resignation. If a resignation is given to the officer this way, he or she should talk with the person and find out the reasons for the resignation. Perhaps just talking to the person can solve the problem. However, an officer who insists on resigning should put it in writing and submit it to the secretary. This gives the accepting body something to read and consider. Every resignation should be put to a vote. When it is accepted, the office is vacant and should be immediately filled according to the rules for filling vacancies stated in the bylaws. If an officer submits a resignation and then decides to withdraw it, he or she can do this until a vote is taken. It is unjust for a secretary or governing body not to allow a withdrawal of the resignation before a vote is taken. The only way a resignation can’t be withdrawn is if some rule of the organization or a state statute prohibits it. When submitting the resignation, the member resigning should give it to the secretary only and not mail it to everyone in the organization. (An e-mail resignation is not acceptable because it is not signed.) Sending the resignation to every member only confuses matters and promotes gossip and conjecture in the organization. If the member later decides to withdraw his or her resignation, there is much more explaining to do. The other members may see this person as unstable and not worthy of the position.
Robert McConnell Productions (Webster's New World: Robert's Rules of Order: Simplified & Applied)
Manuscripts were not easy to read, by later typographic standards, and what readers found in manuscripts they tended to commit at least somewhat to memory. Relocating material in a manuscript was not always easy.
Walter J. Ong (Orality and Literacy (New Accents))
alone.Illiteracy is a misunderstood indicator. The great mass is largely illiterate, yet there is a rich oral tradition and many Afghans are informally educated, articulate and comfortable in society. Many, despite not reading, know the Koran and a number of ahadith by heart.
Toby Ralph (Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special)
Well, I know you don’t want to talk about it anymore, but I signed you up for that computer match thingy.” Why is it that so many people over the age of sixty refer to everything on the Internet as some sort of “computer thing”? Helen was trying to contain her laughter. “Laura, do you mean Match.com?” My father was groaning audibly now. “Yes, that’s it. Charles helped me put up her profile.” “Oh my god, Mother. Are you kidding me?” Helen jumped out of her seat and started running toward the computer in my dad’s home office, which was right off the dining room. “Get out of there, Helen,” my dad yelled, but she ignored him. I chased after her, but she stuck her arm out, blocking me from the monitor. “No, I have to see it!” she shouted. “Stop it, girls,” my mother chided. “Move, bitch.” We were very mature for our age. “This is the best day of my life. Your mommy made a Match profile for you!” “Actually, Chuck made it,” my mother yelled from across the hall. Oh shit. Helen typed my name in quickly. My prom picture from nine years ago popped up on the screen. My brother had cropped Steve Dilbeck out of the photo the best he could, but you could still see Steve’s arms wrapped around my purple chiffon–clad waist. “You’re joking. You’re fucking joking.” “Language, Charlotte!” my dad yelled. “Mom,” I cried, “he used my prom photo! What is wrong with him?” I still had braces at eighteen. I had to wear them for seven years because my orthodontist said I had the worst teeth he had ever seen. You know how sharks have rows of teeth? Yeah, that was me. I blame my mother and the extended breastfeeding for that one, too. My brother, Chuck the Fuck, used to tease me, saying it was leftovers of the dead Siamese twin I had absorbed in utero. My brother’s an ass, so it’s pretty awesome that he set up this handy dating profile for me. In case you hadn’t noticed, our names are Charlotte and Charles. Just more parental torture. Would it be dramatic to call that child abuse? Underneath my prom photo, I read the profile details while Helen laughed so hard she couldn’t breath. My name is Charlotte and I am an average twenty-seven year-old. If you looked up the word mediocre in the dictionary you would see a picture of me—more recent than this nine-year-old photo, of course, because at least back then I hadn’t inked my face like an imbecile. Did I forget to mention that I have a tiny star tattooed under my left eye? Yes, I’d been drunk at the time. It was a momentary lapse of judgment. It would actually be cute if it was a little bigger, but it’s so small that most people think it’s a piece of food or a freckle. I cover it up with makeup. I like junk food and watching reality TV. My best friend and I like to drink Champagne because it makes us feel sophisticated, then we like to have a farting contest afterward. I’ve had twelve boyfriends in the last five years so I’m looking for a lifer. It’s not a coincidence that I used the same term as the one for prisoners ineligible for parole. “Chuck the Fuck,” Helen squeaked through giggles. I turned and glared at her. “He still doesn’t know that you watched him jerk off like a pedophile when he was fourteen.” “He’s only three years younger than us.” “Four. And I will tell him. I’ll unleash Chuck the Fuck on you if you don’t quit.” My breasts are small and my butt is big and I have a moderately hairy upper lip. I also don’t floss, clean my retainer, or use mouthwash with any regularity. “God, my brother is so obsessed with oral hygiene!” “That’s what stood out to you? He said you have a mustache.” Helen grinned. “Girls, get out of there and come clear the table,” my dad yelled. “What do you think the password is?” “Try ‘Fatbutt,’ ” I said. “Yep, that worked. Okay, I’ll change your profile while you clear the table.
Renee Carlino (Wish You Were Here)
KATHARINE HEPBURN: Oh, hell. We read fairy tales for years, didn’t we? Are they throwing all that out? Do you think that A Clockwork Orange has a lot more to do with reality? I don’t. . . . You’ve got to dream up your own life. You’ve got to dream up everything.
Jeanine Basinger (Hollywood: The Oral History)
The language lifted up my heart whenever I read it, and as I spoke it, it possessed me, it sang through me. When I ended, I heard for the first time in my life that silence which is the performer's sweetest reward.
Ursula K. Le Guin (Gifts (Annals of the Western Shore, #1))
Research into Ruth Rappaport’s life led me to a seemingly endless array of sources in many archives and in multiple languages. I started with her oral history and tried to verify the stories she told. As it turned out, some of them were impossible to track down in other sources, and I’ve tried my best to reconcile the sources I could track down with Ruth’s own words.
Kate Stewart (A Well-Read Woman: The Life, Loves, and Legacy of Ruth Rappaport)
M. Romains had taken many journeys in his country’s interest and at his own expense. He had talked with the statesmen of fourteen European lands. Three years ago he had traveled to Berlin and delivered a lecture under government auspices. Brownshirted leaders had been summoned from all over the land to hear him, and one of the top-flight Nazis had said to him: “You know, no private individual has ever been received like this in Berlin.” The philosopher-novelist had also been welcomed by the King of the Belgians, who had discussed frankly that country’s attitude to the gravely threatened war. As M. Romains told about these matters, you couldn’t doubt that he was patriotically in earnest, but also you couldn’t help feeling that he was intensely impressed by his own importance. His plan was the one known as le couple France-Allemagne, and it meant reconcilation with Germany, by the simple method of giving the Nazis whatever they demanded. For example, he had had the idea that the Allies should have got out of the Saar without the formality of a plebiscite. Lanny happened to know that Briand had been trying to work out some compromise on this question as far back as ten years ago; but apparently M. Romains didn’t know that, and certainly it wasn’t up to Lanny to correct him on his facts. The philosopher-novelist seemed to have the idea that the Saar settlement had been a matter between France and Germany, and that the plebiscite had taken place under French military control, whereas the fact was it had been a League matter, and French troops had been withdrawn nine years before the plebiscite was held. Among the members of that attentive audience was Kurt Meissner, who had met the Frenchman many years ago in Emily’s drawing-room. Evidently he had put his opportunity to good use, for it was just as if M. Romains had sat in a seminar conducted by the Wehrmacht’s agent, had absorbed the entire doctrine, and was now giving an oral dissertation to demonstrate what he had learned and get his degree. His discourse embraced the complete Nazi program for the undermining of the French republic: warm protestations of friendship; unlimited promises of peace; the sowing of distrust of all politicians and of the entire democratic procedure; and, above all else, fear of the Red specter. The Reds kept faith with nobody, their country was a colossus with feet of clay, their army a broken reed upon which France persisted in trying to lean. The republic had to choose between Stalin and Hitler; between an illusory military alliance and a secure and enduring peace. The words burned Lanny’s tongue: “M. Romains, have you ever read Mein Kampf?” Of course, Lanny couldn’t say them; but he wondered, how would this somewhat self-conscious idol of the bourgeois world have replied? Lanny recalled the Max Beerbohm cartoon in which a drawing-room fop is asked if he has read a certain book, and replies: “I do not read books; I write them.
Upton Sinclair (The Lanny Budd Novels Volume Two: Wide Is the Gate, Presidential Agent, and Dragon Harvest)
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Jason Dawson (Darien Connors and the Necromancy of Eridu)
Literacy is a human right, an individual competence inextricable from social health. Access to it is a question of social justice, a nonnegotiable entitlement of citizenship. To say...that not everyone has to be a reader is different from saying that not everyone should be taught to read. Everyone has a fundamental right to learn to read. A society in which people are actively denied literacy, or a society that neglects literacy in wide segments of its population, has reason to be ashamed. If the ascendance of the written word may be imagined as a fall from the original paradise of oral culture, the labor with which we are tasked for that primal transgression is making the world of writing available to all comers. It is an enormous labor, requiring unflagging, communal commitment.
Heather Cass White (Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life)
Judge Nelson announced he’d found enough incriminating evidence to hold Ramirez over for trial. Because of the multiple murder counts Ramirez could face the death penalty. The judge read into the record all the counts: fourteen murders, five attempted murders, fifteen burglaries, five robberies, four rapes, three acts of oral copulation, and four acts of sodomy. The attacks were on sixteen different L.A. households, between June 27, 1984 (Vincow) and August 8, 1985 (the Abowaths). While the judge read the counts in a factual, dispassionate way, Richard sat low in his seat and looked forward as all eyes in the courtroom focused on the back of his head.
Philip Carlo (The Night Stalker: The Disturbing Life and Chilling Crimes of Richard Ramirez)
In my youth . . . my sacred youth . . . in eaves sole sparowe sat not more alone than I . . . in my youth, my saucer-deep youth, when I possessed a mirror and both a morning and an evening comb . . . in my youth, my pimpled, shame-faced, sugared youth, when I dreamed myself a fornicator and a poet; when life seemed to be ahead somewhere like a land o’ lakes vacation cottage, and I was pure tumescence, all seed, afloat like fuzz among the butterflies and bees; when I was the bursting pod of a fall weed; when I was the hum of sperm in the autumn air, the blue of it like watered silk, vellum to which I came in a soft cloud; O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, I sang then, knowing naught, clinging to the tall slim wheatweed which lay in a purple haze along the highway like a cotton star . . . in my fumbling, lubricious, my uticated youth, when a full bosom and a fine round line of Keats, Hart Crane, or Yeats produced in me the same effect—a moan throughout my molecules—in my limeade time, my uncorked innocence, my jellybelly days, when I repeated Olio de Oliva like a tenor; then I would touch the page in wonder as though it were a woman, as though I were blind in my bed, in the black backseat, behind the dark barn, the dim weekend tent, last dance, date's door, reaching the knee by the second feature, possibly the thigh, my finger an urgent emissary from my penis, alas as far away as Peking or Bangkok, so I took my heart in my hand, O my love, O my love, I sighed, O Christina, Italian rose; my inflated flesh yearning to press against that flesh becoming Word—a word—words which were wet and warm and responsive as a roaming tongue; and her hair was red, long, in ringlets, kiss me, love me up, she said in my anxious oral ear; I read: Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; for I had oodles of needs, if England didn't; I was nothing but skin, pulp, and pit, in my grapevine time, during the hard-on priesthood of the poet; because then—in my unclean, foreskinned, and prurient youth—I devoutly believed in Later Life, in Passion, in Poetry, the way I thought only fools felt about God, prayer, heaven, foreknowledge, sin; for what was a poem if not a divine petition, a holy plea, a prophecy:
William H. Gass (The Tunnel)
MILAN’S FIRST RESOLUTION: The Convention, considering the incontestable superiority of articulation over signs in restoring the deaf-mute to society and giving him a fuller knowledge of language, declares that the oral method should be preferred to that of signs in education and the instruction of deaf-mutes. (Passed 160–4) MILAN’S SECOND RESOLUTION: The Convention, considering that the simultaneous use of articulation and signs has the disadvantage of injuring articulation and lip-reading and the precision of ideas, declares that the pure oral method should be preferred. (Passed 150–16) Where Milan’s resolutions were implemented, deaf children were forbidden from using sign language in the classroom or outside of it. As punishment, hands were tied down, rapped with rulers, or slammed in drawers. The period between 1880 and 1960 is considered the dark ages of deaf education. In the U.S., the National Association of the Deaf, founded in 1880 in response to the conference, became the first disability rights organization, and was and is run for and by Deaf people. Worried that ASL would become extinct, they also used brand-new film technology to document the language, making some of the earliest recordings of their kind.
Sara Nović (True Biz)
John began the process of educating himself. “As I got into studying slavery, and I’ve read probably eleven hundred oral histories, [I thought,] Sooner or later I’m going to get to the one where the woman was not raped or the man was not almost beaten to death or branded or his finger cut off or his ear cut off for trying to run away. But I haven’t gotten there yet.” He added: “You get an eerie feeling ’cause it’s their words, more or less. And you feel as though someone is talking to you who never had a voice…and all of a sudden, you feel very strange. It’s not a feeling of guilt. It’s a feeling of ‘discovered ignorance.’ I don’t know how else to explain it. When you wonder, How could this have happened and I didn’t know about it? How could that happen?
Clint Smith (How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America)
Given that the written code didn’t inherit the limits of spoken language, did it expand our linguistic capacities? Absolutely. The medium allows writers to create texts that are far more complex than speakers can produce. It’s the difference between oral storytelling in preliterate cultures and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
Mark Seidenberg (Language at the Speed of Sight)
The typical synagogue service consisted of (1) antiphonal recitations of the Shema (Deut. 6:4) and the Shemone Esreh (a series of praises to God), (2) prayer, (3) the singing of the psalms, (4) readings from the Hebrew law and prophets (interspersed with a Targum—that is, loose oral translation into Aramaic or Greek), (5) a sermon, and (6) a blessing or benediction.51 The early Christians adopted the synagogue pattern of worship for their churches.
Ernest Reisinger (Worship: The Regulative Principle and the Biblical Practice of Accomodation)
Most centrally, how did approximately 10,000 people killed in skirmishes between the EIC police and natives in a small portion of the territory over a 20-year period mushroom into 10 million dead, “mass murder on a vast scale” and “a forgotten Holocaust”? Rather than climb down from this ludicrous claim, which the doyen of Congo studies, Jean Stengers, called “absurd” and “polemical,” Hochschild repeats it. His source? The same Jan Vansina whose work, I noted, was based on an erroneous reading of an earlier report (a Harvard study that rejected the report of the Permanent Committee for the Protection of the Natives of 1919 that Hochschild cites in his letter) and whose own work was based on nothing more than “oral traditions.
Bruce Gilley (The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind)
The strike of 1931 revolved around readers in the factory. The workers themselves used to pay twenty-five to fifty cents a week and would hire a man to read to them during work. A cigar factory is one enormous open area, with tables at which people work. A platform would be erected, so that he’d look down at the cigar makers as he read to them some four hours a day. He would read from newspapers and magazines and a book would be read as a serial. The choice of the book was democratically decided. Some of the readers were marvelous natural actors. They wouldn’t just read a book. They’d act out the scenes. Consequently, many cigar makers, who were illiterate, knew the novels of Zola and Dickens and Cervantes and Tolstoy. And the works of the anarchist, Kropotkin. Among the newspapers read were The Daily Worker and the Socialist Call.
Studs Terkel (Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression)
Sam regaled me with something scarier than tales of life at sea. Nothing he had seen at sea was more terrifying than facing the Board for the oral exam to become a Master at the Warsash Maritime Academy. Sam’s vicarious pleasure in recounting the ludicrous level of detail that needed conquering in this professional rite of passage was obvious. “They might allow you a mistake, but probably not two. And if they smell any weakness in your knowledge they are merciless . . . Predators!” The nautical rite of passage was beautiful in itself to me.
Tristan Gooley (How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea (Natural Navigation, #3))
I’d read somewhere a long time ago that oral sex, given willingly and with desire, was like a higher level of acceptance. That taking your lover’s intimate body parts into your mouth meant you loved them whole, the good and the ugly, that you accepted the clean and the dirty, all those imperfections of shape and smell and taste a human body held.
Roe Horvat (Vanilla Clouds)