Vocabulary Development Quotes

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Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.
Kenneth Burke
She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. "Misanthrope" is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men. And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: "misogynist." But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.
Carl Sagan (Contact)
There is massive evidence that self-selected reading, or reading what you want to read, is responsible for most of our literacy development. Readers have better reading ability, know more vocabulary, write better, spell better, and have better control of complex grammatical constructions. In fact, it is impossible to develop high levels of literacy without being a dedicated reader, and dedicated readers rarely have serious problems in reading and writing.
Stephen D. Krashen
We need to develop a better descriptive vocabulary for lying, a taxonomy, a way to distinguish intentional lies from unintentional ones, and a way to distinguish the lies that the liar himself believes in – a way to signal those lies that could be more accurately described as dreams. Lies – they make for a tidy little psychological Doppler effect, tell us more about a liar than an undistorted self-report ever could.
Rivka Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances)
Ow!' was the first thing out of her mouth, followed by a steam of articulate and literate curses that were neither blasphemous nor prurient.She'd had years to develop a vocabulary of invective that wouldn't offend anyone. It was the sort of thing a princess had to do if she was going to be able to adequately vent her feelings.
Mercedes Lackey (Fortune's Fool (Five Hundred Kingdoms, #3))
The powerful intellect leashed by an impoverished vocabulary is a myth. Without a vocabulary, a language, the intellect cannot develop.
T. Geronimo Johnson (Welcome to Braggsville)
And while I am all in favour of using precision to describe something, might I suggest that you would be better off not doing something so dangerous so often that you need a specific word for it? Perhaps develop your self-control rather than your vocabulary.
Natalie Haynes (Stone Blind)
Parent talk is probably the most valuable resource in our world. No matter the language, the culture, the nuances of vocabulary, or the socioeconomic status, language is the element that helps develop the brain to its optimum potential. In the same way, the lack of language is the enemy of brain development.
Dana Suskind (Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain)
Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is ”breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it. More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, firemen find and burn books while most citizens watch interactive television. In George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949, books are banned and television is two-way, allowing the government to observe citizens at all times. In 1984, the language of visual media is highly constrained, to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past, and consider the future. One of the regime’s projects is to limit the language further by eliminating ever more words with each edition of the official dictionary. Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell’s and Bradbury’s books could not do this—but we still can.
Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
The rise of the buffered identity has been accompanied by an interiorization; that is, not only the Inner/Outer distinction, that between Mind and World as separate loci, which is central to the buffer itself; and not only the development of this Inner/Outer distinction in a whole range of epistemological theories of a mediational type from Descartes to Rorty;' but also the growth of a rich vocabulary of interiority, an inner realm of thought and feeling to be explored. This frontier of self-exploration has grown, through various spiritual disciplines of self-examination, through Montaigne, the development of the modern novel, the rise of Romanticism, the ethic of authenticity, to the point where we now conceive of ourselves as having inner depths.
Charles Margrave Taylor (A Secular Age)
Through the various discourses, legal sanctions against minor perversions were multiplied; sexual irregularity was annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old age, a norm of sexual development was defined and all the possible deviations were carefully described; pedagogical controls and medical treatments were organized; around the least fantasies, moralists, but especially doctors, brandished the whole emphatic vocabulary of abomination.
Michel Foucault (The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction)
Success-minded people must understand that the use of profane and obscene words have no place in their vocabulary.
John Patrick Hickey (Oops! Did I Really Post That)
Working as a white ally is tough, but certainly not impossible. Learning to listen is a virtue that whiteness has often avoided. I asked him to engage, to adopt the vocabulary of empathy, to develop fluidity in the dialect of hope and the language of racial understanding. It
Michael Eric Dyson (Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America)
I would expect a significant development and elaboration of language in only a few generations if all the chimps unable to communicate were to die or fail to reproduce. Basic English corresponds to about 1,000 words. Chimpanzees are already accomplished in vocabularies exceeding 10 percent of that number.
Carl Sagan (The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence)
More studies followed. In 2005 Fredrik Ullen scanned the brains of concert pianists and found a directly proportional relationship between hours of practice and white matter. In 2000 Torkel Klingberg linked reading skill to white matter increases, and in 2006 Jesus Pujol did the same for vocabulary development.
Daniel Coyle (The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else)
A recent wave of research shows that children who eat dinner with their families are less likely to drink, smoke, do drugs, get pregnant, commit suicide, and develop eating disorders. Additional research found that children who enjoy family meals have larger vocabularies, better manners, healthier diets, and higher self-esteem.
Bruce Feiler (The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More)
The cause of the onset of overgeneralization [of regular past tense forms to irregular verbs] is not a change in vocabulary statistics, but some endogenous change in the child's language mechanisms.
Steven Pinker (Overregularization in Language Acquisition (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development))
From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, ‘research’, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. It is so powerful that indigenous people even write poetry about research. The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity. Just knowing that someone measured our ‘faculties’ by filling the skulls of our ancestors with millet seeds and compared the amount of millet seed to the capacity for mental thought offends our sense of who and what we are.1 It galls us that Western researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible to know of us, on the basis of their brief encounters with some of us. It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations. It angers us when practices linked to the last century, and the centuries before that, are still employed to deny the validity of indigenous peoples’ claim to existence, to land and territories, to the right of self-determination, to the survival of our languages and forms of cultural knowledge, to our natural resources and systems for living within our environments.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples)
Though teachers pride themselves on having developed bionic hearing (the phrase “I heard that” is a common part of many teachers’ vocabularies), sometimes it is better to conceal such super-human powers.
Gary Rubinstein (Reluctant Disciplinarian: Advice on Classroom Management from a Softy Who Became (Eventually) a Successful Teacher)
Some types of people seem to be particularly susceptible to extremist online propaganda: people with weak real-world social ties; people with unstable senses of self; people with too much verbal intelligence and not enough emotional intelligence; people who prize idiosyncrasy over logical consistency, or flashy contrarianism over humble moral dignity. Still, there is no formula that can predict exactly who will succumb to fascism and who will not.* People act the way they do for a million contingent reasons. Nature matters and nurture matters. Some people seem strong but turn out to be weak; some people bear opaque trauma, invisible even to themselves; some people are desperately lonely; some people just want to watch the world burn. We would like to imagine that, in the current year, the United States has developed a moral vocabulary that is robust and widespread enough to inoculate almost all of us against raw bigotry and malign propaganda. We would like to imagine that, but it would be wishful thinking.
Andrew Marantz (Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation)
was never told off for speaking her mind, although she was told off for swearing because she needed to develop her vocabulary (Yazz, say you find Marissa unpleasant or unlikeable rather than describing her as a shit-faced smelly bottom) and although she didn’t always get what she wanted, if she argued her case strongly enough, she was in with a chance Amma wanted her daughter to be free, feminist and powerful
Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other)
As I reflected in my bed about this day's event, of creatures small and great, you see, a change I underwent. I felt a part of something grand, beyond what I can see. I felt a part of everything, and everything of me.
Kirsten L. Marie (The Carpenter Bee (Nature’s li’l Samaritans))
At four Bela was developing a memory. The word yesterday entered her vocabulary, though its meaning was elastic, synonymous with whatever was no longer the case. The past collapsed, in no particular order, contained by a single word.
Jhumpa Lahiri (The Lowland)
A truly enlightened attitude to language should simply be to let six thousand or more flowers bloom. Subcultures should be allowed to thrive, not just because it is wrong to squash them, because they enrich the wider culture. Just as Black English has left its mark on standard English Culture, South Africans take pride in the marks of Afrikaans and African languages on their vocabulary and syntax. New Zealand's rugby team chants in Maori, dancing a traditional dance, before matches. French kids flirt with rebellion by using verlan, a slang that reverses words' sounds or syllables (so femmes becomes meuf). Argentines glory in lunfardo, an argot developed from the underworld a centyry ago that makes Argentine Spanish unique still today. The nonstandard greeting "Where y'at?" for "How are you?" is so common among certain whites in New Orleans that they bear their difference with pride, calling themselves Yats. And that's how it should be.
Robert Lane Greene (You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity)
There's a strange uniformity in the vocabulary European soccer fans use to hate black people. The same primate insults get hurled. Although they've gotten better over time, the English and Italians developed the tradition of making ape noises when black players touched the ball. The Poles toss bananas on the field. This consistency owes nothing to television, which rarely shows these finer points of fan behavior. Nor are these insults considered polite to discuss in public. This trope has simply become a continent-wide folk tradition, transmitted via the stadium, from fan to fan, from father to son.
Franklin Foer (How Soccer Explains the World)
Edward Said summed up “the principal dogmas of Orientalism” in his majesterial study of the same name. The first dogma is that the same Orientalist histories that portray “the West” as “rational, developed, humane [and] superior,” caricature “the Orient” as “aberrant, undeveloped [and] inferior.” Another dogma is that “the Orient” lives according to set rules inscribed in sacred texts, not in response to the changing demands of life. The third dogma prescribes “that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and scientifically ‘objective.’ “And the final dogma is “that the Orient is at the bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible).
Mahmood Mamdani (Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror)
In addition to the receptive learning technique, Elizabeth had been reading aloud to him, long ago replacing simple children’s books with far weightier texts. “Reading aloud promotes brain development,” she’d told him, quoting a research study she’d read. “It also speeds vocabulary accumulation.” It seemed to be working because, according to her notebook, he now knew 391 words.
Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
If you ask a boy, 'How did that make you feel?' he very often won't know how to respond. He'll talk instead about what he did or plans to do about the problem. Some boys don't even have the words for their feelings--sad or angry or ashamed--for instance. A large part of our work with boys and men is to help them understand their emotional life and develop an emotional vocabulary.
Dan Kindlon (Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys)
Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. They were people without a written language, but with their own laws, their poetry, their history kept in memory and passed on, in an oral vocabulary more complex than Europe’s, accompanied by song, dance, and ceremonial drama. They paid careful attention to the development of personality, intensity of will, independence and flexibility, passion and potency, to their partnership with one another and with nature.
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
With the increased recognition that an important part of brain development occurs within the first three years of a child’s life, and that reading to children enhances vocabulary and other important communication skills, the group, which represents 62,000 pediatricians across the country, is asking its members to become powerful advocates for reading aloud, every time a baby visits the doctor.
Anonymous
People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly un-charted territory—whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the "fag hag" label. There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are -patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our-parents or schools or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends' tricks and tricks' bar friends and gal pals and companions "in the life," queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability. They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from many straight people. Who among us would give them up? Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room. (In some circles this is a common party sport already.) You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it, and in many ways has already begun to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends.
Michael Warner (The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life)
I want economists to quit concerning themselves with allocation problems, per se, with the problem, as it has been traditionally defined. The vocabulary of science is important here, and as T. D. Weldon once suggested, the very word "problem" in and of itself implies the presence of "solution." Once the format has been established in allocation terms, some solution is more or less automatically suggested. Our whole study becomes one of applied maximization of a relatively simple computational sort. Once the ends to be maximized are provided by the social welfare function, everything becomes computational, as my colleague, Rutledge Vining, has properly noted. If there is really nothing more to economics than this, we had as well turn it all over to the applied mathematicians. This does, in fact, seem to be the direction in which we are moving, professionally, and developments of note, or notoriety, during the past two decades consist largely in improvements in what are essentially computing techniques, in the mathematics of social engineering. What I am saying is that we should keep these contributions in perspective; I am urging that they be recognized for what they are, contributions to applied mathematics, to managerial science if you will, but not to our chosen subject field which we, for better or for worse, call "economics.
James M. Buchanan
Novels begin and end with, consist of, and indeed in one sense are nothing but voices. So reading is learning to listen sensitively, and to tune in accurately, to varying frequencies and a developing programme. From the opening words a narrative voice begins to create its own characteristic personality and sensibility, whether it belongs to an 'author' or a 'character'. At the same time a reader is being created, persuaded to become the particular kind of reader the book requires. A relationship develops, which becomes the essential basis of the experience. In the modulation of the fictive voice, finally, through the creation of 'author' and 'reader* and their relationship, there is a definition of the nature and status of the experience, which will always imply a particular idea of ordering the world. So much is perhaps familiar enough, and a useful rhetoric of Voice' has developed. Yet I notice in my students and myself, when its vocabulary is in play, a tendency to become rather too abstract or technical, and above all too spatial and static. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves what it can be like to listen to close friends, talking animatedly and seriously in everyday experience, in order to make sure that a vocabulary which often points only to broad strategies does not tempt us to underplay the extraordinary resourcefulness, variety and fluctuation of the novelist's voice.
Ian Gregor (Reading the Victorian novel: Detail into form (Vision critical studies))
To be a good diagnostician, a physician needs to acquire a large set of labels for diseases, each of which binds an idea of the illness and its symptoms, possible antecedents and causes, possible developments and consequences, and possible interventions to cure or mitigate the illness. Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language of medicine. A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
Some of the variable words, say lunch and supper and dinner, may be highlighted but the differences are not particularly important. When we come to say `we just don't speak the same language' we mean something more general: that we have different immediate values or different kinds of valuation, or that we are aware, often intangibly, of different formations and distributions of energy and interest. In such a case, each group is speaking its native language, but its uses are significantly different, and especially when strong feelings or important ideas are in question. No single group is `wrong' by any linguistic criterion, though a temporarily dominant group may try to enforce its own uses as `correct'. What is really happening through these critical encounters, which may be very conscious or may be felt only as a certain strangeness and unease, is a process quite central in the development of a language when, in certain words, tones and rhythms, meanings are offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, changed.
Raymond Williams (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society)
THE WORLD HAS changed. Information is being communicated differently. Misinformation is developing its techniques. On a world scale emigration has become the principal means of survival. The national state of those who had suffered the worst genocide in history has become, militarily speaking, fascist. National states in general have been politically downsized and reduced to the role of vassals serving the new world economic order. The visionary political vocabulary of three centuries has been garbaged. In short, the economic and military global tyranny of today has been established.
John Berger (Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance)
Historical accounts of philosophy deal with both the chronological development of ideas over time and the timeliness of those ideas in response to the specific social conditions and challenges of their eras. The chronological perspective follows a particular line of thought as it develops through the years, emphasizing the progressive aspect of philosophizing. New ideas build on former ideas by expanding, modifying, or even rejecting them. In this way schools of thought emerge and the chronological perspective focuses on a community of thinkers who may agree or disagree, but who always share common ground: a cluster of problems, technical vocabulary, forms of analysis, and points of departure.
James W. Heisig (Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook (Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture))
as the nature of space and time are relative to the concentration of matter in a given area of the continuum, the nature of reality itself operates by the same or similar, laws. The averaged mass of all the stars in our galaxy controls the ‘reality’ of our microsector of the universe. But as a ship leaves the galactic rim, ‘reality’ breaks down and causes insanity and eventual death for any crew, even though certain mechanical laws – though not all – appear to remain, for reasons we don’t understand, relatively constant. Save for a few barbaric experiments done with psychedelics at the dawn of spatial travel, we have not even developed a vocabulary that can deal with ‘reality’ apart from its measurable, physical expression. Yet, just when we had to face the black limit of intergalactic space, bright resources glittered within.
Samuel R. Delany (Driftglass)
On Contemporary Jazz—‘Bebop’” (from a handwritten journal dated February 24–May 5, 1947) focuses more intently on the effects of speed and virtuosity on stylistic changes in the jazz idiom, as embodied in the playing of figures such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk—all of whom Kerouac had seen perform in New York’s Fifty-second Street jazz clubs by the mid-1940s. Flexing his talents as a music writer, Kerouac presents an informed, condensed jazz history of the 1930s and 1940s. He not only recognizes the significance of bebop’s modern, avant-garde revision of jazz’s compositional vocabulary, but views those compositional developments in rhythm and harmony as the virtuosic equivalent of the European classical tradition. If “A Couple of Facts Concerning Laws of Decadence” displays Kerouac’s tendency at times to sentimentalize the premodern, this early essay on bebop valorizes propulsive, forward-looking art, the avant-garde abandon that came to characterize American expressive culture in the decades following World War II.
Jack Kerouac (The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings)
The French language is one of the most widespread languages in terms of its presence around the world. It is the only language that can be found to be used commonly in every single continent. You may or may not be aware of the fact that French is derived from Latin, along with many other languages that it is similar to such as Spanish and Italian. If you already have some knowledge of Spanish or Italian, then learning French could be quite a breeze for you. Many languages change over time as different dialects and forms come into practice simply because of time passing and people changing. The interesting thing about the French language though is that there is a governing body whose main mission is to keep and protect the French language as close to its origin as possible in terms of word additions and changes to things like grammar or sentence structure. There are many changes proposed and rejected by this governing body in an effort to maintain its integrity to the past. This is different from the English language as many new words are being added to the dictionary all the time as societies grow, change and develop. The French language and its prominence are growing rapidly as many of the countries where French is a primary language are developing countries and thus they are growing and changing. What this means for the French language is that it is also growing and becoming more widespread as these countries develop.
Paul Bonnet (FRENCH COMPLETE COURSE: 3 BOOKS IN 1 : The Best Guide for Beginners to Learn and Speak French Language Fast and Easy with Vocabulary and Grammar, Common Phrases and Short Stories)
Knowledge about society is thus a realization in the double sense of the word, in the sense of apprehending the objectivated social reality, and in the sense of ongoingly producing this reality. For example, in the course of the division of labor a body of knowledge is developed that refers to the particular activites involved. In its linguistic basis, this knowledge is already indispensable to the institutional “programming” of these economic activities. There will be, say, a vocabulary designating the various modes of hunting, the weapons to be employed, the animals that serve as prey, and so on. There will further be a collection of recipes that must be learned if one is to hunt correctly. This knowledge serves as a channeling, controlling force in itself, an indispensable ingredient of the institutionalization of this area of conduct. As the institution of hunting is crystallized and persists in time, the same body of knowledge serves as an objective (and, incidentally, empirically verifiable) description of it. A whole segment of the social world is objectified by this knowledge. There will be an objective “science” of hunting, corresponding to the objective reality of the hunting economy. The point need not be belabored that here “empirical verification” and “science” are not understood in the sense of modern scientific canons, but rather in the sense of knowledge that may be borne out in experience and that can subsequently become systematically organized as a body of knowledge. Again,
Peter L. Berger (The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge)
The pathway is smooth. Why do you throw rocks before you?’ Using the Pain-to-Power Chart to help, you can begin to clear the rocks in front of you. These steps will help you clear the way: 1. Draw a large copy of the Pain-to-Power Chart and stick it on your wall. Just the simple act of making it larger will make you feel a little more powerful. You are already taking action! Remember that much of the trick of moving from pain to power is taking action – action is very powerful! Once the chart is on your wall it will always remind you of where you want to go in life – from pain to power. Awareness, knowledge, is half the battle. Having the chart on your wall will also help you to keep moving forward. 2. Put a pin at the place on the chart where you see yourself at this moment in your life. Are you in the middle, where you sometimes feel depressed and stuck, and at other times more in control? Or do you find yourself on the far left side, where there is little you are able to do to pull yourself out of the rut? Or perhaps you are already on the right side, where you feel you are really moving ahead with your life, with only a few areas that need to be worked on. I doubt that anyone reading this book has reached their goal of gaining total power over the self. Even the Buddhas don’t have power over their selves all the time! There are always new events that challenge a sense of personal power. 3. Each day look at the chart and ask yourself, ‘Do I see myself at the same place, or have I moved?’ Move the pin if you have moved. 4. If you keep in mind the way you want to go, it will help you make choices about what you are doing in your life. Before you take any action in life, ask yourself: ‘Is this action moving me to a more powerful place?’ If it isn’t, think again about doing it. A word of warning – if you go ahead anyway, knowing the action will keep you in a place of pain, don’t get angry with yourself about it. Use your mistakes to learn more about yourself. 5. Make your use of the chart fun. Having it as a game keeps you relaxed about how you are getting on. If you have children, they can create their own charts, and you can make a family game out of the fun of growing. 6. You might want to make different charts for different areas of your life. To be really powerful, you need to be in charge of all aspects of your life – your work, relationships, home, body, and so on. Often people are very powerful in some parts of their lives and very weak in others. For example, I am very powerful in terms of my career, but need to work on the area of exercise. To help you on your Pain-to-Power path, it’s important that you begin to develop Pain-to-Power words. The way you use words has a huge impact on the quality of your life. Certain words make you weaker; others make you powerful. Choose to move to Pain-to-Power Words as follows: PAIN-TO-POWER VOCABULARY • ‘I can’t’ suggests you have no control over your life, but ‘I won’t’ puts an issue in the area of choice. From this moment on, stop saying, ‘I can’t’.
Susan Jeffers (Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway (Quick Reads 2017))
Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare ‘automeals,’ heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning. Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica. [M]en will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button. Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. “[H]ighways … in the more advanced sections of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground. [V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’ … can be set for particular destinations … that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. [W]all screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible. [T]he world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that! There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be ‘farms’ turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction…. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary “Fortran". [M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. [T]he most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work! in our a society of enforced leisure.
Isaac Asimov
The human child's use of words looks entirely different from Kanzi's because it is equipotential. There is apparently no limit to the child's rapid acquisition of new words and to their very wide application, and the child is constantly using words of everything and everybody she encounters. Kanzi, however, is stuck with few words and with limited application, and apparently has no impulse to develop them on his own or to use them except for limited purposes like making a request. We suggest that Kanzi's "vocabulary" relates to a finite number of frames of limited application and that because there is no higher-level blending capacity, those frames cannot be integrated fluidly, which is the power of blending and the sine qua non of language. The Eliza fallacy here consists in taking word combinations by Kanzi and assuming that Kanzi is doing mentally what the child would be doing with those same word combinations. We have no dispute in principle with the proposal that Kanzi or Sarah might know meanings, might associate symbols with those meanings, and might put some of those symbols together in ways connected with juxtaposition of corresponding meanings. We are making a different observation: This kind of symbol-meaning correlation need not be equipotential. For the limited frames Kanzi is using, his behavior and the child's might be quite similar, even though the underlying mental processes are different. It is a fallacy to assume that Kanzi is doing essentially the same mental work as the child. This is like assuming that because a chess-playing machine can play chess, it is doing all the fabulous double-scope blending that a human being does while playing chess. We suggest that our account is corroborated by the fact that Kanzi's vocabulary tops out at fewer than 200 words of limited application, while the six-year-old child uses 13,000 words with very wide application. The actual wide-ranging human use of even a rudimentary word turns out to be a major imaginative achievement.
Gilles Fauconnier (The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities)
It is not the development of material need which sets the modern vocabulary of aspiration apart from anything which has gone before, but rather the transformation of our spiritual needs. It is our spirits, not our clothes and houses and cars, that set us so radically apart from our own past and form much of the rest of the world. Imagine what we must be like to the primitive peoples who receive our attentions as anthropologists. We come upon them armed with our mastery of nature, and yet they can disarm us with the simplest metaphysical inquiry: what happen when people die? where do they go? what are the duties of the living to the dead? Their cultures are as rich in answers to these questions as our culture is rich in answers to the technical and scientific problems which baffle them. It has always been a truism of the Western bad conscience that we have purchased our mastery of nature at the price of our spirits. The conservative and romantic critique of Western progress has always used the example of the savage - rich in cosmology, poor in goods - to argue for an inverse historical relationship between the development of material and spiritual needs. Certainly this view could draw upon the dark side of the Christian theology of need. While secular optimists have trust in the permanence of spiritual need, Augustinian Christians have fixed their gaze on the nightmare of the happy slave: the being so absorbed by the material that all spiritual needs have perished. Yet human needing is historical, and who can predict what forms the needs of the spirit may take? There is a loss of nerve in the premature announcements of the death of the spirit, the easy condemnations of materialist aspiration in capitalist society. Western societies have continued the search for spiritual consolation in the only manner consistent with the freedom of the seeking subject: by making every person the judge of his own spiritual satisfaction. We have all been left to choose what we need, and we have pushed the search for private meaning to the limits of what a public language can contain if it is to continue to be a means of communication. We have Augustine's first freedom, and because we have it, we cannot have his second. We can no longer offer each other the possibility of metaphysical belonging: a shared place, sustained by faith, in a divine universe. All our belonging now is social.
Michael Ignatieff (The Needs of Strangers)
THE ORIGIN OF INTELLIGENCE Many theories have been proposed as to why humans developed greater intelligence, going all the way back to Charles Darwin. According to one theory, the evolution of the human brain probably took place in stages, with the earliest phase initiated by climate change in Africa. As the weather cooled, the forests began to recede, forcing our ancestors onto the open plains and savannahs, where they were exposed to predators and the elements. To survive in this new, hostile environment, they were forced to hunt and walk upright, which freed up their hands and opposable thumbs to use tools. This in turn put a premium on a larger brain to coordinate tool making. According to this theory, ancient man did not simply make tools—“tools made man.” Our ancestors did not suddenly pick up tools and become intelligent. It was the other way around. Those humans who picked up tools could survive in the grasslands, while those who did not gradually died off. The humans who then survived and thrived in the grasslands were those who, through mutations, became increasingly adept at tool making, which required an increasingly larger brain. Another theory places a premium on our social, collective nature. Humans can easily coordinate the behavior of over a hundred other individuals involved in hunting, farming, warring, and building, groups that are much larger than those found in other primates, which gave humans an advantage over other animals. It takes a larger brain, according to this theory, to be able to assess and control the behavior of so many individuals. (The flip side of this theory is that it took a larger brain to scheme, plot, deceive, and manipulate other intelligent beings in your tribe. Individuals who could understand the motives of others and then exploit them would have an advantage over those who could not. This is the Machiavellian theory of intelligence.) Another theory maintains that the development of language, which came later, helped accelerate the rise of intelligence. With language comes abstract thought and the ability to plan, organize society, create maps, etc. Humans have an extensive vocabulary unmatched by any other animal, with words numbering in the tens of thousands for an average person. With language, humans could coordinate and focus the activities of scores of individuals, as well as manipulate abstract concepts and ideas. Language meant you could manage teams of people on a hunt, which is a great advantage when pursuing the woolly mammoth. It meant you could tell others where game was plentiful or where danger lurked. Yet another theory is “sexual selection,” the idea that females prefer to mate with intelligent males. In the animal kingdom, such as in a wolf pack, the alpha male holds the pack together by brute force. Any challenger to the alpha male has to be soundly beaten back by tooth and claw. But millions of years ago, as humans became gradually more intelligent, strength alone could not keep the tribe together.
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
The mixture of a solidly established Romance aristocracy with the Old English grassroots produced a new language, a “French of England,” which came to be known as Anglo-Norman. It was perfectly intelligible to the speakers of other langues d’oïl and also gave French its first anglicisms, words such as bateau (boat) and the four points of the compass, nord, sud, est and ouest. The most famous Romance chanson de geste, the Song of Roland, was written in Anglo-Norman. The first verse shows how “French” this language was: Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes, set anz tuz pleins ad estéd en Espaigne, Tresqu’en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne… King Charles, our great emperor, stayed in Spain a full seven years: and he conquered the high lands up to the sea… Francophones are probably not aware of how much England contributed to the development of French. England’s court was an important production centre for Romance literature, and most of the early legends of King Arthur were written in Anglo-Norman. Robert Wace, who came from the Channel Island of Jersey, first evoked the mythical Round Table in his Roman de Brut, written in French in 1155. An Englishman, William Caxton, even produced the first “vocabulary” of French and English (a precursor of the dictionary) in 1480. But for four centuries after William seized the English crown, the exchange between Old English and Romance was pretty much the other way around—from Romance to English. Linguists dispute whether a quarter or a half of the basic English vocabulary comes from French. Part of the argument has to do with the fact that some borrowings are referred to as Latinates, a term that tends to obscure the fact that they actually come from French (as we explain later, the English worked hard to push away or hide the influence of French). Words such as charge, council, court, debt, judge, justice, merchant and parliament are straight borrowings from eleventh-century Romance, often with no modification in spelling. In her book Honni soit qui mal y pense, Henriette Walter points out that the historical developments of French and English are so closely related that anglophone students find it easier to read Old French than francophones do. The reason is simple: Words such as acointance, chalenge, plege, estriver, remaindre and esquier disappeared from the French vocabulary but remained in English as acquaintance, challenge, pledge, strive, remain and squire—with their original meanings. The word bacon, which francophones today decry as an English import, is an old Frankish term that took root in English. Words that people think are totally English, such as foreign, pedigree, budget, proud and view, are actually Romance terms pronounced with an English accent: forain, pied-de-grue (crane’s foot—a symbol used in genealogical trees to mark a line of succession), bougette (purse), prud (valiant) and vëue. Like all other Romance vernaculars, Anglo-Norman evolved quickly. English became the expression of a profound brand of nationalism long before French did. As early as the thirteenth century, the English were struggling to define their nation in opposition to the French, a phenomenon that is no doubt the root of the peculiar mixture of attraction and repulsion most anglophones feel towards the French today, whether they admit it or not. When Norman kings tried to add their French territory to England and unify their kingdom under the English Crown, the French of course resisted. The situation led to the first, lesser-known Hundred Years War (1159–1299). This long quarrel forced the Anglo-Norman aristocracy to take sides. Those who chose England got closer to the local grassroots, setting the Anglo-Norman aristocracy on the road to assimilation into English.
Jean-Benoît Nadeau (The Story of French)
The realization that Jews and/or Christians first used all of the technical religious vocabulary of the Qur’an and all of the forms of the Five Pillars of Islam (except references to Muhammad and Mecca) encouraged them to develop a liturgy using biblical content but Muslim forms.
David H. Greenlee (From the Straight Path to the Narrow Way: Journeys of Faith)
Rather than being nonverbal, individuals with NLD generally present with abundant verbal ability, with many showing precocious language development and high levels of vocabulary and general knowledge.
Maggie Mamen (Understanding Nonverbal Learning Disabilities: A Common-Sense Guide for Parents and Professionals (JKP Essentials))
Table 6.1 Skill Categories Skill Category Description Comment Determining the Meaning of Words (Word Meaning) Student determines the meaning of words in context by recognizing known words and connecting them to prior vocabulary knowledge. Student uses a variety of skills to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words, including pronouncing words to trigger recognition, searching for related words with similar meanings, and analyzing prefixes, roots, and suffixes. This skill category includes more than just lexical access, as word identification and lexical recall are combined with morphological analyses. Understanding the Content, Form, and Function of Sentences (Sentence Meaning) Student builds upon an understanding of words and phrases to determine the meaning of a sentence. Student analyzes sentence structures and draws on an understanding of grammar rules to determine how the parts of speech in a sentence operate together to support the overall meaning. Student confirms that his or her understanding of a sentence makes sense in relationship to previous sentences, personal experience, and general knowledge of the world. This skill category focuses on the syntactical, grammatical, and semantic case analyses that support elementary proposition encoding and integration of propositions across contiguous sentences. Understanding the Situation Implied by a Text (Situation Model) Student develops a mental model (i.e., image, conception) of the people, things, setting, actions, ideas, and events in a text. Student draws on personal experience and world knowledge to infer cause-and-effect relationships between actions and events to fill in additional information needed to understand the situation implied by the text. This skill category is a hybrid of the explicit text model and the elaborated situation model described by Kintsch (1998). As such, category three combines both lower-level explicit text interpretation and higher-level inferential processes that connect the explicit text to existing knowledge structures and schemata. Understanding the Content, Form, and Function of Larger Sections of Text (Global Text Meaning) Student synthesizes the meaning of multiple sentences into an understanding of paragraphs or larger sections of texts. Student recognizes a text’s organizational structure and uses that organization to guide his or her reading. Student can identify the main point of, summarize, characterize, or evaluate the meaning of larger sections of text. Student can identify underlying assumptions in a text, recognize implied consequences, and draw conclusions from a text. This skill category focuses on the integration of local propositions into macro-level text structures (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978) and more global themes (Louwerse & Van Peer, 2003). It also includes elaborative inferencing that supports interpretation and critical comprehension, such as identifying assumptions, causes, and consequence and drawing conclusions at the level of the situation model. Analyzing Authors’ Purposes, Goals, and Strategies (Pragmatic Meaning) Student identifies an author’s intended audience and purposes for writing. Student analyzes an author’s choices regarding content, organization, style, and genre, evaluating how those choices support the author’s purpose and are appropriate for the intended audience and situation. This skill category includes contextual and pragmatic discourse analyses that support interpretation of texts in light of inferred authorial intentions and strategies.
Danielle S. McNamara (Reading Comprehension Strategies: Theories, Interventions, and Technologies)
The Present Vocabulary certain obligations blocks my perception another dimension a vision without alteration without wall of illusion blocking my perception forget the presentations no prescription or medication in the creation phase I but all my emotions no intention to tell you about my mistakes pass I represent the present vocabulary be indulgent learn from your mistakes of your misfortune and obliterate your fear be indulgent to guard what is being dissipated is impossible if you do not want to sink you must learn to swim and take strength because his world and become far too fierce I have no intention of being for you a recreation attention to any division of concentration as a vision of illusion the exclusion of all perceptions of emotions without any understanding of good and bad intentions concentration mode, watch out for reverberation, bad reaction, a pawn you want action, go back do your preparation without any interaction no need for explanation no need for presentations no prescription or medication in the creation phase I but all my emotions all these voices a place of disarray in the middle of all these voices the fights are without faith or law in the middle of all these voices no odds to escape and auctanperer you can forget my mind and there to create prisoner never I'm here to show you with the thinking of passing moments and the vocabulary of the present moment for a decent future absent not writing insistent on days much more clement for my present and the mind filled with writing he is not stupid by technology Develop my thoughts often full of words store no time to rest I will not give up no prescription or medication in the creation phase I but all my emotions enclose between two dimensions no need for presentation or tell you about my intentions errors are passed and now I represent the vocabulary present.
Marty Bisson milo
C18: A child is autistic or has Asperger's syndrome. Should we use one language only with the child? Children diagnosed with a specific autism spectrum disorder have a greater or lesser degree of impairment in language and communication skills, as well as repetitive or restrictive patterns of thought and behaviour, with delays in social and emotional development. Such children use language in restricted ways, expecting much consistency in language and communication, and are less likely to learn through language. However, such children may experience the social and cultural benefits of bilingualism when living in a dual language environment. For example, such children may understand and speak two languages of the local community at their own level. Like many parents of children with language impairment, bilingualism was frequently blamed by teachers and other professionals for the early signs of Asperger's, and a move to monolingualism was frequently regarded as an essential relief from the challenges. There is almost no research on autism and bilingualism or on Asperger's syndrome and bilingualism. However, a study by Susan Rubinyi of her son, who has Asperger's syndrome, provides insights. Someone with the challenge of Asperger's also has gifts and exceptional talents, including in language. Her son, Ben, became bilingual in English and French using the one parent–one language approach (OPOL). Susan Rubinyi sees definite advantages for a child who has challenges with flexibility and understanding the existence of different perspectives. Merely the fact that there are two different ways to describe the same object or concept in each language, enlarges the perception of the possible. Since a bilingual learns culture as well as language, the child sees alternative ways of approaching multiple areas of life (eating, recreation, transportation etc.) (p. 20). She argues that, because of bilingualism, her son's brain had a chance to partly rewire itself even before Asperger's syndrome became obvious. Also, the intense focus of Asperger's meant that Ben absorbed vocabulary at a very fast rate, with almost perfect native speaker intonation. Further Reading: Rubinyi, S. (2006) Natural Genius: The Gifts of Asperger's Syndrome . Philadelphia & London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Colin Baker (A Parents' and Teachers' Guide to Bilingualism)
The explanation of language depends upon its fulfilling criteria demanded by reason. Reason, though, itself requires language. The character of any natural language has a great deal to do with the history of the interactions with the world of the people whose language it is. Even if we can no longer accept a theological story of creation, the immediacy of human contact with things and the development of language do go hand in hand, as the primacy of practical vocabulary before abstractions in the history of languages suggests. Any attempt to generalize about language without taking this historical basis into account will lead to a conception of language in which an abstract conception of reason is prior. Hamann's polemic against such positions is often couched in sexual terms: revelation is most powerful when it occurs through the body's libidinal link to other parts of the universe. The very fact that languages sometimes divide the world up in terms of genders is therefore one key to understanding how language is attached to the world.
Andrew Bowie (Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas)
underlies the Toyota Production System. At Toyota, this goes by the Japanese term genchi gembutsu, which is one of the most important phrases in the lean manufacturing vocabulary. In English, it is usually translated as a directive to “go and see for yourself” so that business decisions can be based on deep firsthand knowledge. Jeffrey Liker, who has extensively documented the “Toyota Way,” explains it this way: In my Toyota interviews, when I asked what distinguishes the Toyota Way from other management approaches, the most common first response was genchi gembutsu—whether I was in manufacturing, product development, sales, distribution, or public affairs. You cannot be sure you really understand any part of any business problem unless you go and see for yourself firsthand. It is unacceptable to
Eric Ries (The Lean Startup: The Million Copy Bestseller Driving Entrepreneurs to Success)
The Bible contains many stories of dysfunctional heroes because its purpose is to show us our exceptional God, a God of love and grace and power; who works through people who have limitations - just like we do. These stories help us develop a vocabulary to identify and describe the reality of brokenness in our own lives.
James C. Wilhoit (Spiritual Formation as if the Church Mattered: Growing in Christ through Community)
In principle – and after Nehru – in practice, the choice came to be posed simply: either democracy had to be curtailed, and the intellectual, directive model of development pursued more vigorously (one of the supposed rationales offered for the Emergency of the mid-1970s); or democracy had to be maintained along with all its cumbersome constraints, and the ambition of a long-term developmental project abandoned. The striking point about the seventeen years of Nehru’s premiership was his determination to avoid this stark choice. Any swerve from democracy was ruled out; the intellectual arguments had, however, to be upheld. The claims of techne, the need for specialist perspectives on economic development, were lent authority by the creation in 1950 of an agency of economic policy formulation, insulated from the pressures of routine democratic politics: the Planning Commission. Discussions of national progress were by now being formulated in the technical vocabulary of economics, which made them wholly unintelligible to most Indians. The task of translation was entrusted to the civil service, and as the algebra of progress moved down the echelons, it was mangled and diluted. The civil service itself provoked deep ambivalence among nationalists: mistrusted because of its colonial paternity, but respected for its obvious competence and expertise. In the 1930s Nehru had called for a radical transformation of the Indian Civil Service in a free India, though by the time independence actually arrived he had become decidedly less belligerent towards it. It was Patel who had stood up for the civil servants after 1947, speaking thunderously in their favour in the Constituent Assembly. But by the early 1950s Nehru had himself turned more wholeheartedly towards them: he hoped now to use them against the obstructions raised by his own party. The colonial civil-service tradition of fiscal stringency was preserved during the Nehru period, but the bureaucracy was now also given explicitly developmental responsibilities.
Sunil Khilnani (The Idea of India)
We are a species that delights in story. We look out on reality, we grasp patterns, and we join them into narratives that can captivate, inform, startle, amuse, and thrill. The plural—narratives—is utterly essential. In the library of human reflection, there is no single, unified volume that conveys ultimate understanding. Instead, we have written many nested stories that probe different domains of human inquiry and experience: stories, that is, that parse the patterns of reality using different grammars and vocabularies. Protons, neutrons, electrons, and nature’s other particles are essential for telling the reductionist story, analyzing the stuff of reality, from planets to Picasso, in terms of their microphysical constituents. Metabolism, replication, mutation, and adaptation are essential for telling the story of life’s emergence and development, analyzing the biochemical workings of remarkable molecules and the cells they govern. Neurons, information, thought, and awareness are essential for the story of mind—and with that the narratives proliferate: myth to religion, literature to philosophy, art to music, telling of humankind’s struggle for survival, will to understand, urge for expression, and search for meaning. These are all ongoing stories, developed by thinkers hailing from a great range of distinct disciplines. Understandably so. A saga that ranges from quarks to consciousness is a hefty chronicle. Still, the different stories are interlaced. Don Quixote speaks to humankind’s yearning for the heroic, told through the fragile Alonso Quijano, a character created in the imagination of Miguel de Cervantes, a living, breathing, thinking, sensing, feeling collection of bone, tissue, and cells that, during his lifetime, supported organic processes of energy transformation and waste excretion, which themselves relied on atomic and molecular movements honed by billions of years of evolution on a planet forged from the detritus of supernova explosions scattered throughout a realm of space emerging from the big bang. Yet to read Don Quixote’s travails is to gain an understanding of human nature that would remain opaque if embedded in a description of the movements of the knight-errant’s molecules and atoms or conveyed through an elaboration of the neuronal processes crackling in Cervantes’s mind while writing the novel. Connected though they surely are, different stories, told with different languages and focused on different levels of reality, provide vastly different insights.
Brian Greene (Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe)
The vocabulary explosion is not the only thing we can blame the French for (see “A Sizeable, Substantial, Extensive Vocabulary”). It introduced new word stress patterns that created confusion and splits based on stress alone (see “Don’t InSULT Me with That INsult!”). It left behind old word forms and phrase ordering (see “Without Fail,” “Ask the Poets Laureate”). It even encouraged the development of a new English speech sound with its own letter, v (see “Of Unrequited Lof”).
Arika Okrent (Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme—And Other Oddities of the English Language)
hypothesis that psychically sensitive individuals may somehow, through some as-yet-undiscovered “psychic retina,” be detecting large, rapid changes in entropy as bright beacons on the landscape ahead in time.24 May’s argument makes a certain amount of sense given the classical equivalence of time’s arrow with entropy. Things that are very rapidly dissipating heat, such as stars and nuclear reactors and houses on fire, or even just a living body making the ultimate transition to the state of disorder called death, could perhaps be seen as concentrated time. But steep entropy gradients also represent a category of information that is intrinsically interesting and meaningful to humans and toward which we are particularly vigilant, whatever the sensory channel through which we receive it. An attentional bias to entropy gradients has been shown for the conventional senses of sight and hearing, not just psi phenomena. Stimuli involving sudden, rapid motion, and especially fire and heat, as well as others’ deaths and illness, are signals that carry important information related to our survival, so we tend to notice and remember them.25 Thus, an alternative explanation for the link between psi accuracy and entropy is the perverse pleasure—that is, jouissance—aroused in people by signs of destruction. Some vigilant part of us needs be constantly scanning the environment for indications of threats to our life and health, which means we need on some level to find that search rewarding. If we were not rewarded, we would not keep our guard up. Entropic signals like smoke from an advancing fire, or screams or cries from a nearby victim of violence or illness, or the grief of a neighbor for their family member are all signifiers, part of what could be called the “natural language of peril.” We find it “enjoyable,” albeit in an ambivalent or repellent way, to engage with such signifiers because, again, their meaning, their signified, is our own survival. The heightened accuracy toward entropic targets that May observed could reflect a heightened fascination with fire, heat, and chaotic situations more generally, an attentional bias to survival-relevant stimuli. Our particular psychic fascination with fire may also reflect its central role as perhaps the most decisive technology in our evolutionary development as well as the most dangerous, always able to turn on its user in an unlucky instant.26 The same primitive threat-vigilance orientation accounts for the unique allure of artworks depicting destruction or the evidence of past destruction. In the 18th century, the sublime entered the vocabulary of art critics and philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to describe the aesthetic appeal of ruins, impenetrable wilderness, thunderstorms and storms at sea, and other visual signals of potential or past peril, including the slow entropy of erosion and decay. Another definition of the sublime would be the semiotic of entropy.
Eric Wargo (Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious)
Since then I've shared this insight with those whose paths I've crossed: When we unite and help each other, fewer suffer loss. Farewell, farewell, my travel friend, whether great or small. Remember always these five words: We matter one and all.
Kirsten L. Marie (Rhyme of the Aged Hummingbird (Nature's Li'l Samaritans, Book Two))
In typical Koch fashion, the company developed a specific strategy to grow, one that came complete with its own vocabulary. The framework was called the Value Creation Strategy, or VCS. Every Koch business leader was expected to create their own Value Creation Strategy. They needed to look for new companies to buy, new plants to build, and expansion projects for existing plants. This wasn’t exactly new—growth was ingrained in Koch’s DNA from the beginning, when Sterling Varner encouraged his employees to keep their eyes peeled for investment opportunities. But the VCS regimen was different. Business leaders knew that Charles Koch would cut or increase their bonus pay based on the Value Creation Strategies they delivered. Expansion was once applauded; now it would be required. This change rippled out through the ranks.
Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
During this decade, one of the most important features of the new Koch Industries was the impervious strength of its corporate veil—the legal barrier that separated Koch’s various divisions. Under the new structure, Koch Industries became little more than a holding company, a big investment firm that owned a lot of smaller, nominally independent firms. And those companies would be strictly segregated from one another, and from Koch central, by a thick wall designed to be legally impenetrable. The corporate veil became reflected in the vocabulary of Koch employees. They didn’t refer to the company’s subsidiaries as units or divisions, but as “companies,” reinforcing the notion that each unit was fully independent. Many of these “companies” developed their own internal systems for human resources, information technology, and other services, creating just the kind of big, redundant systems that most US corporations were striving to eliminate. These redundancies might have cost Koch money, but their value far outstripped the cost. Koch could now argue persuasively that each company division was a stand-alone company, one that could assume its own liabilities. Never again would angry creditors be able to threaten the cash reserves of Koch Industries’ central treasury, as the lawyers from Purina Mills had done. Now liability would only travel to the top of each company that Koch held.
Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
of the individual—of all the individuals—is the basic purpose and ultimate justification for all social organizations and second that autonomous individuals cannot exist apart from others. In the transcendentalist vocabulary “association” is just as charged a word as “self.” Transcendentalism believes that the purpose of education is to facilitate the self-development of each individual. The political trajectory of transcendentalism begins in philosophical freedom and ends in democratic individualism.12
Robert D. Richardson Jr. (Emerson: The Mind on Fire)
The Importance of Books in Our Lives Books have always been an integral part of human civilization, shaping societies, preserving knowledge, and fostering personal growth. From ancient manuscripts to modern digital eBooks, they provide a gateway to learning, imagination, and personal development. Books serve as a bridge to the past, allowing readers to explore the thoughts, ideas, and cultures of previous generations. They also encourage critical thinking by offering multiple perspectives on topics ranging from philosophy and science to art and fiction. One of the greatest values of books lies in their ability to educate. Whether it's academic textbooks, biographies, or self-help guides, books impart knowledge that helps individuals excel in personal and professional spheres. Students, for example, rely heavily on textbooks to prepare for exams, while professionals may turn to industry-specific literature to stay updated with new trends and technologies. Beyond formal education, reading fosters self-improvement by exposing individuals to new ideas, challenges, and perspectives that expand their thinking and worldview. Books also serve as an escape from reality, providing readers with an opportunity to dive into new worlds and experience life from different perspectives. Fictional genres, such as fantasy, mystery, and romance, offer entertainment while simultaneously inspiring empathy and creativity. A reader can embark on an adventure through the pages of a novel or experience a new culture through travel literature. In this sense, books become companions that help readers unwind, dream, and explore the unknown, even from the comfort of their homes. In addition to their educational and recreational benefits, books play a critical role in personal development. Self-help books guide readers through personal challenges by offering advice on mental health, relationships, or financial management. Biographies of influential personalities inspire readers to overcome obstacles and achieve success. Books also promote empathy by helping readers understand emotions and experiences different from their own. When individuals read about the struggles, triumphs, and perspectives of others, they become more compassionate and socially aware. Furthermore, books foster a lifelong habit of learning and personal reflection. They help develop concentration and focus, as reading requires sustained attention. This is particularly important in the digital age, where people are often distracted by social media and short-form content. Regular reading improves vocabulary, communication skills, and analytical thinking, all of which contribute to personal and professional growth. Additionally, books promote mental well-being, offering a sense of comfort and relaxation to readers. Many people find solace in reading, especially during challenging times, as books can provide both emotional support and practical solutions. Even in a world dominated by technology, the relevance of books remains undiminished. While the formats may change—moving from physical books to audiobooks and eBooks—their essence and purpose remain
Sufi
I do not think that it is too sweeping to say that instead of provoking new thinking, the sciences of complexity have been used in ways that simply justify existing ideologies, preserve without any questioning the taken-for-granted underlying assumptions of causality to be found the dominant discourse and so simply re-present that discourse in strange jargon. Furthermore, it is striking how in the dominant discourse and its re-presentation in the vocabulary of complexity, the organizational reality of ordinary people acting in ordinary, everyday ways to get things done together, disappears completely from the scene. Instead, we have forces, wholes, systems, abstract entities such as ‘the organization’ which intends and does. Organizations interact with each other and ordinary people are simply their resources. What we seem to be stuck in is an abstract way of thinking which distances us from our experience of being immersed in the experience of daily life in real activities of organizing. If we are to slowly develop a more promising way of rethinking management then it seems to me that it is important to understand the split in our thinking between abstract reasoning about organizations and immersed experience of daily organizational life. I argue that rethinking management would require a more paradoxical way of thinking than that provided by a split between abstraction and immersion. The
Ralph D. Stacey (Complexity and Organizational Reality)
Horst (2005) used simplified readers in a study of vocabulary development among adult immigrants who were enrolled in an ESL programme in a community centre in Montreal, Canada. The 21 participants represented several language backgrounds and proficiency levels. In addition to the activities of their regular ESL class, students chose simplified readers that were made available in a class library. Over a six-week period, students took books home and read them on their own. Horst developed individualized vocabulary measures so that learning could be assessed in terms of the books each student actually read. She found that there was vocabulary growth attributable to reading, even over this short period, and that the more students read, the more words they learned. She concluded that substantial vocabulary growth through reading is possible, but that students must read a great deal (more than just one or two books per semester) to realize those benefits. As we saw in Chapter 2, when we interact in ordinary conversations, we tend to use mainly the 1,000 or 2,000 most frequent words. Thus, reading is a particularly valuable source of new vocabulary. Students who have reached an intermediate level of proficiency may have few opportunities to learn new words in everyday conversation. It is in reading a variety of texts that students are most likely to encounter new vocabulary. The benefit of simplified readers is that students encounter a reasonable number of new words. This increases the likelihood that they can figure out the meaning of new words (or perhaps be motivated to look them up). If the new words occur often enough, students may remember them when they encounter them in a new context.
Patsy M. Lightbown (How Languages are Learned)
The terminology, then, is extremely important. Although this is not perfect, over the years people involved with adoption have developed a vocabulary that feels most comfortable for everyone. We use “birth mother and birth father” to describe the parents who gave birth to the child, or the root parents; “adoptive parents” is the preferred term for the parents adopting and raising the child.
Joyce Maguire Pavao (The Family of Adoption: Completely Revised and Updated)
There is one further attribute of language that places it at a higher level than any existing technological organization or facility; and that is, to function at all, it demands a reciprocal relation between producer and consumer, between sayer and listener: an inequality of advantage destroys in some degree the integrity and common value of the product. Unlike any historic economic system, the demand for words may be limited without embarrassing the supply: the capital reserves (vocabulary) may become huger and the capacity for production (speech, literature, sharable meanings) continue to increase without imposing any collective duty to consume the surplus. This relationship, embedded in the special form of language, the dialogue, is at last being undermined by a new system of control and one-way communication that has now found an electronic mode of operation; and the grave issues that have thus been raised must now be faced.
Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
Be a word herder. The powerful intellect leashed by an impoverished vocabulary is a myth. Without a vocabulary, a language, the intellect cannot develop.
T. Geronimo Johnson (Welcome to Braggsville)
One of the most impressive aspects of language development in the school years is the astonishing growth of vocabulary. Children enter school with the ability to understand and produce several thousand words, and thousands more will be learned at school. In both the spoken and written language at school, words such as ‘homework’ or ‘ruler’ appear frequently in situations where their meaning is either immediately or gradually revealed. Words like ‘population’ or ‘latitude’ occur less frequently, but they are made important by their significance in academic subject matter.
Patsy M. Lightbown (How Languages are Learned)
Even if the rest of man's history were lost, the vocabularies, the grammars, and the literature of all his present languages would testify to a mind infinitely above the level of any other living creature's. And if some sudden mutation afflicting the progeny of the entire human race resulted in the birth of only deaf-mutes, the outcome would be almost as fatal to human existence as that of a nuclear chain reaction.
Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
I’m paid to be a narcissistic blow-hard, to volley my opinions, to appear more confident about them than I really am, to appear smarter than I really am, to appear better and more authoritative than I really am. I have to work harder than most people to avoid a life of smug superficiality. I’ve also become more aware that, like many people these days, I have lived a life of vague moral aspiration—vaguely wanting to be good, vaguely wanting to serve some larger purpose, while lacking a concrete moral vocabulary, a clear understanding of how to live a rich inner life, or even a clear knowledge of how character is developed and depth is achieved.
David Brooks (The Road to Character)
The first step in knowing a word is simply to recognize that it is a word. Paul Meara and his colleagues (2005) have developed tests that take advantage of this fact. Some of these tests take the form of word lists, and learners are instructed to check ‘yes’ or ‘no’ according to whether or not they know the word. Each list also includes some items that look like English words but are not. The number of real words that the learner identifies is adjusted for guessing by a factor that takes account of the number of non-words that are also chosen. Such a procedure is more effective than it might sound. A carefully constructed list can be used to estimate the vocabulary size of even advanced learners. For example, if shown the following list: ‘frolip, laggy, scrule, and albeit’, a proficient speaker of English would know that only one of these words is a real English word, albeit a rare and somewhat odd one. On the other hand, even proficient speakers might recognize none of the following items: ‘goniometer, micelle, laminitis, throstle’. Even our computer’s spell-checker rejected two out of four, but all are real English words, according to the New Oxford Dictionary of American English.
Patsy M. Lightbown (How Languages are Learned)
Some theorists have argued that second language learners, like children learning their first language, can learn a great deal of vocabulary with little intentional effort. Stephen Krashen (1989) has asserted that the best source of vocabulary growth is reading for pleasure. There is no doubt that reading is an important potential source of vocabulary development for second language learners as it is for first language learners. However, there are some problems with the notion that vocabulary growth through reading requires little effort. As noted above, it is difficult to infer the meaning of a new word from reading unless one already knows 95 per cent or more of the other words, and learners usually need to have many meaningful encounters with a word before they recognize it in new contexts or produce it in their own speaking and writing. As we saw in Chapter 1, Dee Gardner’s (2004) research demonstrates that certain types of words are rare in narratives. Thus, students who read mainly fiction may have little chance of learning words that are essential for their academic pursuits. Conversely, reading mainly science texts will not provide many opportunities to learn the vocabulary of social interaction.
Patsy M. Lightbown (How Languages are Learned)
society. Sins such as adultery, bribery, and betrayal are more like treason than like crime; they damage the social order. Social harmony can be rewoven only by slowly recommitting to relationships and rebuilding trust. The sins of arrogance and pride arise from a perverse desire for status and superiority. The only remedy for them is to humble oneself before others. In other words, people in earlier times inherited a vast moral vocabulary and set of moral tools, developed over centuries and handed down from generation to generation. This was a practical inheritance, like learning how to speak a certain language, which people could use to engage their own moral struggles.
David Brooks (The Road to Character)
Research on vocabulary learning through reading without focused instruction confirms that some vocabulary can be learned without explicit instruction (see Chapter 6, Study 17). On the other hand, Jan Hulstijn and Batia Laufer (2001) and others provide evidence that vocabulary development is more successful when learners are fully engaged in activities that require them to attend carefully to the new words and even to use them in productive tasks. Izabella Kojic-Sabo and Patsy Lightbown (1999) found that effort and the use of good learning strategies, such as keeping a notebook, looking words up in a dictionary, and reviewing what has been learned were associated with better vocabulary development. Cheryl Boyd Zimmerman (2009) provides many practical suggestions for teaching vocabulary and also for helping learners to continue learning outside the classroom.
Patsy M. Lightbown (How Languages are Learned)
A trick of vocabulary: we say "to develop a photograph '; but what the chemical action develops is undevelopable, an essence (of a wound), what cannot be transformed but only repeated under the instances of in-sistence (of the insistent gaze). This brings the Photo-graph (certain photographs) dose to the Haiku. For the notation of a haiku, too, is undevelopable: everything is given, without provoking the desire for or even the pos-sibility of a rhetorical expansion.
Roland Barthes
Develop a vocabulary of uplifting and empowering words for times of uncertainty and upheaval.
Mensah Oteh (Wisdom Keys In Words: A collection of the Inspirational words that will change your life)
Emma's left hand took my right—it was all the warmth and meaning we could trade. We were developing a language that was entirely untranslatable into words, a special vocabulary of gestures and glances and touches and increasingly deep kisses that was growing richer, more intense, more complex by the hour. It was fascinating and essential and in moments like this, made me just a little less cold and a little less scared than I might've been otherwise.
Ransom Riggs (Library of Souls (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #3))
Children born deaf of deaf parents have no language delay at all: being exposed to Sign from birth enables a baby to develop as full a vocabulary as the hearing, not just to describe the world, but to manipulate abstract concepts.
Anonymous
volley my opinions, to appear more confident about them than I really am, to appear smarter than I really am, to appear better and more authoritative than I really am. I have to work harder than most people to avoid a life of smug superficiality. I’ve also become more aware that, like many people these days, I have lived a life of vague moral aspiration—vaguely wanting to be good, vaguely wanting to serve some larger purpose, while lacking a concrete moral vocabulary, a clear understanding of how to live a rich inner life, or even a clear knowledge of how character is developed and depth is achieved.
David Brooks (The Road to Character)
Setting the bar at even 2,000 word families means learning 20 word families a week over two years, starting from zero: a daunting task, but not an impossible one. Nor a thankless one. There are grounds for believing that vocabulary size may be a reliable predictor, not just of reading proficiency, but of linguistic competence overall. Certainly, in first language acquisition, the processes of vocabulary development and grammar emergence are closely intertwined, with the former possibly driving the latter. Tomasello (2003: 93), for example, cites research that shows that ‘only after children have vocabularies of several hundred words [do] they begin to produce in earnest grammatical speech’, which suggests to him ‘that learning words and learning grammatical constructions
Scott Thornbury (Big Questions in ELT)
The vocabulary for discussing smells, tastes and textures, the primary characteristics of wine, seems paltry compared with the far better developed lexicon for sights and sounds.
Anonymous
We all have to accept reality, yes, that's true. But just to accept reality and do nothing else, that is the attitude of human beings who have lost the ability to develop and grow, because human beings also have the ability to create new realities. And if there are no longer people who want to create new realities, then perhaps the word progress should be removed altogether from humankind's vocabulary.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
novels [4]. It follows that authentic text—text written for native speakers—is inappropriate for unassisted ER by all but the most advanced learners. For this reason, many educators advocate the use of learner literature, that is, stories written specifically for L2 learners, or adapted from authentic text [5]. For learners of English, there are over 40 graded reader series, consisting of over 1650 books with a variety of difficulty levels and genres [6].However, the time and expense in producing graded readers results in high purchase costs and limited availability in languages other than English and common L2‘s like Spanish and French. At a cost of £2.50 for a short English reader in 2001 [7] purchasing several thousand readers to cater for a school wide ER program requires a significant monetary investment. More affordable options are required, especially for schools in developing nations. Day and Bamford [8] recommend several alternatives when learner literature is not available. These include children's and young adult books, stories written by learners, newspapers, magazines and comic books. Some educators advocate the use of authentic texts in preference to simplified texts. Berardo [9] claims that the language in learner literature is ―artificial and unvaried‖, ―unlike anything that the learner will encounter in the real world‖ and often ―do not reflect how the language is really used‖. Berardo does concede that simplified texts are ―useful for preparing learners for reading 'real' texts. ‖ 2. ASSISTED READING Due to the large proportion of unknown vocabulary, beginner and intermediate learners require assistance when using authentic text for ER. Two popular forms of assistance are dictionaries and glossing. There are pros and cons of each approach. 1 A group of words that share the same root word, e.g. , run, ran, runner, runs, running. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.NZCSRSC’11, April 18-21, 2011, Palmerston North, New Zealand
Anonymous
Smell and taste are processed in parts of our brains that are reactive and emotional rather than intellectual, which is one reason developing a good vocabulary of aromas is so difficult. It’s a long journey from our lizard brain way up to where language is processed.
Randy Mosher (Mastering Homebrew: The Complete Guide to Brewing Delicious Beer)
develop the 100 word vocabulary taught to the Lao tribesman to make the rudiments of combat conversation. A few nouns, some basic single tense verbs, names of weapons and directions made up the pidgin English. Like spice, flavor was added by whichever additional words the Special Forces teacher felt appropriate. The basic word denoting the reproductive act, and its many wondrous and colorful variations, was by far the most popular and common.
Mark Berent (Eagle Station (Wings of War, #4))
We are no longer very sophisticated thinkers or very precise thinkers. We deal in moods and emotions, especially in the arts, and we have developed a very loose vocabulary along with our loose thinking.
Dale Ahlquist (The Apostle of Common Sense)
The fact that human beings learn more vocabulary from a machine than from their mothers is undeniably leading to the development of a new kind of sensibility. The new forms of mass psychopathology of our time cannot be investigated without due consideration of the effects of this new environment, in particular the new process of language learning.
Anonymous
the differences between the crown of France and its vassals were expressed in a language which was essentially feudal (a new political vocabulary more suited to developments had not yet evolved), what was really happening was something remarkably ‘modern’, the laying of the foundations of a national state under one monarch whose territorial authority could only be effectively exercised through annexation or conquest.
Christopher Allmand (The Hundred Years War: England and France at War c.1300–c.1450 (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks))
One goal is that our tooling reinforces that Development and Operations not only have shared goals but have a common backlog of work, ideally stored in a common work system and using a shared vocabulary, so that work can be prioritized globally.
Gene Kim (The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations)
Training our attention to identify needs (our own and others’) involves: • Expanding our vocabulary for needs Training our attention to see life through the “lens of needs” Building close relationships of trust and mutual respect, in which we feel safe enough to explore needs Attuning to the level of vulnerability that supports understanding and collaboration, depending on the context • Learning to be at peace with unmet needs Developing the ability to shift our attention from the personal to the universal aspect of needs, from a narrow focus on satisfying our needs to a broader appreciation for the beauty of human needs
Oren Jay Sofer (Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication)
Artistic "style" that does not evolve as a result of a natural process is the embodiment of "fake it till you make it," referring to the way something APPEARS, not the way that it IS. It's a veneer, a hollow afterthought technique hung on the artwork to dress it up... I prefer to think in terms of the artist's VOICE. Voice is deeper, manifested from the very core of your being. You earn it through research, experimentation, and discovery. It is a synthesis of the experiences, intellectual concepts, and aesthetic interests you possess, executed in your distinctive way, in the formal, emotional and intellectual language of your chosen medium. When successful, the realization of your voice follows the gestalt principle. The combination of your ideas and the work's physical embodiment is greater than the sum of its parts and distinguishes your outcome from everyone else's.
Kate Kretz (Art from Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice)
Missing the window for a “simple” skill, therefore, has wide-ranging implications because, while new learning may occur, it just becomes more and more difficult. This is especially critical in language accrual, because language, during the first three years, in addition to helping build vocabulary and conversational skills, helps provide a foundation for social, emotional, and cognitive development.
Dana Suskind (Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain)
You are committed to developing a more expansive emotional vocabulary. You plan to become more skilled in talking about the things you feel and not just what you do. You plan to become well versed in recognizing the signs your body is giving you when emotions register internally.
David Thomas (Raising Emotionally Strong Boys: Tools Your Son Can Build on for Life)
THE TEN STEPS TO BUILDING A COMPANY CULTURE 1. Define the company’s core values and align them with aspects such as mission, vision, principles or purpose to create a solid foundation for the organisation. 2. Integrate the desired culture into every aspect of the company, including hiring policies, processes and procedures across all departments and functions. 3. Agree upon expected behaviours and standards for all team members, promoting a positive work environment. 4. Establish a purpose that goes beyond the company’s commercial goals, fostering a deeper connection for employees. 5. Use myths, stories, company-specific vocabulary and legends, along with symbols and habits, to reinforce the company culture and embed it in the collective consciousness. 6. Develop a unique identity as a group and cultivate a sense of exclusivity and pride within the team. 7. Create an atmosphere that celebrates achievements, progress, and living the company culture, boosting motivation and pride. 8. Encourage camaraderie, community and a sense of belonging among team members, encourage mutual dependence and a collective sense of obligation, reinforcing the interconnected nature of the team. 9. Remove barriers and enable employees to express themselves authentically and embrace their individuality within the organisation. 10. Emphasise the unique qualities and contributions of both employees and the collective, positioning them as distinct and exceptional.
Steven Bartlett (The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life)
Mortals have a word for this kind of arrogance: the kind that makes a person think she can compare herself favourably to a goddess. The word is hubris. And while I am all in favour of using precision to describe something, might I suggest that you would be better off not doing something so dangerous so often that you need a specific word for it? Perhaps develop your self-control, rather than your vocabulary.
Natalie Haynes (Stone Blind)
Reading is the only way, the only way we become good readers, develop a good writing style, an adequate vocabulary, advanced grammatical competence, and the only way we become good spellers.
Stephen D. Krashen (The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research by Stephen D. Krashen, Libraries Unlimited)
The Importance of Books in Our Lives Books have always been an integral part of human civilization, shaping societies, preserving knowledge, and fostering personal growth. From ancient manuscripts to modern digital eBooks, they provide a gateway to learning, imagination, and personal development. Books serve as a bridge to the past, allowing readers to explore the thoughts, ideas, and cultures of previous generations. They also encourage critical thinking by offering multiple perspectives on topics ranging from philosophy and science to art and fiction. One of the greatest values of books lies in their ability to educate. Whether it's academic textbooks, biographies, or self-help guides, books impart knowledge that helps individuals excel in personal and professional spheres. Students, for example, rely heavily on textbooks to prepare for exams, while professionals may turn to industry-specific literature to stay updated with new trends and technologies. Beyond formal education, reading fosters self-improvement by exposing individuals to new ideas, challenges, and perspectives that expand their thinking and worldview. Books also serve as an escape from reality, providing readers with an opportunity to dive into new worlds and experience life from different perspectives. Fictional genres, such as fantasy, mystery, and romance, offer entertainment while simultaneously inspiring empathy and creativity. A reader can embark on an adventure through the pages of a novel or experience a new culture through travel literature. In this sense, books become companions that help readers unwind, dream, and explore the unknown, even from the comfort of their homes. In addition to their educational and recreational benefits, books play a critical role in personal development. Self-help books guide readers through personal challenges by offering advice on mental health, relationships, or financial management. Biographies of influential personalities inspire readers to overcome obstacles and achieve success. Books also promote empathy by helping readers understand emotions and experiences different from their own. When individuals read about the struggles, triumphs, and perspectives of others, they become more compassionate and socially aware. Furthermore, books foster a lifelong habit of learning and personal reflection. They help develop concentration and focus, as reading requires sustained attention. This is particularly important in the digital age, where people are often distracted by social media and short-form content. Regular reading improves vocabulary, communication skills, and analytical thinking, all of which contribute to personal and professional growth. Additionally, books promote mental well-being, offering a sense of comfort and relaxation to readers. Many people find solace in reading, especially during challenging times, as books can provide both emotional support and practical solutions. Even in a world dominated by technology, the relevance of books remains undiminished. While the formats may change—moving from physical books to audiobooks and eBooks—their essence and purpose remain
Alex
If we want to exercise more responsibility regarding what ideas we entertain, we will need to develop the attention and vocabulary required to relate truthfully to a complex world. Or, as (Wendell) Berry puts it, "We must speak, and teach our children to speak, a language, precise and articulate and lively enough to tell the truth about the world as we know it." And we won't learn this language if our minds have become passive thoroughfares for advertising jingles, political slogans, and hashtags.
Jeffrey Bilbro (Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News)