Fire and Knowledge

Abraham Piper, a friend and co-worker, just started a blog called 22 Words. Every post is twenty-two words, just like this one.

Our words for unhealthy contamination—“soiled” or “dirty”—suggest that if we really knew the number-one ingredient of a garden, we’d all head straight into therapy.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 10.

People have always used clothing not only (or even primarily) for covering, but for communicating. The symbolic use of clothing is in many ways like a language, with a grammar or syntax that allows for a range of expressive acts. And what a rich language it is, with regional and demographic dialects sophisticated enough to permit jokes, ironic statements, even slang and metaphor.

What we wear speaks volumes about who we are. Our clothes reveal our age and income, our education and our social class; they reveal our current attitudes and political beliefs, our gender and even our sexual orientation. They play an extraordinary important role in mate selection. Clothing is also an extremely accurate guide to the time in which we live—notice how clothing (along with hairstyles) is the easiest way to date old photographs.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 163

The other day I used the phrase “the coast is clear” and wondered what it originally meant. Here’s the answer:

The phrase first appears in print in 1531 where it describes a vessel which had safely cleared the coast, then later Shakespeare used it in Henry VI as a reference to visibility. Neither of these references touch on its true insinuation; it is a reference to smuggling … or some nefarious operation. (source)

The difficulty of learning the dead languages does not arise from any superior abstruseness in the languages themselves, but in their being dead, and the pronunciation entirely lost. It would be the same thing with any other language when it becomes dead. The best Greek linguist, that now exists, does not understand Greek so well as a Grecian plowman did, or a Grecian milkmaid: and the same for the Latin, compared with a plowman or a milkman of the Romans; and with respect to pronunciation, and idiom, not so well as the cows that she milked.

–Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794), p. 273

How can an idea, which is not material, have a material origin? “Average” for example, is an idea which partakes of none of the physical properties of the things that are averaged. Materialism itself is an idea, just as immaterial as any other.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 50

[A] Briton, when he wants to sup ale, must find his way to the Dog and Duck, the Goose and Firkin, the Flying Spoon, or the Spotted Dog. The names of Britain’s 70,000 or so pubs cover a broad range, running from the inspired to the improbable, from the deft to the daft. Almost any name will do so long as it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing, and enjoying oneself. At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners—this is a basic requirement for most British institutions—and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal. Among the pubs that meet, and indeed exceed, these exacting standards are the Frog and Nightgown, the Bull and Spectacles, the Flying Monk, and the Crab and Gumboil.

–Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way (1990), p. 198

There are more people learning English in China than there are people in the United States.

–Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way (1990), p. 182-3