the vampire slayer?
Yeah!
The dialogue is actually pretty smart and they do the “verbify” bit all the time…
Hey, a use for pop culture! ;D
I’ve watched all 7 seasons of Buffy, so I can attest to their verby-ness. Actually, even without the verb consciousness, viewers of that show remain aware of Joss Whedon’s constructed ‘valley-girl’ teen language. It sounds like something someone would speak somewhere…but he made it all up. Really interesting.
Watch enough of those shows in a row and you start seeing the world in terms of ‘talismans’ and metaphorical ‘demons’. Weird.
i totally concur that the whedonverse writers could turn a phrase. and i loved where the definition of demon kept heading: that demons are people too, just with a much older pedigree.
joss did some nice phrase-turning with firefly, too, in his “china will be the next superpower, so my characters will cuss in chinese” dialogue.
in fierfly and serenity, “shiny” was the slang for “good”. probably not wild enough for what you’re looking for, though, penny. but in terms of the way i hope that the plants will swallow up the artifacts of civilization after the crash, maybe “leafy” will be the new slang for “good” or “cool”.
Ha! That’s awesome!
I think I’m going to start using that…
I just wanted to give y’all a heads up to another great book on a rewilding of language. This may surprise you, but “Nonviolent Communication” (also known as “compassionate communication”), by Marshall Rosenberg, has some amazing things to say about thinking and speaking in terms of what you observe and experience, rather than outmoded paradigms of ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’. In fact he starts out the book describing the ways of modern languages as languages of enslavement, a linguistic tradition originating with the birth of civilization and ‘power-over’ (as opposed to ‘power-with’).
In fact that book has directly inspired a lot of my writing and paradigm shifts, which I express in terms of the Empathic Way, and it’s sequel.
Really fun stuff.
Yeah, I like that word too. Another one that doesn’t even get that much use is “fathering”, which is a shame cause I think that would prolly help with the absent father situation we have in this country…
Haha 
Calvin and Hobbes. Genius. I can hardly believe it.ROTFL.
The hippies had "groovy"
Was that because they were always trying to start fires with their fire plows?
Oh, shit, I just turned into a feral nerd, didn’t I? Trying to make esoteric jokes–that’s a definite sign.
Haha. You remind me of my botanist boss last summer. You’d be amazed at how many scientific names make for bad puns! Don’t worry, I like it.
awesome, i got the penny seal of approval!
i bet binomials do lend themselves to terrible puns. do you remember any of your bosses really bad ones?
Err…hazelnut is Corylus americana and our computer woman back in the office was named Cory…so if she didn’t come into work we would be Cory-less. That’s a particularly bad one, but for some reason the only one I can remember.
“Err…hazelnut is Corylus americana and our computer woman back in the office was named Cory…so if she didn’t come into work we would be Cory-less. That’s a particularly bad one, but for some reason the only one I can remember.”
The above in E-prime/primitive:
Err…hazelnut also goes by the name Corylus americana and our computer women back in the office we call, Cory…so if she didn’t come into work we’d go “Coryless”. Bad example, but for some reason the only one I can remember ;).
I haven’t switched to e-prime myself but I think the difference is most apparent when you are arguing with someone! It’s different for someone to say you are lazy than for them to say you acted lazy today. Of course you could say you are acting lazy which means the same thing as the second but has to be of the first so maybe it doesn’t matter…but then I’d say there are other aspects to e-primtive such as making up names for places based on wild characteristics. Beaver valley rather than Thompson’s valley or whatever. If you say go to beaver valley and then follow hemlock stream uphill. The person will see the tree stumps and know they are there whereas Mr. Thompson is some 17th century settler long gone and it doesn’t mean anything. Or maybe I’m just making stuff up!
I wish I could just “switch” to E-primitive/prime just like that but I don’ think it “is” that easy. I mean (E-primitively speaking): I want to get more used to speaking in E-prime for various reasons and I don’t feel that I can just “switch” it on or off or just switch fully over to it or with it (similar to what Willem just said) instantly. It take practice for a lot of us, me too. I just got into and started liking the sound of it and decided that I’d rather use it, yeah and slipping, everybody slips. Sometimes I even like to…slip.
It also helps to have people all around the place that use it (so offline, online, neighbors, friends, family, and so on) to receive a more natural feel and experience by growing up around it with other people that do it too.
Plains,
In our Be-English mindset, we have a hard time understanding the difference between “I am sick” and “I feel sick”. Both express the same underlying concept, but they approach it from different mindsets. The latter tells the listener directly how you feel. The former implies how you feel by redefining yourself as the feeling.
The main problem e-primers tend to have with the verb “to be” lies in the way it redefines things and limits their existence.
At work, I analyze databases. To say I “am” a database analyst reduces me to one thing that I only happen to do for 40 hours (usually less) each week. It denies the other aspects of my life: the raising of my child, the love I have for plants, etc. By saying I “am” one thing and presenting myself to you with that definition of myself, I linguistically exclude the rest of my existence.
I think the “utility” of e-prime comes from waking up our minds to another way in which civilization lies to us. Granted, when we say “he’s a teacher; she’s a biologist; they are good people; we are Americans,” we don’t internally believe they have no other facets to their lives, but in the act of saying someone “is” one thing, we deny all the other possibilities. However, when we say “he teaches; she studies life; they treat others well; we live in a place the inhabitants refer to as America,” we still focus on only one facet, but we don’t deny the existence of the other facets in doing so.
Think about how we get to know a new person, about the questions we usually ask: “How old is he? What does he do for a living? Where is he from?” Our civilized minds want to reduce people to a handy set of concepts, to have a rigid framework in which to fit the person so that we know just what to expect from them. Because “a 34 year old, database analyst from Arkansas” tells a civilized person exactly what they need to know about me. Once they have these minute details about my life, they can pigeonhole me and encapsulate my life into a manageable piece of data. Moreover, they no longer have to worry about getting to really know me–until I start acting outside of their framework. Once I do something outside of the expected bounds for a “34 year old database analyst from Arkansas” I “become” something different–to that person. But in reality I “was” the “something different” all along.
I think that feral life (whether in terms of tracking animals and plants, judging the portents of the sky, listening to the hunting stories of our fellow tribalists) stands on unsure footing. Nothing in the feral world ever “is” just one thing. Knowing that, keeping the mind open, keeping the senses open, gives the feral man the tools he needs to constantly interact with the changing world.
When I stop asking myself “what is this” and start trying to more directly describe the facets of whatever lies before me, I realize that the thing I study with my senses can “be” many things–all at once–and that I need to attune my senses to all of those things. Moreover, I open myself up to the possibility for this thing in front of me to “be” something I can’t yet sense at all.
M’kay folks.
A very fascinating read is an article in the April 16th issue of The New Yorker, The Interpreter: The puzzling language of an Amazon tribe. It discusses a challenge to Noam Chomsky's universal constant of recursive grammar (...an evolutionary adaptation that allowed us to juggle syntax and place one sentence within another to exponentially allow refinement in description, meaning and reason). So "unique" is this tribe's vocabulary and cultural outlook that fundamental reasoning skills and language structure taken for granted elsewhere falter sharply in this setting.
another article on the peeps:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,414291,00.html
and
This might be (does might be count?) some interesting stuff. I think I maybe sorta redefined BE a long long time ago to always have a mental modifier identifying the might aspect.
Might is seemingly quite important.
For instance, I am saying I am X and Y but not Z, never Z, and undoubtably a sprinkle of Q on alternate Tuesdays, however, beneathe all that I believe I AM nothing aside from human, alive and mutable.
It all started when I read this axiom coined by the author Theodore Sturgeon, an author responsible for some really badass speculative fiction stories and progenitor of the phrase “Live Long and Prosper”, which is what I first thought of when I saw that Long Life Honey in the Heart book.
Anyway, some have written Sturgeon’s Law utilizing the following string of characters : ‘Nothing is always absolutely so.’
After seeing this and after much pondering and pontificating and boring all my poor buddies I decided to tweak my individual conception of ‘to be’, and suddenly, in my eyes, it isn’t so bad. I don’t really want to go through the curbing and the trimming and deracinating and constantly paying of attention neccessary to extricate it completely out of my lexicon.
Is is there and is could be staying till the day I abandon english.