Two weekends ago, I took the Massachusetts Test for Educator Licensure (MTEL). It took eight hours: half for the Communication & Literacy Skills portion, and half for the English test. Living in Virginia helped prepare me for the test, since Lynn, MA, like most of New England at the time, had a bit of a heatwave. No air-conditioning in an old high school was no problem.
In addition to heat acclimation, I also got ready for the test by studying some literary theory vocabulary. A friend told me to expect many questions about theory, and it's an area that I hadn't formally studied. Many of the terms' definitions, however, blended together. And it took great work to find and pin down the nuance between similar ideas or schools of thinking.
So, while brushing up on vocabulary between the two tests, I wrote the following: Learning a term or phrase gives its idea/concept a solid mental place/existence (parameters) - words create order out of the abstract, boundaries within that which bleeds together. This has deep implications for how we perceive the world.
The pursuit of precise terms that capture specific ideas reminds me of the scientific pursuit of matter's fundamental components. Actually, that's a poor analogy. Maybe it better compares to the identification and classification of chemistry's elements. In either case, though, it shows our desire to better understand our perceived scale of the world by moving to a scale outside of the naked eye. To classify and conquer.
NECA TMNT Toon “Binky’s Day Out” Slash V2
19 hours ago
2 comments:
The wonderful thing aboout English is its ease with incorporating words or coining new ones to simplify communication. Precise terms are shorthand. In other words, rather than providing a complete description, you use a precise word and become more efficient in your communication. This kind of development is seen in jargon, where common terms used in a particular context acquire special, precise meanings. When I hear "give me a loop" i understand it to mean, "short circuit the wires." The terms used by musicians are very precise but meaningless to those who don't "speak" music. Many of the terms are Italian words, retaining their meaning but acquiring a specificity of purpose. Pizzicato comes to mind, meaning "plucked." It is the past participle of pizzicare (to pluck) and refers to a plucked string. Instruments that cannot pluck can still play pizzicato.
The precise terms developed by scholars often clearly convey a concept through analogy. Terms like "entanglement" or "phototropic" convey concepts that the scholar narrows to a specific by defining the term precisely.
So, it all comes down to laziness. We love to make things easier for ourselves and others. Precise terms ease communication, making it easier to communicate complex ideas in small sentences. We English-speakers love abbreviations, acronyms, jargon and slang. Our language reflects this. English seems to be very good at expanding, while other languages seem to resist it, often incorporating an English word rather than a unique native form. This may be the result of the ubiquity of English rather than a failing of another language, and another concession to laziness; the word exists, let's use it.
A similar thing is seen in Chinese characters. Complex characters are built by incorporating simple characters in a stylized way.
btw congrats on passing the exam. I look forward to your return to NE with Alex.
The wonderful thing aboout English is its ease with incorporating words or coining new ones to simplify communication. Precise terms are shorthand. In other words, rather than providing a complete description, you use a precise word and become more efficient in your communication. This kind of development is seen in jargon, where common terms used in a particular context acquire special, precise meanings. When I hear "give me a loop" i understand it to mean, "short circuit the wires." The terms used by musicians are very precise but meaningless to those who don't "speak" music. Many of the terms are Italian words, retaining their meaning but acquiring a specificity of purpose. Pizzicato comes to mind, meaning "plucked." It is the past participle of pizzicare (to pluck) and refers to a plucked string. Instruments that cannot pluck can still play pizzicato.
The precise terms developed by scholars often clearly convey a concept through analogy. Terms like "entanglement" or "phototropic" convey concepts that the scholar narrows to a specific by defining the term precisely.
So, it all comes down to laziness. We love to make things easier for ourselves and others. Precise terms ease communication, making it easier to communicate complex ideas in small sentences. We English-speakers love abbreviations, acronyms, jargon and slang. Our language reflects this. English seems to be very good at expanding, while other languages seem to resist it, often incorporating an English word rather than a unique native form. This may be the result of the ubiquity of English rather than a failing of another language, and another concession to laziness; the word exists, let's use it.
A similar thing is seen in Chinese characters. Complex characters are built by incorporating simple characters in a stylized way.
btw congrats on passing the exam. I look forward to your return to NE with Alex.
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