Silicon Investor - SI Grammar and Spelling Lab

[Stan] "Goodbye." [youtube video]

Stan — 5/10/2026 10:29:26 PM

[Maple MAGA ] A Poet of Science Who Shook Faith in God Biographer Richard Holmes reveals how ...

Maple MAGA — 4/3/2026 9:47:24 PM

A Poet of Science Who Shook Faith in God

Biographer Richard Holmes reveals how Tennyson predated Darwin and speaks to us today

KB

By Kevin Berger

1:00 PM CDT on April 3, 2026

When Richard Holmes was a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2001, researching the surprising affinity among Romantic poets and scientists, he often walked by a giant white marble statue of Alfred Lord Tennyson, looking imposing and, well, irrelevant. Tennyson was the Victorian poet born after the wild Romantics, vaguely remembered by English senior citizens who had to memorize “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in school. “When can their glory fade?/O the wild charge they made!”

“With his long beard, Tennyson looked monolithic, like he had nothing to do with anything,” Holmes said to me recently, from his home in Norfolk, England. “Life had passed on.”

Being the natural-born biographer he was—Holmes had written vivid books about the poets Shelley and Coleridge—he began to wonder about the young man beneath the beard. Who was Tennyson before he became England’s stodgy poet laureate? Holmes seemed to recall that Tennyson was tutored by another one of the marble statues in the chapel, William Whewell, a Cambridge don of science, who in the first decades of the 1800s published works on astronomy, physics, mineralogy, and philosophy. Perhaps science lurked in Tennyson’s background.

Holmes filed away the thought as he went on to write his 2008 book about the Romantic poets and scientists, The Age of Wonder, a brilliant corrective to the “ two-cultures” trope that 19th-century science cut the heart out of humanity and the humanities. The era’s radical poets—Byron, Shelley, Coleridge—read deeply in the burgeoning sciences of astronomy, chemistry, and electricity. The scientific revelations supercharged their poetry and amplified the natural world and the cosmos with astonishing beauty and terror.

The poets palled around with scientists like gregarious chemist Humphry Davy, whose experiments with dosing himself and volunteers with nitrous oxide, formed a blueprint for anesthesia. Getting high on the gas was an “unmingled pleasure,” Coleridge said, echoing Xanadu, with its “stately pleasure dome,” in his poem “Kubla Khan.”

Read more: “ Who Said Science and Art Were Two Cultures?”

In London taverns with Coleridge and essayist Charles Lamb, anarchist philosopher William Godwin and his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, Davy loved to hold forth on the likeminded mission of science and art. The genius of Newton and Shakespeare are not remote in character, Davy would say. “Imagination, as well as the reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic mind.”

Holmes spoke with infectious enthusiasm for his subjects, as if they were old friends. “One of the most interesting exchanges that Coleridge and Davy had was on the idea of pain,” he told me. “What is the function of pain, particularly in animal life? What is it doing? Why was it put there? They would frame it in terms of, ‘Why did God put pain into this system?’ This was the kind of metaphysical discussion they often had.”

Crossing the wires of science and poetry sparked a dangerous new awareness. Through the eyepieces of the new telescopes, illuminating the vastness of space, Earth suddenly looked insignificant. Fossils of extinct species, uncovered in rock layers that had to be hundreds of thousands of years old, gave lie to the Bible story that God created all creatures great and small in six days. Religion was losing its hold on truth.

WHO ARE YOU?:

While biographer Richard Holmes was a fellow at the University of Cambridge, he would walk by this statue of Alfred Lord Tennyson. He began to wonder if he could chip away the image of the ancient Victorian bard and expose the young poet beneath. Photo courtesy of Vysotsky / Wikimedia Commons.The complex feelings caused by the new revelations can’t be understated. Nature wasn’t as people had been told—it was more extraordinary! The Romantic poets captured the vertigo of a worldview caving in, and a new one evolving. And their poems were widely read. As a kaleidoscope of images from astronomy, chemistry, and geology, Romantic poetry was the first popular science.

After The Age of Wonder was published, Holmes wrote about the adventures and scientific discoveries (the layered spheres of Earth’s climate system) of the first hot-air ballooners, and candid reflections on his experiences as a biographer, the Frankenstein art of bringing the dead alive. But he knew the story of science and poetry couldn’t have ended with the Romantics and began to think about the next chapter. He didn’t have to think long. His curiosity about Tennyson returned. He decided to chip away the marble statue and meet the real man underneath.

Tennyson was born in 1809, the same year as Charles Darwin and Edgar Allan Poe. He came of age in a chaotic family of 11 in the country parish of Somersby in England. His father was the parish’s highly educated rector who carried a chip on his shoulder for being left out of his family inheritance for being “rude and ungovernable” as a kid.

To escape his father’s drunken rages, Tennyson journeyed to the seaside town of Mablethorpe and strolled along the windy dunes and beaches on the North Sea. “I come again,” he wrote in a poem: “Gray sand-banks, and pale sunsets, dreary wind, Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea.” Not the cheeriest of chaps, that Tennyson.

At Cambridge, Tennyson often hid behind his sullen self. At the same time, Holmes would write, the budding poet was “strange, energetic, independent, and subtly engaged with contemporary questions” arising from the daring science offending the Christians in his midst. Tennyson read through works on astronomy, geology, and the incipient science of evolution with his mind ablaze.

RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW:

Richard Holmes, at his home in Norfolk, England, reads a famous stanza from Tennyson’s epic, “In Memoriam,” drawn from the poet’s reading of Principles of Geology by Charles Lyall.Holmes grew up farther south in Kent County. In his early teens, following his own wandering spirit, he and his older sister rode their bikes a couple hundred miles north to camp on the dunes along the North Sea beaches. Holmes hadn’t returned for decades when in 2020, deep into his research on Tennyson, with England under lockdown during the dreary Covid days, he had the freeing idea to make like the poet and return to the gray sand banks and wander under pale sunsets himself.

“The North Sea coast is quite fierce, and always meant rather a lot to me,” Holmes said. “It was wonderful returning there. I felt Tennyson’s childhood excitement as my own. Coming back to the atmosphere of that wild North Sea coast was quite another level of inspiration. It was like returning to my old idea to go and walk in the footsteps of people to write about them.”

Holmes’ reference is to his 1985 book Footsteps, which trailblazed a new model for the literary biography as autobiography, and travel writing too. Holmes’ own life and passions emerge as he traces the footsteps of his young idols, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Wollstonecraft, and publicly flamboyant Romantic French poet Gerard de Nerval, best known (if at all), for walking through the gardens of Paris with a lobster on a leash.

After his drives to the North Sea coast in 2020, Holmes felt a newfound closeness to Tennyson. Discovering Tennyson’s engagement with science deepened the connection. Through Tennyson’s eyes, Holmes thought, he could portray the social earthquake of science in the Victorian era—and take readers with him. Which he has done beautifully in The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief, published earlier this year.

Read more:

“ Up, Up, and Away With Science”

Tennyson is an ideal lens on the insurrections of science because his brooding nature made him so incredibly sensitive. His father’s violent outbursts not only cracked apart the family—two of Tennyson’s siblings were confined to a mental asylum—but Tennyson’s faith.

“Because of the nature of what we’d now call a dysfunctional family,” Holmes said, “Tennyson, despite his golden education, became a kind of permanent outsider. That allowed him to take on board all these rather frightening things about science, to educate himself and write about them.”

If Tennyson was a saturnine fellow by nature, he sunk even deeper into his tenebrous self when his closest friend, Arthur Hallam, died of a stroke at age 22. Tennyson and Hallam trekked across the mountains and villages of Europe together, sharing the kind of conversations that you can only have once in your life, the kind that liberates you from yourself, allowing you to feel what love is.

Hallam’s death haunted Tennyson nearly every waking and sleeping hour. For 16 years, from 1833 to 1849, he wrote about his friend, a “fragmented graveyard,” Holmes writes. In total, Tennyson wrote 131 cantos, published together as “In Memoriam.”

The intensely autobiographical work opens with one elegy of pain after another. But gradually a transformation takes place. Hallam’s death leads Tennyson to consider “death in general, and the meaning of ‘Extinction’ throughout nature.” These reflections stemmed from his reading in science.

One work that had a profound influence on Tennyson was Principles of Geology by Charles Lyall. In it, Tennyson read, “Amidst the vicissitude of the earth’s surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them. There is no possibility of escaping from this conclusion … None of the works of a mortal being can be eternal.”

“It’s difficult to appreciate today what a bewildering impact this would have had back then,” Holmes said. “Here was evidence that individual animals, creatures, had become extinct. From that came the logical idea that mankind itself was destined to become extinct.”

In his epic mourning for his beloved friend, Tennyson transformed Lyall’s science into mourning for the cruelty of nature, a decade before Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Before Tennyson or anyone could have read Darwin, Holmes explained, Tennyson captured “the metaphysical crisis that Darwinism and the actual theory of evolution would subsequently produce throughout society.” In fact, Tennyson penned one of the most famous lines about nature—“red in tooth and claw”—often mistaken for something Darwin wrote. A stanza of “In Memoriam” goes like this:

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law—
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed

Tennyson uses “ravine” in its Victorian sense of rapine or plundering; in other words, God’s love is fine and all, but no match for nature’s violence.

“That phrase, ‘red in tooth and claw with ravine,’ would have struck Tennyson’s original readers with horror,” Holmes said. And not just readers in elitist academies. “In Memoriam” was published in May of 1850; by the end of that year, it had sold 60,000 copies. That number, unheard of for a book of poetry today, made “In Memoriam” the talk of English towns.

Many biographies and books of criticism have been written about Tennyson since the poet’s death in 1892. What’s exceptional about The Boundless Deep is how modern that Holmes makes Tennyson feel. In one of his youthful conversations with Hallam, Holmes writes, Tennyson told “a story about a Brahmin destroying a microscope because it showed animals killing each other in a drop of water. He and Hallam agreed that this was a ‘significant’ kind of unscientific response: ‘as if we could destroy facts by refusing to see them.’”

Tennyson’s relevance today “is not so much about science itself, but what science does to the human imagination,” Holmes said. “That was Tennyson’s subject. Science shares things that we can’t face but have to face. We still undergo the same emotions today. Science can haunt and depress. But it can also expand and excite.”

In a poem Tennyson began in the 1830s, “The Palace of Art,” he imagines a woman astronomer describing what she sees through a telescope.

Brushes of fire, hazy gleams,
Clusters and beds of worlds, and bee-like swarms
Of suns, and starry streams.

Edwin Hubble, the 20th-century astronomer who established that galaxies exist far beyond our own, planting awe in humanity’s conception of the universe, wrote, “Our stellar system is a swarm of stars isolated in space. It drifts through the universe as a swarm of bees drift through the summer air.”

“I don’t know if Hubble read Tennyson,” Holmes said. “But isn’t the image of the universe as a swarm of bees wonderful?” Yes, it is.

In The Boundless Deep, Holmes has done what science does. He has stripped away myths calcified in culture to expose what’s real. Tennyson is not the stodgy marble statue anchored in the Trinity Chapel at the University of Cambridge. He was and is a magnificent voice of humanity and the universe, ringing out today.

Lead image: Portrait of Alfred Lord Tennyson by Samuel Laurence / Wikimedia Commons

[Maple MAGA ] Sounds like a Thai massage.

Maple MAGA — 3/28/2026 9:19:16 AM

[Tom Clarke] Always happy to help. This might be useful some day. [graphic]

Tom Clarke — 3/28/2026 7:01:32 AM

Always happy to help. This might be useful some day.

[Maple MAGA ] Many thanks for posting that, it was quite useful in a conversation yesterday.

Maple MAGA — 3/26/2026 10:59:36 AM

[Tom Clarke] I Love the Em Dash—Too Bad If AI Does Too I won’t abandon the controversial pun...

Tom Clarke — 3/25/2026 4:52:10 AM

I Love the Em Dash—Too Bad If AI Does Too

I won’t abandon the controversial punctuation mark just to prove I’m human

thewalrus.ca

[Stan] Empty - :) Why English is confusing?? [youtube video]

Stan — 11/19/2025 10:00:34 PM

[Maple MAGA ] Islamophobia is incorrectly described as: Islamophobia is the fear, prejudice, ...

Maple MAGA — 9/8/2025 2:01:38 PM

Islamophobia is incorrectly described as:

Islamophobia is the fear, prejudice, or hatred of Muslims or Islam, manifesting as hostility and discrimination at individual, systemic, and institutional levels. It includes racism, stereotypes, and acts of violence or harassment, leading to the perception of Muslims as a threat and preventing them from exercising their rights and freedoms. While it is not the same as criticizing Islam's doctrines, Islamophobia occurs when a person targets or excludes an individual based on their perceived faith.

Arachnophobia is described as:

Arachnophobia is an intense, irrational fear of spiders and other arachnids (such as scorpions).

It is one of the most common specific phobias, and people who have it often experience strong anxiety or panic when they see a spider, think about one, or are in places where they believe spiders might be present. Symptoms can include:

- Rapid heartbeat and sweating

- Nausea or dizziness

- Difficulty breathing

- Urge to escape or avoid the situation entirely

Like other phobias, arachnophobia is considered an anxiety disorder. Its intensity varies: for some, its mild discomfort, while for others, it can be debilitating and interfere with daily life.

Islamophobia should be described similarly:

Islamophobia is an intense, irrational fear of Muslims.

It is one of the most common specific phobias, and people who have it often experience strong anxiety or panic when they see a Muslim, think about one, or are in places where they believe Muslims might be present. Symptoms can include:

- Rapid heartbeat and sweating

- Nausea or dizziness

- Difficulty breathing

- Urge to escape or avoid the situation entirely

Like other phobias, Islamophobia is considered an anxiety disorder. Its intensity varies: for some, its mild discomfort, while for others, it can be debilitating and interfere with daily life.

[Tom Clarke] The em dash is under attack theringer.com

Tom Clarke — 8/24/2025 11:37:55 AM

[Stan] The Pedants' Revolt [graphic]

Stan — 8/10/2025 2:02:24 PM

The Pedants' Revolt

[Tom Clarke] Sorry. : ) That scene is from a movie based on a James Ellroy novel. Ellroy is a...

Tom Clarke — 8/10/2025 12:41:35 PM

Sorry. : ) That scene is from a movie based on a James Ellroy novel. Ellroy is a master of language.

[Valuepro] O.k., thanks. You guys just convinced me that it's long past time to abandon thi...

Valuepro — 8/10/2025 10:40:30 AM

O.k., thanks. You guys just convinced me that it's long past time to abandon this Subject Mark.

[Tom Clarke] That’s racist. [X] pic.twitter.com/3yF35TR2Yc— ONT WTF (@OntWtf) March 1, 2025...

Tom Clarke — 8/10/2025 6:10:16 AM

That’s racist.

[X]

pic.twitter.com/3yF35TR2Yc
— ONT WTF (@OntWtf) March 1, 2025

[/X]

[Maple MAGA ] Rachel Maddow Says Lord Of The Rings “A Right-Wing Dog Whistle” [youtube video]

Maple MAGA — 8/9/2025 11:24:23 PM

[Tom Clarke] The semicolon had its moment; that moment is over On the power of punctuation Ph...

Tom Clarke — 5/19/2025 2:29:25 PM

The semicolon had its moment; that moment is over
On the power of punctuation
Philip Womack
19 May 2025

Rend your cheeks and rub ashes into your hair; for that most elegant, elusive of punctuation marks – the semicolon – is, if not yet quite dead, at least fairly close to being on first name terms with St Peter. Research from Babbel, a ‘learning platform’, shows that usage of the semicolon in texts has plunged by 47 per cent over the past two decades. I would be more surprised if the Pope turned out to be Catholic. These days, students struggle with commas and apostrophes. How can the poor milquetoasts be expected to grasp the finer usages of semicolons?

This is all a terrible shame. Good punctuation is a balm for the soul. As punctuation (or ‘pointing’, as it used to be called) orders sentences, so this relates to the order of mind, body and the universe itself. I do not exaggerate; Cicero himself thought so.

We can thank Aldus Manutius for introducing the semicolon into Venice, in the 1490s (though its previous life, in Ancient Greek, was as a question mark). What better birthplace than La Serenissima? Where brackets, or lunulae, remind us of the moon, simply using a semicolon in a sentence links us to gondolas, to the Bridge of Sighs; to sunlight shining on the waters of the canals. The typesetter Nicolas Jenson used a star in place of the point; I wish this had become common usage. Its first appearance in English – its debut, perhaps – came in the highest possible authority: the Coverdale Bible, printed in Paris in 1538.

Sure, Theodor Adorno thought it looked like a drooping moustache, but I disagree: formed, from two other punctuation marks, it is a gorgeous, enigmatic, humanist chimera. It more closely resembles a gentleman, on the edge of his chair, leaning slightly forwards, poised to hear the aphorism fall from your learned lips. It is the jewelled hand, held out to be kissed; it is the tactful recognition of a guest in the glittering salon.

This, I’m afraid, is why modernity despises the semicolon. It is too courtly, too refined, too subtle. I blame the democratic, cow-steering Americans, who shun it. They think of it as King Lear did the letter zed: unnecessary. For them it is a foppish aristo sipping absinthe, while the plebeian comma sweats beneath. Computers can’t stand it, because its proper usage refuses strict rules. Deploy it and their horrible, bossy ‘writing’ programmes become confused. (Which, to my mind, is more than reason enough to carry on with them.)

Indeed, the semicolon is useful, unlike the poor old punctus percontativus, ?, or rhetorical question mark, which vanished along with ruffs. Who needs a mark to tell us a question is rhetorical, I ask you?

The semicolon’s role, on the other hand, is manifold. It is caesura; it is release mechanism; it both divides, and connects

The semicolon’s role, on the other hand, is manifold. It is caesura; it is release mechanism; it both divides and connects. ‘It was the best of times; it was the worst of times’ is rendered much better with a semicolon. Witness this gorgeous specimen by Christopher Marlowe, in ‘Hero and Leander’:

Come thither; As she spake this, her toong tript.
For vnawares (Come thither) from her slipt.
And sodainly her former colour chang’d.
And here and there her eies through anger rang’d.

That slight, erotic pause after the first ‘thither’; it’s heavenly. Daniel Defoe’s usage of the semicolon threw Samuel Taylor Coleridge into raptures. When Robinson Crusoe returns to his ship for the final time, he finds a large amount of gold; now all useless and for a moment he wants to let it sink with the ship. Defoe then writes: ‘However, upon second thoughts, I took it away; and wrapping all this in a piece of canvas…’ For Coleridge, this semicolon was ‘exquisite and masterlike… A meaner writer… would have put an ‘!’ after ‘away’. It rendered Defoe, he said, on the same level as Shakespeare. (Incidentally, the original Robinson Crusoe doesn’t have a semicolon there, since it was inserted by a later editor. But still, the point, if you’ll excuse the pun, holds.)

We must resist this decline. Like napkins, black tie and having a glass of champagne before lunch, the semicolon remains a bulwark against civilisational decline. We mustn’t let a generation ape the meaner writers (!) Pause, rest, think; and encourage this most noble of punctuation marks to flourish anew.

spectator.co.uk

[Maple MAGA ] Nice printing but his grammar is all wrong... [X] NEW: Police in Arizona have ...

Maple MAGA — 4/29/2025 7:52:46 PM

Nice printing but his grammar is all wrong...

[X]

NEW: Police in Arizona have arrested a suspect in connection with an arson attack targeting a newly delivered Cybertruck.

Ian Moses, the alleged arsonist, reportedly torched the new Tesla vehicle and wrote the word "THEIF" on the side of the nearby building.

Democrats and the… pic.twitter.com/tTI9OGUJXi
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 29, 2025

[/X]

[Thomas M.] [X] French is not for beginners pic.twitter.com/CdH5N65opx— NO CONTEXT HUMANS (...

Thomas M. — 3/26/2025 7:57:22 AM

[X]

French is not for beginners pic.twitter.com/CdH5N65opx
— NO CONTEXT HUMANS (@HumansNoContext) March 25, 2025

[/X]

Tom

[Valuepro] "... it will move away from Western perspectives after concerns were raised th...

Valuepro — 3/20/2025 11:42:52 AM

"... it will move away from Western perspectives after concerns were raised that Shakespeare’s ideas were used to advance ‘white supremacy’ ideas."

Or, how to undermine social order a la Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. Specificly, undermine everything respected or held sacred by the existing system, deserved or not.

[Maple MAGA ] Shakespeare, a ‘White Racist’ and ‘British Imperialist’ Mar 19, 2025 10:00 am ...

Maple MAGA — 3/20/2025 11:12:23 AM

Shakespeare, a ‘White Racist’ and ‘British Imperialist’

Mar 19, 2025 10:00 am

By Hugh Fitzgerald

32 Comments

The latest entry in the Annals of Wokeness can be found in an essay Robert Spencer wrote here. More on this can be found here: “Shakespeare’s birthplace to be ‘de-colonised’ over fears his success ‘benefits the ideology of white European supremacy,'” by Emily Jane Davies, Daily Mail, March 16, 2025:

William Shakespeare’s birthplace will be de-colonised over fears that portraying his success as the ‘greatest’ playwright ‘benefits the ideology of white European supremacy’.

Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust owns buildings in the playwright’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon.

It wants to ‘create a more inclusive museum experience’ and announced it will move away from Western perspectives after concerns were raised that Shakespeare’s ideas were used to advance ‘white supremacy’ ideas.

The trust also said that some of its items could contain language or depictions that are racist, sexist, or homophobic.

It comes amid an ongoing backlash against the writer. Some productions of his works have been slapped with trigger warnings for misogyny, racism and ‘problematic radicalised dynamics’ that link whiteness to beauty.

In 2022, a research project between the trust and Dr Helen Hopkins at the University of Birmingham postulated that the idea of Shakespeare’s ‘universal’ genius ‘benefits the ideology of white European supremacy’.

This is because European culture is portrayed as the standard for high art and the playwright as a symbol of British ‘superiority’, according to The Telegraph.

The project said this narrative has caused harm, and advised that the trust stop saying Shakespeare was the ‘greatest’ but part of a community of ‘equal and different’ writers globally.

Some of its organised events celebrated Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, and a Romeo and Juliet-inspired Bollywood dance workshop.

The trust also promised to remove offensive language from its collections.

Some of the items at the trust include archived material, literary criticism, books linked to the writer and gifts from around the world offered in honour of him.

A statement from the trust said: ‘As part of our ongoing work, we’ve undertaken a project which explores our collections to ensure they are as accessible as possible.’

In 2021, The Globe Theatre launched a project to ‘ decolonise’ Shakespeare’s famous plays, while experts claimed his work is ‘problematic’ for linking whiteness to beauty.

The London theatre, which is a reconstruction of the Elizabethan playhouse where William Shakespeare wrote his work, has begun ‘anti-racist’ seminars to discuss ‘decolonising’ Shakespeare’s esteemed plays.

Experts claimed that the bard’s plays are ‘problematic’ for linking whiteness to beauty, while an academic said all of Shakespeare’s plays are ‘race plays’ as they all contain ‘whiteness’.

Also in 2021, it was reported that a growing number of ‘woke’ academics are refusing to teach Shakespeare in U.S. schools, arguing that the Bard promotes racism, white supremacy and intolerance, and instead are pushing for the teaching of ‘modern’ alternatives.

It should be enough to point out the passages in his writings that prove Shakespeare to have been a defender of British imperialism even before there was a British empire to defend, and a racist to boot. Once those offending passages have been pointed out, shouldn’t they be excised from all future editions of his works, and from all future performances of his plays?

Or perhaps, given Shakespeare’s “racism,” why not remove his works altogether from the libraries, school syllabi, and repertoire of plays allowed to be put on? No one should be given a pass to spread racist views in his writings just because some consider that writer talented. As for me, now that his racism has been brought to my attention, I will never read a line of Shakespeare again. I will urge my local library to divest itself of his books so that no one else, including impressionable young people, inadvertently runs across them. And you will find me out on the picket line outside any theatre that has the bad taste to put on one of his plays. We have so many writers who are not racists; why do we need Shakespeare?

[Maple MAGA ] English for Beginners [youtube video]

Maple MAGA — 2/18/2025 1:31:42 AM

[Stan] LOL!!

Stan — 1/29/2025 9:19:48 AM

[Maple MAGA ] [graphic]

Maple MAGA — 1/29/2025 6:23:04 AM

[Stan] I've heard that "woman" came from "the [hu]man with the womb" but I can't find a...

Stan — 7/23/2024 10:04:40 AM

I've heard that "woman" came from "the [hu]man with the womb" but I can't find anything to substantiate that.

[Valuepro] One would suppose she is speaking as a representative of womankind, but that wou...

Valuepro — 7/23/2024 8:26:13 AM

One would suppose she is speaking as a representative of womankind, but that would not be appropriately gender neutral enough to underscore "her" point. Or, is it "their" point?

What would Shakespeare say?

Never mind. The Bard never had a PhD. She wins. Oops, no! They win.

[Stan] "men" [youtube video] Tolkien and "Men" (youtube.com)

Stan — 7/22/2024 7:10:02 PM

[Valuepro] I saw it as communications-related, something which is associated with grammar.

Valuepro — 7/20/2024 3:47:59 PM

[Zen Dollar Round] Not sure how that story ended up in this thread unless you took a left instead o...

Zen Dollar Round — 7/19/2024 9:41:18 AM

Not sure how that story ended up in this thread unless you took a left instead of a right at the Laughter is the Best Medicine forum, but I did find it amusing!

[Valuepro] The heart of comedy is surprise. Thanks for the laugh.

Valuepro — 7/19/2024 8:40:03 AM

[Maple MAGA ] The professor told his class one day, 'Today we will experiment with a new form ...

Maple MAGA — 7/19/2024 12:49:31 AM

The professor told his class one day, 'Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story.

The process is simple.

Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right.

As homework tonight, one of you will write the first paragraph of a short story.

You will e-mail your partner that paragraph and send another copy to me.

The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story and send it back, also sending another copy to me.

The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back-and-forth.

Remember to re-read what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent.

There is to be absolutely NO talking outside of the e-mails and anything you wish to say must be written in the e-mail.

The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached.'

The following was actually turned in by two of his English students: Rebecca and Gary.

-------------------------------------------

THE STORY

(first paragraph by Rebecca)

At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The chamomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked chamomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So chamomile was out of the question.

(second paragraph by Gary )

Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. 'A.S. Harris to Geostation 17,' he said into his transgalactic communicator. 'Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far...' But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.

(Rebecca)

He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. 'Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel,' Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth, when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspaper to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. 'Why must one lose one's innocence to become a woman?' she wondered wistfully..

( Gary )

Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu'udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace disarmament Treaty through the congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu'udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them, they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan.. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam , felt the inconceivably massive explosion, which vaporized poor, stupid Laurie.

(Rebecca)

This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic semi-literate adolescent.

( Gary )

Yeah? Well, my writing partner is a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium. 'Oh, shall I have chamomile tea? Or shall I have some other sort of F**KING TEA??? Oh no, what am I to do? I'm such an air headed bimbo who reads too many Danielle Steele novels!'

(Rebecca)

Asshole!

( Gary )

Bitch!

(Rebecca)

F**K YOU - YOU NEANDERTHAL!

( Gary )

Go drink some tea - whore.

(TEACHER)

A+ I really liked this one.

[Stan] Comments from French speakers confirm (what are to us) their odd word patterns. ...

Stan — 6/24/2024 11:19:04 PM

Comments from French speakers confirm (what are to us) their odd word patterns.

[Stan] [graphic]

Stan — 6/24/2024 11:39:58 AM

[Stan] It's the C- at the bottom that gets me. :) [graphic]

Stan — 2/27/2024 2:46:56 PM

It's the C- at the bottom that gets me. :)

[Stan] Oh, if only . . . :)

Stan — 12/12/2023 10:04:53 AM

[Valuepro] Or, "Shamed by AI altering your writing?" LOL

Valuepro — 12/12/2023 8:54:38 AM

[Stan] Shamed by you English? [graphic]

Stan — 12/12/2023 8:06:10 AM

Shamed by you English?

[S. maltophilia] After reading that, I wonder why more non-native English speakers don't just tak...

S. maltophilia — 11/15/2023 1:47:14 PM

After reading that, I wonder why more non-native English speakers don't just take up Mandarin as an easier alternative.

[Stan] A chaotic poem about English pronunciation [youtube video]

Stan — 11/15/2023 1:38:53 PM

[Valuepro] I get that response when unexpectedly hearing bad grammar from the mouths of pro...

Valuepro — 10/28/2023 1:27:29 PM

I get that response when unexpectedly hearing bad grammar from the mouths of professionals in broadcasting.

[Tom Clarke] Bad grammar is so maddening it activates the 'fight or flight' response within t...

Tom Clarke — 10/28/2023 6:41:06 AM

Bad grammar is so maddening it activates the 'fight or flight' response within the human body, study finds

dailymail.co.uk

[Stan] :) [graphic]

Stan — 9/20/2023 1:04:48 PM

[Tom Clarke] Boris Johnson gives an example of Churchill's deliberate selection of Germanic v...

Tom Clarke — 4/16/2023 7:30:59 PM

Boris Johnson gives an example of Churchill's deliberate selection of Germanic vs Latin words for effect in his famous speeches at 4:55

h/t Wretchard T. Cat
facebook.com

[Tom Clarke] In 1977 Jorge Luis Borges told William F. Buckley (whose first language was Span...

Tom Clarke — 4/16/2023 7:28:21 PM

In 1977 Jorge Luis Borges told William F. Buckley (whose first language was Spanish) his reasons for feeling that English was 'far finer' than his native tongue.

[X]

In 1977, Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most influential 20th c. Spanish-language writers, told William F. Buckley (whose first language was Spanish) his reasons for feeling, age 78, that English was 'far finer' than his native tongue. Right or wrong, I love his savor for language pic.twitter.com/foOzTu6mYR
— Benjamin Carlson (@bfcarlson) April 10, 2023

[/X]

[Tom Clarke] [graphic]

Tom Clarke — 3/20/2023 5:51:45 AM

[Maple MAGA ] They certainly are the most sanctimonious people who ever lived... [youtube ...

Maple MAGA — 2/20/2023 1:05:13 PM

They certainly are the most sanctimonious people who ever lived...

[Valuepro] "...they claim they are the most moral people who ever lived." Therein evolves ...

Valuepro — 2/20/2023 12:48:27 PM

"...they claim they are the most moral people who ever lived."

Therein evolves the risks from such exclusivity and superiority, undetectable cancers within those who fall prey to this kind of social disease.

[DMaA] The modern Woke not only think they are the most moral people on Earth, they cla...

DMaA — 2/20/2023 12:36:27 PM

The modern Woke not only think they are the most moral people on Earth, they claim they are the most moral people who ever lived.

[Valuepro] Do you mean to say "Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Tennyson, Orwell, Huxley, Kipl...

Valuepro — 2/20/2023 12:34:27 PM

Do you mean to say "Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Tennyson, Orwell, Huxley, Kipling and Edmund Burke" are not Woke? They must be cancelled immediately. And maybe we should have public book burnings, too.

Geesh, such a waste of public funds!

[Maple MAGA ] British Taxpayer-Funded Anti-Extremist Study Finds Shakespeare, Orwell, Tolkien ...

Maple MAGA — 2/20/2023 12:13:36 PM

British Taxpayer-Funded Anti-Extremist Study Finds Shakespeare, Orwell, Tolkien "Key Texts" For "White Supremacists"

BY TYLER DURDEN

MONDAY, FEB 20, 2023 - 03:35 AM

Several of the UK’s most respected TV shows, movies, and works of literature have been included in a list of works that could potentially encourage far-right sympathies, compiled by the taxpayer-funded and government-led ‘Prevent’ counter-terrorism program.

As The Daily Mail reports, works by some of the world’s greatest writers were included as examples of warning signs of potential extremism, including Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Tennyson, Orwell, Huxley, Kipling and Edmund Burke.

The flagship Prevent scheme, recently the subject of a scathing audit, singled out comedies Yes Minister and The Thick Of It, the 1955 epic war film The Dam Busters, and even The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare as possible red flags of extremism.

Prevent is a key part of the UK's counter-terrorism strategy as a means to safeguard against "vulnerable people being drawn into criminal behavior".

In practical terms, it places public bodies, including schools and the police, under a legal duty to identify people who may turn to extremism, and intervene in their lives before it is too late.

If the local panels find someone who is at risk of becoming a terrorist, the Prevent teams use specialist mentors or other support programs to turn around their lives.

It said the works of fiction were "key texts" for "white nationalists/supremacists".

Right-leaning writer Douglas Murray obtained the full list and discovered that one of his books had been given a red flag by Prevent.

He wrote in The Spectator:

"A number of books are singled out, the possession or reading of which could point to severe wrongthink and therefore potential radicalisation.

It seems that RICU [Prevent’s Research Information and Communications Unit ] is so far off-track that it believes that books identifying the problem that it was itself set up to tackle are in fact a part of the problem."

House of Cards screenwriter Andrew Davies said:

"It almost seems like a joke. House Of Cards was actually a satirical view of Right-wing politics. This list includes more or less the entire classical canon of literature and some of the very best British television programs ever made."

The list has emerged following a major review criticized the Prevent scheme by William Shawcross.

His report, published earlier this month, criticised the £49million-a-year scheme Prevent scheme, saying it applied a ‘double standard’ to Islamist and far-Right threats, prioritizing the latter.

The BBC reports, Mr Shawcross said he had been consistently unable to determine how many community organisations receiving a slice of the Prevent budget were having any impact.

"Funding too often goes towards generic projects dealing with community cohesion and hate crime, and few [community organisations] could be seen publicly to contest extremist discourse.

"Some have promoted extremist narratives, including statements that appear sympathetic to the Taliban.

As The Mail reports, a Home Office spokesman said:

"The Home Secretary made clear that Prevent will now ensure it focuses on the key threat of Islamist terrorism, as well as remaining vigilant on emerging threats.

We’ve accepted all 34 recommendations [from the Shawcross review] and are committed to protecting our country from the threat posed by terrorism."

Home Secretary Suella Braverman told MPs that Prevent needs major reform: "Prevent has shown cultural timidity and an institutional hesitancy to tackle Islamism for fear of the charge of Islamophobia. Prevent's focus must be solely on security, not political correctness."

[Stan] How the Pink Panther theme mimics English speech rhythm [youtube video] An inte...

Stan — 11/5/2022 2:48:44 PM

How the Pink Panther theme mimics English speech rhythm

An interesting channel

youtube.com

[Stan] Contronyms - words with opposite meanings I was surprised to find out the Hebre...

Stan — 10/1/2022 10:24:25 PM

Contronyms - words with opposite meanings

I was surprised to find out the Hebrew has at least one, the word "barak" which means "bless." It was used in a sentence about Job's great concern that after his adult children had partied they might have sinned by uttering a "barak" toward God. (Job ch. 1 v. 5)

The English translations render it "curse" due to context.

English examples are cleave (to join or to cut), overlook (to view from above or to fail to see), refrain (to repeat as in a song, or to stop doing something).

more examples - rd.com