Reading harold_maude's journal

It's sunday morning. My head is running on overload again this morning.
When this happens, as it does quite often, I will try to focus on one idea. Kind of ignore the rest of the stuff going on and just focus on one thing and sometimes it helps to get things a bit more focused and generally makes the day a bit easier.

this morning this thought went through my head:
artist: an accomplished master of any given discipline, or acitvity.

A simple definition.
That's what that is. Tear away all the add-on words and that at the bottom of all things that define one notion of what an aritst is.

The Oxford dictonary has, like all dictionaries, a group of pages that give you instructions on how to use the dictionary, a preface, and the tools to help you the searcher and reader understand how to decode the words that are in the dictionary.

I decited to read through this section a few months ago.
I read the story of how the oxford dictionary came into existance.
It is an amazing story.

In the year 1857 there was decision made that all the dictionaries that existed were incomplete due to the fact
that the english language had changed so much that a new dictionary needed to be made.
The first 22 years of collecting definitions produced almost two tons of little 4x6 inch peices of paper with a single word on it and a definition of that word.
That's alot of little yellow peices of paper.

In 1878 it was decited that a 4 volume 6400 page work would
be completed in ten years.
Ten years to organize and sort and edit and spell check almost two tons of little yellow peices of paper.
I'm not sure that would be a job that I would want.

To skip ahead to the end here are the statistics about this book called the oxford dictionary:

It was finally completed in 1928.
It was bound in 12 large volumes
contianed 15,487 pages defining 414,825 words
with 1,827,306
supporting and illustrative quotations from Anglo-Saxib tunes to the twenthieth century.
There was a 127 miles of typeset material.
The whole thing took 70 years to complete.

This and a whole lot more is written in a brief history of how the oxford english dictionary came into existance.
The numbers alone stager the mind.
How can so many words exist and yet many times it's so hard to define what we want to say?

That's amazing, that even after that many words sometimes finding the right one never seems to happen.
Enter the thesaurus.
That cool book that helps you make up your mind what word would be good to use to help you get your meaning across.
It's awesome, but in the currant existing languages spoken in
this country alone, the different dialects that exist in this country, not to meantion how many other countries with how many varried language dialects and meanings to thoes spoken languages, it's really hard to know if they have the same definition of a particular word as you do as their main definition.

All this leads me to believe that Terrence was right about our need to find a different way to communicate with each other so we can actually understand each other.

There are languages that I listen to, the words are in english, but understanding them has proven difficult.
When I hear people speak strings of words back and forth, I watch the body language as the conversation goes on.

There are whole expressions of body movments that accompany the spoken word.
And there is a term that someone came up with to define all of this: Ebonics.
And from what I was told as a definition of what ebonics is, I gathered that it is a mixture of words that orignally started as a seperate language group among african groups in this country and then mixed with the melting pot of languages called americanese, that's seems a good term for what is spoken in this country.

It occured to me that we all have our own personal language in additon to all of the above.
I have no idea how many languages actually exist right now.
Is it any wonder that we have trouble communicating clearly?

It seems a right of passage almost for a generation to create it's own language as well.
Trying to bridge the generation gap might be better said this way: trying to bridge the language gap and the language barriers.
The previous generations find themselves in this situation,
they must learn the new language in order to be understood by the group that created and is speaking the lanugage.
New pages are written in memory and I would guess that someone somewhere is writing this stuff down so that it becomes the written expression of definitions for the new language.

I'm not sure how long it would now to make yet another version of a common , common meaning used by all who use linguistic expressions to communicate ideas, dictionary.
With computer technology probably not very long relativly speaking.
With the ablity to take photographs to act as a support for the definitions, it would be a very large set and number of books.
It would be huge.

It boggles the mind.
but I think it probably needs to be done. Just so that at least there is some kind of record of the evolution of language.

gonna stop here.

You are the best immatation of you that exists