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Life and Strange Surprising Adventures

@lydia-laowai / lydia-laowai.tumblr.com

"irrelevant opinions, cat gifs, and angst about not belonging anywhere"
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Now, how do the young prepare to meet the old? The same way the old prepare to meet the young: with a little condescension; with low expectation of the other's rationality; with the knowledge that the other will find what they say hard to understand, that it will go beyond them; [...] and with the feeling that they must arrive with something the other will like, something suitable. Like Garibaldi biscuits. "They like them," explained Irie when the twins queried her choice, as the three of them rumbled to their destination on the top of the 52 bus, "they like the raisins in them. Old people like raisins." Millat [...] sniffed, "Nobody likes raisins. Dead grapes -- bleurgh. Who wants to eat them?" "Old people do," Irie insisted, stuffing the biscuits back into her bag. "And they're not dead, akchully, they're dried."

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

#hello i'm a literature student#literature#generation gap#代沟#biscuits
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It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind Nature for the wingless wild things that have their homes in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of the woodland; the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere; far in the empty sky a solitary esophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God.

Mark Twain, A Double Barrelled Detective Story

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He opened the filing cabinet and picked out the first card in the set. Traditionally, it read. Now there was a random choice between cards reading coronations, engagements, funerals, weddings, comings of age, births, deaths, or the churching of women. [...] He closed his eyes, drew weddings, and was signposted on to are occasions for rejoicing. The wedding of X and Y followed in logical sequence, and brought him a choice between is no exception and is a case in point. Either way there followed indeed. Indeed, whichever occasion one had started off with, whether coronations, deaths, or births, Goldwasser saw with intense mathematical pleasure, one now reached this same elegant bottleneck. He paused on indeed, then drew in quick succession it is a particularly happy occasion, rarely, and can there have been a more popular young couple. From the next selection, Goldwasser drew X has won himself/ herself a special place in the nation’s affections, which forced him to go on to and the British people have clearly taken Y to their hearts already. Goldwasser was surprised, and a little disturbed, to realise that the word “fitting” had still not come up. But he drew it with the next card — it is especially fitting that. This gave him the bride/bridegroom should be, and an open choice between of such a noble and illustrious line, a commoner in these democratic times, from a nation with which this country has long enjoyed a particularly close and cordial relationship, and from a nation with which this country’s relations have not in the past been always happy. Feeling that he had done particularly well with “fitting” last time, Goldwasser now deliberately selected it again. It is also fitting that, read the card, to be quickly followed by we should remember, and X and Y are not merely symbols — they are a lively young man and a very lovely young woman. Goldwasser shut his eyes to draw the next card. It turned out to read In these days when. He pondered whether to select it is fashionable to scoff at the traditional morality of marriage and family life or it is no longer fashionable to scoff at the traditional morality of marriage and family life. The latter had more of the form’s authentic baroque splendour, he decided.

Michael Frayn, The Tin Men

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Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting agrammar school [...] Thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear. 

Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2

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[Aside] Nay, John, it will be stinking law for his breath stinks with eating toasted cheese.

Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2

#老公
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It is the fate of those who dwell at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward. Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries.

Samuel Johnson in the preface to his dictionary

#doctorate#my expensive stressful hobby
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In language there are no licensed practitioners, but the woods are full of midwives, herbalists, colonic irrigationists, bonesetters, and general-purpose witch doctors, some abysmally ignorant, others with a rich fund of practical knowledge—whom we shall lump together and call shamans. They require our attention not only because they fill a lack but because they are almost the only people who make the news when language begins to cause trouble and someone must answer the cry for help. Sometimes their advice is sound. Sometimes it is worthless, but still it is sought because no one knows where else to turn.

Dwight Bolinger, Language - The Loaded Weapon: The Use and Abuse of Language Today

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Vladimir Nabokov, another brilliant writer in English, refused to lecture or be interviewed extemporaneously, insisting on writing out every word beforehand with the help of dictionaries and grammars. As he modestly explained, "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct

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George Bernard Shaw led a vigorous campaign to reform the English alphabet, a system so illogical, he said, that it could spell fish as "ghoti"—gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in nation.

Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct

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‘When I arrived in Japan on November 4, 1992, the linguist Masaaki Yamanashi greeted me with a twinkle and said, “In Japan, we have been very interested in Clinton’s erection.”’

Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct

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Never say anything about a book that anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying Moby-Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say that Moby-Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand times. So in your paper, you say Moby-Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked Moby-Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative.

Dave Barry

#hello I'm a literature student#literature#moby dick#moby-dick#college#university#interpretation
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Freedom is only and always the right to think differently.

Rosa Luxemburg

#freedom
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reblogged
fyeah-asian-history-art
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shihlun

「我是中華國民／我愛中華民國／中華民國現在雖然不得了／將來一定了不得」

Carl Mydans, Patriotic Education in Primary School, China, 1941.

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