Your Dominant Intelligence is Linguistic Intelligence

You are excellent with words and language. You explain yourself well. An elegant speaker, you can converse well with anyone on the fly. You are also good at remembering information and convincing someone of your point of view. A master of creative phrasing and unique words, you enjoy expanding your vocabulary. You would make a fantastic poet, journalist, writer, teacher, lawyer, politician, or translator.

It's no accident that I call this category GAMES.

Back in the 80s, there was a wonderful magazine called EUROPEAN TRAVEL & LIFE.  I still have about 5 years worth. I can't bear to throw them away. It was a real reader's magazine -- long, beautifully written, interesting articles, useful information about local life in the "A" list and "B" list cities, recipes, fashion. Wonderful!  I miss it.  It was in one of those issues that a writer referred to England as "Israel for white people".  Completely, unashamedly, brazenly elitist. Those were the years of obsession with Princess Diana and the "Treasure Houses of Britain".  However, I'm sure if you asked the average East Londoner about England being for white people, he would have pissed himself laughing.  For better or worse, England belongs to its immigrants -- just like the U.S. 

Yet...for all that modern England belongs to its Caribbeans, East Indians, North Africans, Central Africans -- and maybe even some Americans, the origins of English belong to its tribes.  Before English was "english", there were the territorial languages of the Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Picts, Frisians, Celts, Scandinavians, Romans from Rome, and Romans who had assimilated into the local population.  Over the generations, they battled, traded, moved, and married.  And as the different tribes began to blend as a drop of water picks up other drops on the way down the glass to form a puddle at the base, legends were born.  Legends of high kings, forest warriors, and conquests.  To tell those stories, a language was needed -- a language to reach as many people as possible.  As stories were passed from generation to generation, a fragile nationalism was born.  English became the language of the people, the bottom of the pyramid that made the top possible.

Therefore, it's no surprise that I have a lot of books about England and the history of English. History of The English Language was a required course for me in college, but that's okay.  It was one of my favorite classes. History and literature make a fantastic combination, just like history and art, or history and music.  One is not possible without the other.  Life is full of those kinds of dualities.  So here's my collection. I'm sure I have more, but this is a good chunk. I still even have the college book I used, but it's in exile in a box somewhere. 

1. ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: A Social & Linguistic History 1986; Joseph M. Williams
2. THE EARLY YEARS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 1964; Barrows, Bletter, & Sullivan
3. WORDS FROM HISTORY 1968; Isaac Asimov
4. THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 1993; Pyles & Algeo
5. THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA 1983; Paul Theroux
6. ENGLISH PLACE NAMES 1997; Kenneth Cameron
7. THE FAMILIES OF WORDS 1972; Mario Pei

2 and 4 are textbooks.  The rest are popular releases.  5 is a wonderful travel book about how Theroux traveled around England -- literally.  He circumnavigated England's coast, observing and interacting with coastal communities, hence the title.  1 was used as the preferred text for the PBS series Origins of The English Language -- a wonderful program that I desperately wish they would pull out of the vault, remaster and transfer to DVD.  Oh, the things I could teach my young'uns with a program like that.  They wouldn't have to suffer my off-key accents and no-key impressions. 6 I have blogged before.  7 reads like a dissertation -- all research and documentation; no personality.

4 has way cool end papers that show linguistic symbols. The language of linguistics, to my ears, kinda funny. Alveolo-palatal fricatives.  hih hih hih hih.  Voiceless epiglottal fricative.  Voiceless?  C'mon, you're pulling my leg.  Bilabial click.  Not as much fun as it sounds. Voiced labial-velar approximant.  What is that? A pick-up line?  Advanced tongue root.  Again -- not fun.  Palatoalveolar click.  Stop!  You're killing me! Some of these words sound more like dentistry than language. 

Asimov's book (3) is wonderful.  He tells stories about the origins of expressions like "Dutch treat", "gentleman", "rigamarole", and Iron Curtain.  I was lucky to find this book in a random box of books being withdrawn from the San Antonio Library.  I used to love their book sales.  It was like grocery shopping -- except with better prices.  I lived for those sales.  A lot of what I have came from those sales. That was the B.A. period.  (Before Amazon.com).

2 is a standard college reader. No illustrations. Every page groans with the weight of text.  The discussion questions at the end of each chapter are more like oral exam questions.  I don't have a problem with any of that.  A good professor knows how to use the information from a book like this, not just regurgitate the information contained within.

A book I want to add to my collection (like I don't have enough??) is Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, a.k.a. Ecclesiastical History of The English People by the Venerable Bede.  An interesting twist in the Latin title, I think, is the word "ecclesiastica" -- a Greek word. 

My collection at SHELFARI

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THE ART OF CLEAR THINKING by Rudolf Flesch

I absolutely cannot get enough of this book!  I carried it in my purse for 2 years, reading it whenever I was at a stoplight, at the drive-thru of junk food palace, in line at the post office, etc. Every chapter had nuggets of solid gold sanity and common sense, divested of junk psychology or trendy rationalizations. First published by Collier Books in 1951, this edition was from 1965 -- the 3rd printing.  I also found a hardcover edition on eBay since my little paperback is coming undone from all the handling it got.  This edition cost 95 cents. I found it in my parents' closet and took it. I asked them about it, but since they hadn't read it since they bought it, they couldn't tell me much about it.  I was hooked from about the 3rd chapter.  Sure, some of the examples Flesch uses are outdated, but the reasoning is not.

It doesn't provide convenient answers. It doesn't wow you with graphs and charts and medical research or psychological data.  It stays close to the human being. Getting to clear thinking is a bit like filling in a map as you go along.  Everyone seems to get to the same destination via their own route -- some arrow-straight, some circuitous.

Another thing I learned from reading this book is that if you think you know what "clear" thinking is, you don't.  You can only command it so far. You might know some of the stops on the way to clear thinking, but there's a whole lot of gray area where things like intuition, muscle memory and synapse sparking take over and you can't control that. You can't be inspired on demand. So of course, one of the main ideas mentioned is that there's still so much we don't know about how the brain works. So much that, even 57 years after this book was published, there's still so much unexplored territory.

The discourse is a bit dry throughout the book, but Flesch does have a Bob Newhart-ish "button-down mind" sense of humor.  The title of Chapter 1 is "Robots, Apes, and You".  Wow, that's quite a spectrum.  And he scores points with me by quoting one of my favorite authors, E. M. Forster: "Unless we remember, we cannot understand."  For me, the most edifying chapter is Chapter 6, The Pursuit of Translation.  It has me chasing down translations of Schopenhauer.  I got so much out that chapter! Translating languages is like Total Gym for the mind, basically because you don't just translate words, you translate ideas and experiences.  So simply put, and it felt like a splash of champagne in my brain.

A book about thinking would be feeble without a discussion of logic and arguing.  Flesch handles it in such an earthy, humanistic manner.  I won't tell you his bottom line, but I will leave you with some "fightin' words": "When you argue with someone, you pit your organization of nerve patterns against his."

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http://www.shelfari.com/o1518324450/shelf

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George Orwell has done for modern English what Geoffrey Chaucer did for Middle English. He has wielded it like Hatori Hanzo wields a sword. From his pen, it's been flowcharted, coded, DE-coded, and programmed like a Microsoft applet.  In exposing its quirks and the ill-use people make of it, he also glorifies it.  It is a marvelous instrument indeed, to be so sought after and exploited.

I tip my hat mime-style to Russell Brand for the title idea. Not sure he'll thank me for the nod, but that's okay. (I'm here for you, Russ. Call me...)

So this bookie-wook I'm referring to is ANIMAL FARM. One of the most wonderful novels ever to be tagged "classic literature".  It's actually one of the more interesting classics.  The version I have is this fantastically illustrated 50th anniversary version. It's a lovely, large hardcover with a slipcover illustrated by Ralph Steadman -- all ink splotches and crudely inked animals.  I bet he was one of those kids in school who couldn't have a pen in his hand without ink all over his fingers and clothes.  Everywhere but on his paper.

Animals. heeheehee. They kick the farmer off his farm because he drinks like a pissed fish and forgets to feed them. Bwahahahahahaha. The animals take over the farm. chucklechucklechuckle. Phf phf phf phf... The PIGS take charge of the farm! AAAAAAHHH HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  Stop! I'm dyin' here!  Sniff, sniff.  Animals? Running a farm?  And they have a flag????  PMSL ROFL.  Damn. That's some funny stuff right there.

That's a kids' story right there -- a fable. But it gets real grown-up real fast. All those nasty, evil things that people do in the name of power and greed. The violence! The lies! By the end of the book, I was Benjamin. Nothing changed except for the worse. All the workers' sacrifices were for nowt. For the sake of your emotional equilibrium, read it when you are feeling pretty good. The worst time to read it is when your life is in turmoil or you're tired after a long day of being overworked and underappreciated.

If you like to linger over linguistics-laced literature, lift the lid on POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE and WHY I WRITE.

PS: There are no good movie or animated versions of this novel. There's an animated movie from 1950-something that's serviceable, but nothing really good. The TNT version from 2002 doesn't count. It's like a CliffNotes version. Bleh!

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