Introduction This is an experiment. If it works, it works.
I’ll normally use one, two or three of the following headings. They should cover most of it.
Work
It was nice when a note I wrote about reflective competence for Businessballs.com http://www.businessballs.com/consciouscompetencelearningmodel.htm was picked up in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscious_competence and nicer still when a Canadian psychologist wrote to me about it and we explored how the idea might work in helping people to unlearn unproductive behaviours. It may not have the kudos of formal publication, but it beats waiting 18 months from acceptance to publication!
Life
They are pumping out the top lake again. The lake leaks, and the fountain, which at its highest reaches around 20 feet, is usually down to about 6 inches by the end of the day.
A new crop (?) of ducklings is skittering about on the mud, nibbling on the drying algae and squeaking almost ultrasonically.
It smells a little like the seaside.
Some of the geese have just walked up from the lower lake, wondering why their holiday pool is down to a third of its normal size.
Other Stuff
Missing words - first in an occasional series.
I think we need another word to mean part of what we currently mean by 'my'.
"My car" - possession - OK
"My children" - "my partner" - association, mutual affection, mutual responsibility - but absolutely not possession.
I think it matters because the 'possession' meaning of 'my' can contaminate the 'association' meaning. You can solve the problem by rephrasing, but it needs pretty drastic rephrasing.
Any suggestions?
'My' people has been a bugbear of mine for a while now - or should I say I've closely associated myself with the bugbear for a number of years?
ReplyDeleteRegardless, it's a tricky one. I toyed with the concept of 'tribe' in my youth. - describing friends and family as 'tribe' rather than anything else, but you're still left with 'my' tribe, which ignores the reciprocity of the concept.
Use of 'The' can work, I suppose - 'the' wife, 'the' children etc - but that feels a little... cold, somehow? Distant?
I could go on a rant about how the current use of language represents a deeper flaw in western thinking of people as property but I can't be bothered, and anyway it's not very interesting. I do wonder if there may not be answers, or clues, in the way other cultures and languages approach these relationships...
Kit
I wrote a response to this the other day but the blog didn’t seem to accept my google account login. Anyway I’ll try and remember what I typed. Originally I was trying to use the example of object possession in object-orientated programming and the way in which an object can be referenced through association and then I thought that I was going straight in at the deep end so better quit whilst ahead.
ReplyDeleteI changed track and remembered some stuff I’d read a time ago about adjectives, possession and finding the correct phrase. But changing the phrasing of a sentence can become quite bothersome and a bit pompous sounding, almost Elizabethan. There is obviously a flaw in our conceptual bank, whether this has anything to do with the subject-predicate-object triumvirate I wouldn’t like to say. There are some ways around these linguistic pitfalls such as not having a girlfriend/wife or children and only surrounding ourselves with inanimate objects that don’t care who is in possession of them as there is no ‘them’. However, this would be extremely monastic and I imagine quite difficult and that still leaves the problem of ‘my family’ so you’d need to be an orphan without siblings, which doesn’t sound very nice at all. You could also not have a job because of ‘my work colleagues’ or ‘friends’ for the same reason. In fact you could extend that to include ourselves and put the question whether we are really in possession of the self so ‘myself’ goes out of the window as well. So that would leave one without a life as that can’t be reduced to something preceded with ‘my’.
Maybe we should except some of our brutalities for the time being….
Thinking further on this, maybe what we need is a word that implies reciprocal ownership? I remember a conversation with a new dog owner (!) who proudly declared 'he is my hound, and I am his human'. It implied all the partnership/choice stuff we're talking about.
ReplyDeleteOn the family thing, as a friend of mine once wisely advised me: You should choose your family vary carefully...
K