Opera Singing Redwood

Opera Singing Redwood
An Opera-Singing Redwood

Monday, September 12, 2011

Disabling & Enabling

This is a pretty vast concept (or two concepts... or two faces of one concept...)
So—for now at least—I guess we'd better stick with a simple subject.
Cookies.

We already know (& don't-know) enough about the computer kind of cookies
to be sort of shocked & awed by them. 
But these are the other kind. The real kind, I will dare to say.
Objects of eternal fascination that can't exactly be enabled or disabled.

Though cookies certainly can make a you FEEL enabled or disabled, 
depending on what kind you try to eat & the circumstances of your physiology.
And, of course, who gave them to you, urging you to eat them. (Why???)

Here are some images of mostly packaged Cookies thought in good faith to be authentic.
I didn't make them, and most of them I've never even tasted. 
But still, I like to think of them. Plus, I like their names.

for example: "Dodo Organics Florentine Cookies of France"

Uh-oh. I'd better go make cookies now.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

It's either that or the opposite . . .

Autoantonyms are words or phrases that can also mean their opposites.
Hmmm. Is that a qualified definition? 
Does it need more oversight? 
Does it adumbrate the situation?
To try to decide if it holds up, we may need to hold up this discussion 
and puzzle a bit to clarify.


What about the word "aspersions"?  Long ago (I guess, although I wasn't there) 
aspergere, in Latin, meant to sprinkle something. The expression "casting aspersions" came from a custom of ritually sprinkling water on someone, to cleanse or purify them. . . presumably meant as a helpful thing to do. And a person who did the sprinkling of the clarifying water was, in those days, called an "asperger"... which is probably where Hans Asperger (who described the eccentric brainy children he saw as patients as "little professors") got his family name.


Currently, the expression "casting aspersions" is used to mean attacking someone or being critical of them. And a lot of such aspersions seem to be cast at Aspergians, who often find it hard to act fake and superficial, as expected by others, to fit in.  


All this to say that language and even thinking have an increasing tendency to decline these days. 


And (sadly) there lies the truth.
But I don't sanction it.