Tough Readin'

[Torrere]

This morning, I picked up a Calculus textbook and tried to start going through it. It was somewhat uncomfortable, and I didn't feel like I was going anywhere, and I put it down after some fifteen minutes to go read something else.

I am very embarrassed about that, and I am now determined to go through the entire book.

I believe that the very language of the book put me off. In reading it, I was trying to read something which I have not put much thought to in quite a while (far too long).

When I was trying to figure out how to do something in Perl a few months ago (easy stuff; renaming and re-organizing files), I tried to read the documentation and felt continually rebuffed: I didn't know enough of the technical language that the documentation was written in to be able to find the document which contained the information that I was looking for. I eventually found it with Google, because Google could find documents that used, or at least contained, the language that I was using.

[Speaking of which, the way to find something you don't know much about using a search engine is to crawl. Start off with a seed that you are aware of, and search for that, read the documents it finds, learn new ideas and the words which represent them, search for those, and eventually you will find either what you're looking for, or something more interesting.]

On a similar note, remember the teenage girl who turned up just after April was kicked out? Not only was that in a particularly xenophobic time, but she used a different language (perhaps I should tone this down to 'dialect'?) than we did. Several people reported that it was painful trying to read her posts. She wrote in the inane new cellphone SMS/IM language her friends used.

I could read them easily, but a few months before she showed up I spent some time communicating with people who wrote in the same way that she did. It was initially painful to read their writing, and had I not had both personal incentive and known that they were notably intelligent when speaking, I probably would have given up very early.

I recall my French textbook, which mentioned an event in French history where someone declared that the court (perhaps it was the church) would henceforth speak in vulgar French*. At that time, I didn't understand how there could be two varieties of French spoken at the same city, differentiated by the class of the people that spoke them.

Now I might -- w.e have several different varieties of English, differentiated by the professions of the people who speak them: common American English, politician-speak, legalese, tech-speak, academican English, etc. They can be differentiated by the lingo that they use, by how they are attempting to speak (politician-speak, for instance, tries not to say anything while remaining verbose), what they're talking about (religious fanatics use words like "wrong" or "Truth" with irritating frequency), etc.

Aside, on the subject of the evolution of language
According to a rhyming dictionary (from the insensitive 1930s) which I bought at a used bookstore several months ago; poetry lasts longer than prose: he specifically claimed that most prose will last 50 years before it starts to become uncomfortable to read, and poetry will last 100 years. The author encouraged the reader (myself) to write poetry in the living tongue that people speak in the streets: that way, at least, you were not writing in a dead language ("twas", "whence", "betwixt" -- I have a bad habit of using archaic words in poetry). He demonstrated exceptional poetry by quoting a passage of Shakespeare: several stanzas (an entirely monologue?) wherein not a single word would sound out of place on the streets today.