Read E.B. White's poignant explanation for writing Charlotte's Web onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Read E.B. White's poignant explanation for writing Charlotte's Web

S

One of the greatest children's books ever written, E.B. White's Charlotte's Web is notable not just for its lovely prose but for its masterful handling of themes on death and dying. In a letter written to his editor a few weeks before the book's publication, White explains why a peculiar truth about farms makes them such appropriate spaces for exploring the concept of death, and how this moved him to write the book in the first place.

Above: One of Garth Williams' gorgeous original illustrations for Charlotte's Web

Writes White to his publisher, Ursula Nordstrom:

I have been asked to tell how I came to write "Charlotte's Web." Well, I like animals, and it would be odd if I failed to write about them. Animals are a weakness with me, and when I got a place in the country I was quite sure animals would appear, and they did.

A farm is a peculiar problem for a man who likes animals, because the fate of most livestock is that they are murdered by their benefactors. The creatures may live serenely but they end violently, and the odor of doom hangs about them always. I have kept several pigs, starting them in spring as weanlings and carrying trays to them all through summer and fall. The relationship bothered me. Day by day I became better acquainted with my pig, and he with me, and the fact that the whole adventure pointed toward an eventual piece of double-dealing on my part lent an eerie quality to the thing. I do not like to betray a person or a creature, and I tend to agree with Mr. E.M. Forster that in these times the duty of a man, above all else, is to be reliable. It used to be clear to me, slopping a pig, that as far as the pig was concerned I could not be counted on, and this, as I say, troubled me. Anyway, the theme of "Charlotte's Web" is that a pig shall be saved, and I have an idea that somewhere deep inside me there was a wish to that effect.

White goes on to explain his decision to include spiders – and Charlotte, in particular – in the story with a rather moving tale. All in all it's a beautiful missive on the reasons writers write what they do, and concludes on a note we think most artists will identify with:

"I haven't told why I wrote the book, but I haven't told you why I sneeze, either. A book is a sneeze."

Read the full correspondence between White and his editor at Letters of Note.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Read E.B. White's poignant explanation for writing Charlotte's Web

Why it's easier to swear at people in another language onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Why it's easier to swear at people in another language

People who speak two or more languages often prefer to use one language over another, depending on the situation. This is especially true when it comes to cursing and insults. It seems that people prefer not to use their native languages to talk smack. Here's why.

In a study published a couple of months ago in PLoS One, two Polish researchers at the University of Warsaw explain that linguists and psychologists have long wondered what causes people to switch back and forth between languages. Apparently, one reason is that people feel more emotionally connected to their native languages. As a result, they're willing to say things in other languages that they wouldn't say in their own. The researchers write:

Those who have contact with bi- or multilinguals often notice that it is easier for the latter group to express certain content in one language, while other content is more willingly conveyed in the other. What does this preference depend on? It has been noticed and proven that it is mostly emotional topics that cause slipping from one language to another. Kim and Starks name this phenomenon 'emotion-related language choice' (ERLC) and define it as a language choice made by a bilingual person, either consciously or subconsciously, which is not conditioned by factors such as the environment (e.g. home/school/playground/workplace/pub…), but lies within their own, subjective preferences.

Apparently, this is because other languages feel "disembodied," while a native language feels intimate. Topics that would be taboo in the native language don't feel so upsetting in other languages. Cultural and social norms of politeness — which are often rules we learn as children — are followed much more rigorously in the native language:

Pavlenko, [using] the results of a web questionnaire for bilinguals on expressing emotions in [their second language (L2)], notices that words connected with emotions may be considered 'disembodied' in L2, whereas in [their first language (L1)] they seem natural, even if they are considered 'taboo' expressions, terms of endearment, or swear words. What is interesting, a theory postulating emotionality of L1 and artificiality of L2 can lead to two alternative conclusions: on the one hand, it should be easier for bilinguals to talk about emotion-loaded issues in the more natural L1; on the other, they may prefer L2 for that purpose, as the cultural and social norms of L1 regarding expressing emotions can be too burdensome.

S

To find out how emotions associated with anger might affect bilinguals, the researchers undertook what they call "a covert experiment." They wanted to see whether ethnic slurs (called "ethnophaulisms") were easier for people to use in their native languages or other languages. So they asked students to translate offensive phrases from English to Polish, and from Polish to English. General swear words didn't seem to hold quite the same emotional weight as ethnic slurs, as you can see in the chart above.

Contrary to what you might expect, Polish students were more uncomfortable using ethnic insults in Polish. But in English, they often intensified the insults:

Bilingual Polish students translated texts brimming with expletives from Polish into English and vice versa. In the Polish translations, the swear word equivalents used were weaker than in the source text; in the English translations, they were stronger than in the original. These results corroborate the ERLC theory. However, the effect was only observed for ethnophaulisms, i.e. expletives directed at social groups. It turns out that the main factor triggering the language choice in bilinguals is not necessarily the different emotional power of both languages, but social and cultural norms.

I say this is "contrary to what you might expect" because one might assume that people are more likely to insult another group when they are using their own group's language. You would think, for example, that a native English speaker might want to insult Spanish-speakers in English. But apparently not. The social norms and taboos over insults are too powerful, and people tend to tone down ethnic insults in their native languages — even if they are willing to go over the top with them in other languages.

If nothing else, this may help explain why all the Western characters on Firefly hurl insults at each other in Chinese.

Read the full paper in PLoS One

Spotted on the Journal of Improbable Research

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Why it's easier to swear at people in another language

Another Layer of J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst's Book Onion onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Another Layer of J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst's Book Onion

S. by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams isn't just a book — it's a mystery artifact, full of weird clues and strange documents. And now, a brand new piece of the puzzle has emerged, and we've got an exclusive look at it.

A fictional blogger, known only as "Jen," has found a lost alternate chapter of the fictional book at the heart of S., called Ship of Theseus. And we've got an exclusive page from it, in the original Czech:

S

Want to know what it means, in English? A complete translation of the lost chapter is available over at Jen's blog.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Another Layer of J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst's Book Onion

What caused a 10-year winter starting in 536? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com What caused a 10-year winter starting in 536?

S

A winter that lasts years isn't just a problem in Game of Thrones. Roughly 1500 years ago, our world was turned upsidown by a winter that witnesses say "never ended." Now there is scientific evidence that there really was a decade of winter.

Scholars writing in Europe and Asia at the time reported that the year 536 and the years following were bitterly cold. They described conditions that reminded them of an eclipse, and claim that the sun remained "small," with ice frosting up crops even in summer. That year and the decade following were also times of great famine, plague and war — possibly connected to the devastating harvests that left many people hungry, angry, and wandering in search of more fertile lands.

Over at New Scientist, Colin Barras has a terrific article about the scientific quest to discover whether these reports have any basis in reality. For years, scientists have studied tree rings and ice cores, looking for clues that could reveal whether the weather change was caused by a supervolcano (which have been known to cool the planet considerably).

Some promising evidence suggests there may have been a supereruption in El Salvador, which could help explain why Maya settlements nearby mysteriously stopped producing written records for a few years. But that wouldn't explain why the planet remained cold for many years. Usually a supervolcano only affects the weather for a year at most.

But now a geologist named Dallas Abbott has a new theory. Perhaps Halley's comet broke up on its trip past the sun, and ejected some large pieces onto Earth. Those events, combined with a thicker-than-usual tail of debris, could have caused the weather disruptions that people say they experienced in 536 and the years that followed.

Writes Barras:

Enter Dallas Abbott, a geologist at Columbia University in Palisades, New York. Her team has also been studying ice cores from Greenland – and they, like Baillie, have found metallic spherules dating to around 536. But they have also found unusually high concentrations of nickel and tin. Nickel is abundant in extraterrestrial debris and is unlikely to reflect contamination, Abbott says, because it is not typically present in the equipment used to collect the ice. The tin, meanwhile, is suggestive of a comet.

So Abbott's findings have resurrected the comet hypothesis – and she even has a particular suspect in mind. "We know that Halley's comet came by Earth in 530," says Abbott. "And the Chinese record indicates it was unusually bright."

The brightness suggests that on this journey through the inner solar system, Halley's comet passed particularly close to the sun, she says. It would have lost more ice than usual, releasing more of the dust and debris frozen inside. "Halley might have been especially likely to lose material and make dust in 530," says Abbott.

"And it came about during this year that a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed"

Procopius (Wars, 4.14.5)

Each year, Earth passes through two meteor showers produced by dusty fragments of Halley's comet. Throughout the 530s and into the 540s, these meteor showers may have been unusually heavy, and continued to top-up Earth's atmosphere with cooling dust – and perhaps more.

There are other surprising clues in the ice. Cores from around the beginning of 536 contain the frozen remains of microorganisms normally found in shallow tropical seas, while samples from 538 also contain fossils of much more ancient marine microorganisms. Abbott thinks there is only one way these microorganisms could have ended up in Greenland ice.

Halley's comet might have shed a few especially large fragments during its journey through the inner solar system in 530. In the following years, perhaps including 536 and 538, these fragments slammed into Earth's oceans. When they did, dust and debris – containing living marine microbes in the water and fossils in the rocks that were struck – were thrown high into the atmosphere and global temperatures plummeted.

Abbot's team may have even found where one of these collisions occurred. Gravity anomalies and metallic spherules in a sediment layer suggest a large object struck Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria sometime in the first millennium AD, she says.

It's a fascinating theory, and one that we'd need a lot more evidence to embrace as the answer. Still, it's a possibility, and one worth exploring.

Read the whole article on New Scientist

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com What caused a 10-year winter starting in 536?