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julielivingstone

~ It isn't always about getting what you want. Sometimes it's about wanting what you've got.

julielivingstone

Tag Archives: words

750words – writing regularly

02 Monday Apr 2012

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750words, blog, trees, words, writing

I’ve started writing on 750words.com, doing at least 750 words everyday, the idea being to get into the habit and accept the discipline of writing regularly. I’d like to think that at least once a week what I write there could just come straight here and be a blog post, but it may not be that easy. Anyway, here is today’s effort. (This isn’t 750 words, I wrote more which wasn’t relevant.)

The view out of the window – they always say write about what you know!
My office window looks out onto a major highway, the only one going from Western Australia across to the rest of the country. I have no idea how many vehicles go past every day, but it’s a big number. Everything from cars to buses to huge trucks. Sometimes, actually quite often, it’s people on bikes, and I cannot imagine what makes them want to ride on the highway. I would be petrified, apart from all the exhaust fumes they must breathe in. There are several back roads they could take through here instead, and even a walk/bike track which would surely be much more pleasant.
Even though it’s a major highway, there as still plenty of trees in view. Some in front of the office on this side, and on the other side of the road there are only trees to be seen. The houses are hidden behind them, well back from the road. The trees are almost all native, some indigenous to this part of Australia and some not. Actually some of the trees over the road are going quite yellow, so I’m not sure what they are. I don’t ever recall having seen deciduous trees over there before, but maybe there are. Otherwise it’s mostly eucalypts, and small acacias underneath them. There is quite a range of colours, from grey-green through mid to dark greens, the slightly yellow green of the trees I don’t know, to bright green grass on our side where the drains run out. The rest of the grass is dead and brown as it always is at this time of year. The tree trunks range from brown, to grey to cream, some a brownish almost pink colour. The sky at the moment is quite grey and overcast, as if it might rain, but it’s not very likely to by the look of it. Been waiting for it to rain since yesterday morning, but hardly enough yet to drown a flea, let alone lay the dust.
I’m trying to come up with descriptions of things which haven’t been used to death. For example, grass as green as ? Emeralds, been done. Actually thinking about it, green as grass is perhaps more usual. What else is bright green, and could be used as a description? What would everybody, everywhere, recognise as green? Astroturf? Still a variant of grass. Kermit? Better perhaps. Perhaps that one’s too hard.
The sky? Ash grey? I don’t think you hear that one too often. Dove grey, leaden is overdone. Sounds, continuous swoosh of traffic going past, broken by the occasional heavier note of a truck, or the roar of a speeding motorbike. Sometimes a siren, at which everybody looks up to see what type of vehicle, and during summer heaves a sigh of relief if it’s not a fire truck. Again, heaves a sigh of relief, breathes again, how could that be better described. A touch of guilt at feeling thankful that it’s only an ambulance, and somebody else’s problem. Fire has the potential to be devastating in this environment, but an ambulance can mean a devastating event in somebody’s llife.

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The rythym of words

23 Friday Dec 2011

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language, quilting, reading, words, writing

Listening to the televison last night, not watching as I was in the next room. The sound was turned low so I couldn’t hear what was being said, but found myself listening to the rythym of speech. The show was a comedy, American I think, with audience, canned, laughter. I found that I could almost anticipate when the pause for laughter would come. There were two male characters, and although I could not hear the words and did not know which lines were going to be funny, there was a rhythm to it. If conversation is like a game of tennis, where the speech gets hit back and forth between two people, then this was like a game of tennis where every few strokes the ball goes into the audience. By laughing, the studio audience showed that they had understood, and were supportive. They tossed the ball back to the players so that they could continue.
I have also been reading recently The Little Red Book of Writing, by Mark Tredinnick, and he speaks about the rhythm of writing. Read your work out loud, he says, so that you can tell if it flows, or is stilted and unnatural. The best writing is like speech, only you have practiced it and polished it until it has rhythm. I think this is something I have generally done anyway, but it makes sense, and I shall certainly make a point of doing it in future.
I finished Dad’s quilt this morning, the last step being to stitch on a label. I included his name, where he lives, the occasion the quilt was made for (being careful to say given for, not on, since I have missed his birthday by almost a month). I bought a laundry marker to write the label with, a Pilot one here, which is supposed to have a point made especially for writing on fabric, and it is certainly much better for the purpose than a normal permanent marker, which is what I have used in the past. The only remaining thing is to take photos, which I will do tomorrow, and then give it to him. I’ll post photos here too.

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Blogging, the Great Automatic Grammatizator, and new skirts

10 Thursday Nov 2011

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blog, content, phrases, Roald Dahl, skirt, words, writing

Browsing the net, a link in a newsletter I subscribe to sent me to some skirts in an upmarket shop in New York. This reminded me that I shall need some skirts to wear for work in the coming summer. (For those of you doing a double take at this, I live in Australia.)

Here are the skirts if you’d like to look.

I started googling for ideas for skirts, and typed in ‘make your own skirt’. The first few results were interesting, but genuine. After only a page and a half though I started to get some really weird hits. After a bit I realised that these articles are what I’ve read about in terms of computer generated internet content and articles. I know that there is software which will compare the text of an article with what is already on the net, to see if the writer is just trying to re-use old content, either theirs or somebody else’s.Most popular and well known being Copyscape.  I’m guessing that these articles are written by some kind of programme which just changes some words, to try and make the piece original. The results are hilarious to say the least, or they are once you realise what is going on. Up to that point they are just plain perplexing, as in I’m thinking “What the ?!!!”

For example, see if you can figure out what this person is trying to say ‘it’s necessary that we peek following ourself.’. Do you think they mean we should look after ourselves?

As if to demonstrate the need for original content, it wasn’t long before I came up with the same article on more than one page. To make it worse, the sites weren’t even about making skirts, which was what I was looking for. They were for all sorts of other things, in some cases I don’t know what they were about. One was multi-level marketing, some were just inexplicable.

If you try searching just blogs, I think you get even better examples of computer generated content, as opposed to quality original writing. I’m not going to post any links here, for fear of offending someone, but try it for yourself. It reminds me of Roald Dahl’s story, The Great Automatic Grammatizator’, but I’d have to dig out the book and read it again to remember exactly how it goes. It was I think based on a guy who invented a machine for writing novels and such. The theory being that there are only limited numbers of combinations of words, and that literature could be written according to a mathematical formula. I’ve heard the same idea applied to music.

How did I get from deciding I need new skirts for work, to deciding to read a Roald Dahl story again? Go figure! And have fun looking for similar examples of writing.

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The Origin of the Phrases

12 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by julielivingstone in Uncategorized

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language, origin of phrases, phrases, sayings, words

I’ve always been fascinated by different sayings and expressions, and how they come to be. Obviously I’m not alone in that judging by how many websites there are on the topic. The only frustrating part is often we will never really know how a particular phrase originated; we can only come up with a theory, which may or may not be correct.

For example, here in Australia we say ‘mad as a cut snake’. It’s fairly easy to guess the origin of that; a snake cut in half (a common if somewhat bloodthirsty way of dealing with the threat of a venomous snake too close for comfort – and done using a shovel or similar long handled implement, not a knife) would thrash around violently in its death throes.

Another Australian one that is less obvious is ‘flat out like a lizard drinking’. Lizards are pretty flat out when they are drinking, but then they are pretty flat out all the time, especially the ones with short legs.

Recently I was telling a friend that person A could ‘knock person B into a cocked hat so far as computer skills go’. Why do we say that, meaning the bit about hats, not computer skills? One theory is that it means being knocked out of shape, normal hats are round, like heads, but cocked hats are three cornered, so out of shape. This certainly seems plausible.

Thinking of this reminded me of the story about the British police helmet. (Do British bobbies still wear them, according to Wikipedia apparently yes they do.) Some wit looked at a British bobby and asked, ‘Does your head come all the way to the top of that helmet?’ Presumably he then ran quickly in the opposite direction.

Some of these expressions are very regional. I know that in England you will hear sayings in some places that you won’t hear in others. One I grew up with is ‘it’s black over Will’s mothers way’, meaning the sky is dark and it looks like rain. I Googled this, and came up with a few possible origins, none of them to my mind very satisfying. One theory is that the Will in question was William Shakespeare, and in that part of the country weather generally came from the direction of Stratford on Avon. In Essex the suggestion was William of Orange, who came from Holland, and that was the direction weather came from there.

It seems the saying is widespread in different parts of the country, so neither of these is very likely to be true.

Another possible suggestion is Will or Bill was a very common name, almost everybody would have known somebody called that, and therefore his mother and where she lived. This doesn’t seem right, other names were also common, why not Harry’s mother or John’s mother or Pete’s mother?

One which has me completely baffled is ‘I’ll go to the foot of our stairs’ to indicate surprise or amazement. I can think of no logical solution, even a far-fetched one.

These sayings all add colour to our language, although they are all quite old. I wonder if new ones are appearing, I’m sure they must be but at the moment I can’t think of any examples.

One point about the various websites discussing the origins of these phrases, I don’t think all of them are very reliable. Many of them have the same theories, and often the theories are only sent in by random contributors, not by anybody who has actually researched or studied the subject. I guess the same could be said about websites about almost anything. Here are a couple of the better ones in my opinion:

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/index.html

http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/more/3/

Another site I found which has heaps of links to language base resources is

http://www.yaelf.com/index.shtml

I didn’t have time to browse through a fraction of the stuff here – enter at your peril! I suspect it could be major time consumption. I won’t say time wasting, but it’s close. The site is a compilation of links to many other site loosely connected with English usage, and it’s the loose part that’s the problem. Some of the links are also obsolete.

I’ve tried blogging before, but never managed to maintain it, neither have I ever managed to write a journal for more than a week or so. This time I’ve set myself the task of posting every week, on or before Thursday, somewhere between 500 and 1000 words (more if I get really inspired). This means that sometimes the quality will be doubtful, but I hope to make a habit of writing, and train myself to write even when inspiration does not seem immediately forthcoming. This makes three weeks, but I think it takes longer than that to form a habit, I’d guess three months or so at least. I’ll review that after Christmas!

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