practice: words – ‘a’

was talking to my ‘speechie’ yesterday and i said i, mainly, maintain a blog to practise my typing. correctly, she pointed out i can also use it to ‘exercise’ my mind as well. aside from helping me try to organise my thoughts, i’m now using it to ‘test my vocabulary’: i had an ‘idea as a challenge’ to start ‘cycling’ through the letters of the English alphabet using each letter as the starting one and trying to recall as many words with the second letter from each ‘entry’ in the alphabet – for example, for ‘ay’:

ayatollah ayuverdic ayahuasca

there are definitely more than these, but these are what comes to mind – for the most part i rely on my memory, but full disclosure when i’m ‘stuck’ i use a search/answer engine to prompt (pun intended) my memory.

w-ord of the rings

listened recently to the fantasy trilogy. tried several times to read this but was unsuccessful. my ‘excuses’ varied from being in high school to John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a Professor of English Literature at Oxford.

the movies were ‘essentially faithful’ to the first two books: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. for ‘practical’ reasons, i was ‘surprised’ that the film adaption of The Return of the King only covered a ‘small part’ of the namesake title.

it was a ‘nice touch’ that the updated version was voiced ‘deftly’ by Andy Serkis…

three out of four ain’t bad

have read a few Stephen King books in my time - ’shock and horror (pun intended) from the cultural elite’

have always felt he was a ‘good’ writer that was typecast into the horror genre. IMHO, his best works were The Eyes of the Dragon and Different Seasons – and while they both have elements of horror i dont consider them belonging to that oeuvre.

have re-listened to both titles recently (as physically re-readig would be ‘difficult’ for me), but this is just about the latter. i’ve always wondered why the first three novellas (Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, and The Body) were made into movies (respectively: The Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, and Stand By Me), and the title for Winter wasn’t: The Breathing Method.

does anybody know why?

practise makes ‘perfect’

‘prominent’ writers advise to try to write everyday. although there seems to be no consensus on duration and ‘cut-off’, am thinking this should be about 20 minutes to be consistent with the pomodoro time management technique. that said, the question then becomes: do you ‘force’ yourself to stop when you’re in a ‘state of flow’?

it seems counter intuitive, but i’ve heard (if anybody knows the details of the study, kindly share this in the comments), there is some ‘positive correlation’ in producing ‘influential research’ with the amount of work put out there. it seems to be a ‘numbers game’ (i.e. the more you try, the more successful you become) and emphasises Voltaire‘s premise that ‘perfect is the enemy of good’ – it sounds similar to using a muscle in order to strengthen it. it seems ‘comfort with bad writing’ and continuous practise is ‘key in getting better.’

as an aside, does anyone know of any work ‘linking’ Anders Erikson’s work on deliberate practice (the ‘10,000 hour rule’ as popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink) to neuroplasticity?

‘block’ of writers

my wife gave me a MasterClass subscription as a gift. the ‘writing categories’ sparked my interest. so much so, i’ve taken classes from Malcolm Gladwell. Aaron Sorkin, Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, James Patterson, Amy Tan, and Shonda Rhimes. i’m currently taking Margaret Atwood’s offering. and while they are all ‘different’, there seem to be ‘common threads’:

• practice regularly and rewrite outputs. write everyday to develop your skill. you usually won’t get it right initially (and most of the time you will have to settle for ‘good enough’ – remember the expression: “perfect is the enemy of good”). revise what you have, but you’ve got to ‘finish’ to make this exercise ‘more robust.’ in the beginning, it’ only natural to keep drafts to yourself until ‘sufficient iterations of quality assurance (one technique is to read it out loud)’ grants you enough confidence to share. but to move it forward, you’l need someone (or a ‘small group’) you trust and ask what isn’t understood – it’s about getting ‘what’ feedback and not ‘how to fix it’: most ‘problem-solving’ originates from the writer and not from the reader based on past occurrences. note that rejection is part of the process: it can be about finding the ‘right publisher (or production company as the case may be) at the right time’,’
• research broadly. reading (watching, listening, or browsing as the case may be) widely doesn’t only expose you to different ‘use-cases/patterns’ or to ‘best practices’, but affords you ‘connection’ (or what Gaiman refers to as confluence) of separate (and largely considered ‘unrelated’) disciplines and can provide ‘unexplored’ points of view. and while ‘purposeful’ domain/subject matter expertise gives your work the requisite credence, it is also sometimes about ‘random/’opportunistic’ learnings unassigned to a specific use but ‘filed away’ just in case – this, sometimes, includes ‘darlings’ you’ve edited out you consider ‘good’, but ‘incongruous’ with your present task’ ,
• finding your voice. seek what they sought and refrain from imitations or impressions. they talk about what has worked for them but they aren’t ‘prescriptive’ and instead encourage you to try then pick and choose what seems right for you given your own experience. at the start, you can look at and ’emulate what other writers have done so you might get a ‘sense of how things are done’ but only do this as a ‘stepping stone’ in your own ‘evolution’. learn the rules so you can intentionally break them to advance the story and
• perform thought experiments. do exercises like ‘interrupting what’s expected, changing the narration (e.g. character, person voice, etc.). Anything that ‘disrupts the pattern: it’s not just sometimes about ‘pushing the envelope’ ,but ‘colouring outside the lines.’ it can be about taking the ‘mundane’, and viewing it through an ‘unexpected’ lens.

this is by no means a comprehensive list: as these are an attempt at a synthesis of take-aways’ – if you think there are things i’ve inadvertently overlooked or could’ve expressed clearer, kindly share these.

it’s all geek to me

i can use the ‘derogatory’ term because i identify as one (not in the original definition though).

i was previously told that jargon shouldn’t be used at all outside of the community. However, Malcolm Gladwell says it’s ok to use it ‘sparingly’ to facilitate reader understanding by communicating what is ‘likely sentiment’ by an expert – this makes sense to me…

words: on linguistics, computing, data analysis, and trivia

i was not really into Text Analytics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). but recently, i’ve been asked by wife if i could do some Sentiment Analysis on Discussion Forum posts for some online learners. – i said i would try to build a workable model given i’ve been dabbling in data analysis recently, have a background in computing, and have always been ‘interested’ in words.

i was not really into Text Analytics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). but recently, i’ve been asked by wife if i could do some Sentiment Analysis on Discussion Forum posts for some online learners. – i said i would try to build a workable model given i’ve been dabbling in data analysis recently, have a background in computing, and have always been ‘interested’ in words.

the thing is: i play an app called HQ Trivia ‘regularly’ and have never won – at most getting 11 out of 12 questions. they recently reintroduced Words on Wednesdays (Thursdays here) ‘technically’ i’ve got a better chance of winning this as i know more answers but my disability has resulted in me ‘typing’ even so slower so i can never tap all the letters in time or mishit the ‘smaller on-screen touch-screen keyboard’ to solve the puzzle.

the ‘confluence’ of these fields make it interesting to me…

high fidelity: on movies about music and serendipity

i thought High Fidelity would always be my favourite franchise. it’s one of rare exceptions where i prefer the film to the novel by Nick Hornby. don’t get me wrong – i like both to the point that i follow it’s TV “reimagining”.

just this arvo, i “stumbled” upon the movie, Hearts Beat Loud on the SBS streaming service and really liked it. there were two lines that resonated withe me (i’m paraphrasing, of corse): one was that when life gives you a conundrum then make art, and the other is, you first need to be brave before you can be good. both are set in a NY record store but probably the reason it “slightly” edges out the other one is that the actors perform the music (instead of “spouting out” a list of songs/events given a particular criterion).

i mentioned before, Juliet, Naked!. it makes my top three (i wish i could “complete” the list in true High Fidelity fashion but i’ve yet to watch enough films “worthy” of this accolade).

in my younger years, i think i was sort of a music snob. i think it was a “necessary” phase – in the same way, i think artists need to “master” realism before they branch out stylistically (IMHO, i don’t think this step is “required” but it tends to provide more “robust”portfolios ). maybe it’s my “advanced” age or “embracing” Australian culture, you like what you like – damn “guilty pleasures”.

i’m not a technophobe but my friend is right – there’s a “warmth” to vinyl (and other analog media) despite sound “impurities” (hopefully, i don’t sound like a wanker). maybe some of it is “nostalgia” as my generation experienced the evolution of media. as my friend once “lamented”, newer generations won’t know the relationship between a pencil and an audio cassette. tangentially to this point, one of my favourite albums of all time is Full Moon Fever by the late Tom Petty – not just because i like the songs and describe them as “cohesive” but because i had the CD version and approximately half-way there is a blurb that at this point some listeners would need to flip their records to continue listening to the rest of it – so to be “fair”, he deliberately inserted a “pause”.

wrong “empha-sis”: on diacritics and pronunciation

i previously knew about the tilde (as i speak Filipino (and can slightly understand a little of two other dialects) which has some words influenced by Spanish) and the umlaut (because of an individual in an organisation i used to work for). i recently found out the general term for it is a diacritic mark in a text mining course.

i’m a computer guy (and not a linguist) that mainly used ASCII – apparently EDCDIC supposedly addresses this “diversity” of letters but have to take this fact “at face value” since i don’t speak other languages.

i can’t help but be reminded of an anecdote of one of my batch mates that matter-of-factly corrected another that chocolate “mouse” isn’t the right way of saying it but since it’s a French word, it should be pronounced as “mouse-say” 😉

use of words over time and the “evolution” of language: on the expression OMG

i thought OMG was a relatively new abbreviation as it was used in text speak. but, apparently, it is much “older”.

it was initially used to avoid offence. i’m not sure what the etymology is but the language and context where it’s used can change its meaning: for the sake of disambiguation (as popularised by Wikipedia), i’m referring to the short-hand for “oh my @@@” (for some,”oh my gosh),

while the meaning hasn’t changed over the years, it’s surprising to note the person likely to use it. it’s hard to believe that Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill used it once in a letter (according to Trivia Genius) and now it’s in the vocabulary of some “angsty” teens.