How to write the perfect sentence

Orwell advised cutting as many words as possible, Woolf found energy in verbs, and Baldwin aimed for ‘a sentence as clean as a bone’. What can we learn from celebrated authors about the art of writing well?

Every writer, of school age and older, is in the sentences game. The sentence is our writing commons, the shared ground where all writers walk. A poet writes in sentences, and so does the unsung author who came up with “Items trapped in doors cause delays”. The sentence is the Ur-unit, the core material, the granular element that must be got right or nothing will be right. For James Baldwin, the only goal was “to write a sentence as clean as a bone”.

What can celebrated writers teach the rest of us about the art of writing a great sentence? A common piece of writing advice is to make your sentences plain, unadorned and invisible. George Orwell gave this piece of advice its epigram: “Good prose is like a windowpane.” A reader should notice the words no more than someone looking through glass notices the glass.

Except that you do notice the glass. Picture an English window in 1946, when Orwell wrote that sentence. It would be smeared with grime from smoke and coal dust and, since houses were damp and windows single-glazed, wont to mist and ice over. The glass might still be cracked from air-raid gunfire or bombs, or covered with shatterproof coating to protect people from flying shards. An odd metaphor to use, then, for clear writing.

Behind Orwell’s windowpane theory of prose lies a puritan pride, a sense that the writer will be purified by a clean, sinewy style as by an early morning run and a cold shower. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” he wrote. Insincere writing spat out tired idioms “like a cuttlefish spurting out ink”. Bad ideas were the bedfellows of bad prose. Fake thoughts made fake sentences.

Some of this is true but none of it is a good way of learning how to write a sentence. More ethical demand than useful advice, it forces writers back to their own reserves of wisdom and authenticity. It blames bad writing on laziness and dishonesty, when a likelier culprit is lack of skill. If you ordered me to make a blancmange, all I could come up with would be a gloopy, inedible mess – not because I am lazy or dishonest, but because, although I have some vague idea that it needs sugar, cornflour and boiled milk, I don’t know how to make a blancmange.

Orwell saw the plain English sentence as the sword of existential truth, a cure-all for the bad faith of modern life. But much of the time he didn’t even follow his own advice. “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out,” he ordered. Perhaps he should have written: “If you can cut a word, do.”

Orwell’s prose, as well as ignoring his own rules when it suits, is really a beautiful contrivance. Take the last thing he wrote, in his hospital notebook: “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.” This unforgettable sentence has an argument behind it that a moment’s thought will reveal as unfair and untrue. Orwell’s oeuvre is full of such sentences that read like eternal verities and turn out to be nonsense. “We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.” (We didn’t.) “Serious sport … is war minus the shooting.” (War minus the shooting isn’t war.) “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” (Steady on.

A good sentence imposes a logic on the world’s weirdness. It gets its power from the tension between the ease of its phrasing and the shock of its thought slid cleanly into the mind. A sentence, as it proceeds, is a paring away of options. Each added word, because of the English language’s dependence on word order, reduces the writer’s alternatives and narrows the reader’s expectations. But even up to the last word the writer has choices and can throw in a curveball. A sentence can begin in one place and end in another galaxy, without breaking a single syntactic rule. The poet Wayne Koestenbaum calls it “organising lava”, this pleasure to be got from “pushing a sentence in a wrong direction without altering its sweet grammatical composure”.

A memorable sentence makes immediate sense but sounds just slightly odd. The model Kate Moss, once asked for her motto, replied: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” – a terrible message to send about dieting and body image, but a well-turned sentence, surely. Skinny, usually an adjective, is here turned into an abstract noun, paired with another abstract noun, nothing. And yet skinny is also quasi-concrete, because where it lies in the sentence suggests that it can actually be felt, just as food has a taste. But feels also retains its non-sensuous sense of intuiting or experiencing something: skinny feels good. As the sentence ends with the snap of a stressed syllable, our perspective has been altered in a way that feels true, even if we don’t share the sentiment. Reality has shifted a little and then clicked back into place.

A sentence is much more than its literal meaning. It is a living line of words where logic and lyric meet – a piece of both sense and sound, albeit the sound is only heard in the reader’s head. Rookie sentence-writers are often too busy worrying about the something they are trying to say and don’t worry enough about how that something looks and sounds. They look straight past the words into the meaning that they have strong-armed into them. They fasten on content and forget about form – forgetting that content and form are the same thing, that what a sentence says is the same as how it says it.

The word “sentence” comes from the Latin sentire, to feel. A sentence must be felt by the reader, and a feeling is something that grows and fades like anything else that is alive. A line of words should unfold in space and time, not reveal itself all at once, for the simple reason that it cannot be read all at once.

Read more at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/21/how-to-write-a-great-sentence?CMP=share_btn_tw&fbclid=IwAR37R9lxQ61JxQwLAiYxdPoOdOpJM9KFhWLpKq5YHA2fxz5_aOJoFeEGMrg

Why British English is fully silly-sounding words

From ‘gazump’ to ‘gobsmack’, ‘squiffy’ to ‘snog’, British English is full of words that sound like barmy balderdash. Christine Ro explains why.

“That wazzock dared to gazump me; I'm gobsmacked by this sticky wicket full of codswallop that's gone pear-shaped!”

That sentence may not sound serious. But the situation it describes is. Translated into standard English, it would be something like “That idiot dared to offer more money for the house after my offer already had been accepted; I'm shocked by this tricky situation full of nonsense that's gone awry!”

Shakespeare, this isn’t. The first sentence sounds so peculiar to certain ears not just because of the mangling of parts of speech. It’s also full of words, with origins ranging from the 1700s to the 1980s, that have two qualities in common: they’re all rather silly-sounding, and they’re all British English.

British English is full of whimsical terms like these. They reflect the UK’s cultural appreciation of wit, a long tradition of literary inventiveness – and Britain’s fluctuating global influence over the centuries.

Whimsical words like these are formed in a number of ways. These include blends of other words (eg ‘Oxbridge’, from Oxford and Cambridge); reduplicatives, which repeat sounds or parts of words (‘higgledy-piggledy’); back-formations, which often remove the suffix of their originating word (like ‘kempt’, from ‘unkempt’); and of course sheer nonsense (like Roald Dahl’s invention ‘gobblefunk’).

These types of coinages aren’t unique to English, let alone British English. But the relative simplicity of English words may lend itself to this kind of play, says Anatoly Liberman, professor of languages at the University of Minnesota and an etymology blogger for Oxford University Press. “English is largely a monosyllabic language (‘come’, ‘go’, ‘take’, ‘big’, ‘laugh’, and so forth),” he says. “This makes such games easy.”

Especially characteristic of these formations in British English is the way they reflect a certain kind of humour. Pop anthropologist Kate Fox has written about the English “ban on earnestness” (an aversion to taking things too seriously) and the pervasiveness of humour in social interaction. This humour is of a particular kind: self-deprecating and given to understatement and irony.

It’s unsurprising that this national trait has made its way into the language. Romantic activities (like ‘snog’ and ‘shag’) are spoken of in childish terms. Classic dishes are made to sound deliberately unappetising (‘dead man’s arm’ and ‘Eton mess’ – respectively, a rolled cake filled with jam and a dessert combining meringue, strawberries and cream. And there’s a healthy appetite for nonsensical ambiguity. To take just one example, ‘ladybird’ is a bugbear of perplexed Americans who wonder – although their version of the word is only slightly more sensible – “Why ladybird? Why not ladybug?”

This hints at a gleeful willingness in British English to dispense with literal meaning. Food, for instance, is a rich vein of words like this. ‘Fairy cake’, ‘toad in the hole’, and ‘jacket potato’ have nothing to do with fairies, toads and jackets.

Child’s play

There’s a long tradition in British English of inventing words just for the fun of it. Eminent linguist David Crystal writes in The Story of English in 100 Words that ‘a gaggle of geese’, ‘an unkindness’ of ravens’, and other collective nouns of this ilk were created in the 15th Century. He speculates that this was done deliberately for comic effect, giving rise to ‘a superfluity of nuns’ (pun intended).While whimsical British terms have been coined in every era, certain periods have been especially fruitful. 

According to Crystal, linguistic inventiveness, particularly of a playful kind, seems to have peaked in the Elizabethan era. This is partly due to the enduring influence of wordsmiths like Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists. Meanwhile, Crystal adds, at this time “there were more people writing, with pressure to produce new plays to feed the daily demands of the new theatres. And there were no dictionaries to act as a stabilising influence.” This created a climate of lexical creativity, which we can thank for words like ‘balderdash’ (meaning, appropriately, a nonsense word or idea).

Here are seven of our favourite silly-sounding British words:

Since Shakespeare, British writers from Charles Dickens (‘whiz-bang’) and Lewis Carroll (‘mimsy’) to JK Rowling (‘muggle’) have continued to enliven English vocabulary. As Liberman points out, it’s not that these authors had a monopoly on childlike wit. Rather, historically, British English’s “influence was mainly exercised by great authors,” he says. “The joys and charm of British English have to be sought in the works of the great wits of various epochs. For comparison, in the US, the only figure of comparable size – in this respect – is Mark Twain.”

Of course, there’s a risk of over-interpreting the relationship between culture and vocabulary. Fanciful terms can be found in all varieties of English: linguists also have written about how terms like ‘face like a dropped pie’ and ‘cultural cringe’ reflect an Australian culture of informality and ‘mateship’.

To make matters more complex, the border between British and American English – the two most influential forms of English – is fairly blurry. In fact, many of the words popularly believed to stem from one country actually originated in the other.

The University of Sussex’s Lynne Murphy, who has a blog and a forthcoming book about differences between US and UK English, notes that many Americans incorrectly think ‘bumbershoot’ and ‘poppycock’ are British words. That’s simply, she says, because “a lot of Americans stereotype the British as having silly words.” So words that fit that expectation are the ones that gain a great deal of currency overseas.

This is also true of terms that mainly sound comical due to their difference from US terms. Murphy explains that Americans love slang with a (non-flattened) short ‘o’ sound, such as ‘cosh’, ‘bollocks’ and ‘dogsbody’, because “that’s a sound that Americans don’t make”.

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170619-why-british-english-is-full-of-silly-sounding-words

How Americans preserved British English

Americans today pronounce some words more like Shakespeare than Brits do… but it’s in 18th-Century England where they’d really feel at home.

It makes for a great story: when settlers moved from England to the Americas from the 17th Century, their speech patterns stuck in place. That was particularly true in more isolated parts of the US, such as on islands and in mountains. As a result, the theory goes, some Americans speak English with an accent more akin to Shakespeare’s than to modern-day Brits.

That’s not entirely right. The real picture is more complicated. One feature of most American English is what linguists call ‘rhoticity’, or the pronunciation of ‘r’ in words like ‘card’ and ‘water’. It turns out that Brits in the 1600s, like modern-day Americans, largely pronounced all their Rs. Marisa Brook researches language variation at Canada’s University of Victoria. “Many of those immigrants came from parts of the British Isles where non-rhoticity hadn’t yet spread,” she says of the early colonists. “The change towards standard non-rhoticity in southern England was just beginning at the time the colonies became the United States.”

So at least when it comes to their treatment of the 18th letter, Americans generally sound more like the Brits of several centuries ago. So do Canadians west of Quebec – thanks to loyalists to the Crown fleeing north during the American Revolution.

Another divergence between British and North American English has been a move toward broad As in words like ‘path’. The pronunciations of the early colonists (and their English counterparts), in contrast, have stuck around in the US: think ‘paath’ rather than ‘pahth’.

At first glance, these colonial legacies of pronunciation seem especially apparent in certain remote areas of the US – hence the argument that some places in the US have preserved Shakespearean English.

For instance, Tangier Island in Virginia has an unusual dialect which can be unintelligible even to other Americans. Some speech patterns, included rounded Os, seem like a dead ringer for the dialect of the West of England. This has led some observers to claim a strong lineage from early Cornish settlers to the current Tangier dialect.

But linguist David Shores has noted that these claims are exaggerated, and that the island’s isolation, rather than any freezing of Elizabethan speech patterns, is responsible for its linguistic quirks.

Another US area that’s been linked to 17th-Century British English is Appalachia, especially the mountainous regions of North Carolina. Linguist Michael Montgomery has written that the North Carolina tourism division used to issue a booklet called A Dictionary of the Queen’s English, which claimed that the English of Queen Elizabeth I could be found in pockets of the state. Montgomery traced the idea back to an educator-clergyman who, around the turn of the 19th Century, spread the idea that mountain language was a remnant of a much older tradition. This myth helped to counteract negative impressions of oft-maligned mountain people. Turning this around – and claiming kinship with a Shakespearean way of speaking – was a way of bringing status and apparent classiness to a marginalised part of the country.

“Mountain speech has more archaisms than other types of American English, but that’s about it,” Montgomery writes. These include terms like ‘afeard’, which famously appears in The Tempest. Overall, however, “the Shakespeare myth reflects simplistic, popular views about the static nature of traditional folk cultures, especially those in out-of-the-way places.”

Common phrases

It’s a bit surprising that Shakespearean English has come to be associated with high status and education. That’s the other oft-forgotten complication of the concept: even if Americans do speak more like the Elizabethan English than today’s Brits themselves, that doesn’t mean they’re speaking a ‘posher’ version of the language.

“We’ve always had this stigma in the UK that Shakespeare has to be posh… [but] in his time, it was everyday speech,” says David Barrett, who conducted workshops in Shakespearean Original Pronunciation (OP) while preparing a thesis on the subject at the University of South Wales. He’s also transcribed Christopher Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander into OP. (There have been similar projects for the King James Bible and the Lord’s Prayer).

Even Queen Elizabeth I didn’t pronounce words in a particularly ‘posh’ way. Barrett has researched Elizabeth’s letters for clues to her pronunciation. Since spellings at the time were far from standardised, written texts are one tool linguists use to determine how words would have been pronounced historically. The queen’s habits likely included pronouncing ‘servant’ as ‘sarvant’, or ‘together’ as ‘togither’. These were pronunciation styles of ordinary people of the 17th Century – rather than the nobility. So like Shakespeare, the queen had a down-to-earth manner of speaking... in contrast to the upper-crust accents she is portrayed with in contemporary films and TV programmes. (It’s worth noting that today’s Queen Elizabeth II is speaking in a more ‘common’ way than she once did, too).

“The reason I find the Elizabethan period interesting is that the pronunciation contains many sounds which are far enough removed from modern English to create a challenge for the speaker, but there is also a considerable overlap with modern English,” says Barrett.

So when actors and audiences hear OP for the first time, it’s a bit of a shock to the system.

“Every English speaker who hears Original Pronunciation for the first time hears something different in it,” Barrett says. Sometimes that sounds similar to Northern Irish or West Country accents, other times South African or American.

Star-spangled Shakespeare

American actors have a head start with performing in OP: it’s “so much more American” than the prestigious Received Pronunciation accent in which Shakespeare’s plays are generally performed now, says Paul Meier, theatre professor emeritus at Kansas State University and a dialect coach who’s worked on theatre productions like an OP version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

For instance, Americans are already used to pronouncing ‘fire’ as ‘fi-er’ rather than ‘fi-yah’, as most Brits would.

It’s useful to know how words would have been pronounced centuries ago because it changes our appreciation of the texts. Because British English pronunciations have changed so much since the era of Queen Elizabeth I, we’ve rather lost touch with what Early Modern English would have sounded like at the time. Some of the puns and rhyme schemes of Shakespeare’s day no longer work in contemporary British English. ‘Love’ and ‘prove’ is just one pair of examples; in the 1600s, the latter would have sounded more like the former. The Great Vowel Shift that ended soon after Shakespeare’s time is one reason that English spellings and pronunciations can be so inconsistent now.

So what’s popularly believed to be the classic British English accent isn’t actually so classic. In fact, British accents have undergone more change in the last few centuries than American accents have – partly because London, and its orbit of influence, was historically at the forefront of linguistic change in English.

As a result, although there are plenty of variations, modern American pronunciation is generally more akin to at least the 18th-Century British kind than modern British pronunciation. Shakespearean English, this isn’t. But the English of Samuel Johnson and Daniel Defoe? We’re getting a bit warmer.

Dialect coach Meier understands the appeal of the idea that 17th-Century speech patterns have been perfectly preserved an ocean away. “It is a delightful and attractive myth that Shakespeare’s language got fossilised” in parts of the US, he says.

But as sociolinguist Brook explains, “Every actively-spoken dialect is always changing – that’s as true of the rural ones as of the urban ones.” Echoes of older dialects can be heard here and there in different places, but unfortunately there’s no living museum of Shakespeare’s English.

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http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english?ocid=fbcul

The beautiful language of the people who talk like birds

Their unusual whistled speech may reveal what humanity’s first words sounded like.

If you are ever lucky enough to visit the foothills of the Himalayas, you may hear a remarkable duet ringing through the forest. To the untrained ear, it might sound like musicians warming up a strange instrument. In reality, the enchanting melody is the sound of two lovers talking in a secret, whistled language.

Joining just a handful of other communities, the Hmong people can speak in whistles. The sounds normally allow farmers to chat across their fields and hunters to call to each in their forest. But their language is perhaps most beautifully expressed during a now rarely-performed act of courtship, when boys wander through the nearby villages at nightfall, whistling their favourite poems between the houses. If a girl responds, the couple then start a flirty dialogue.

It’s not just the enticing melodies that make it the perfect language of love. Compared with spoken conversations, it is hard to discern the identity of the couple from their whistles – offering some anonymity to the public exchange. The couple may even create their own personal code, adding nonsense syllables to confound eavesdroppers – a bit like the Pig Latin used by English schoolchildren to fool their parents. “It gives them some intimacy,” says Julien Meyer, at the University of Grenoble, France, who visited the region in the early 2000s.

The practice not only highlights humanity’s amazing linguistic diversity; it may also help us to understand the limits of human communication. In most languages, whistles are used for little more than calling attention; they seem too simple to carry much meaning. But Meyer has now identified more than 70 groups across the world who can use whistles to express themselves with all the flexibility of normal speech.

These mysterious languages demonstrate the brain’s astonishing capacity to decode information from new signals – with insights that are causing some neuroscientists to rethink the fundamental organisation of the brain. The research may even shed light on the emergence of language itself. According to one hypothesis, our first words may have sounded something like the Hmong’s courtship songs.

Meyer’s interest in whistled languages began with a 40-year-old Scientific American article about Silbo Gomero – a form of whistled Spanish ‘spoken’ on one of the Canary Islands. The trilled sounds allow shepherds to communicate across deep ravines, and they are apparently so close to the local birdsong that blackbirds have been known to learn and mimic the human dialogues. You can hear a clip above of someone whistling 'En todo el mundo hay hombres que hablan silbando', which translates as 'Around the World, there are humans who whistle their language'. (Clip courtesy of Julien Meyer and Laure Dentel.)

Meyer was instantly fascinated – and ended up completing a PhD on the subject. More than a decade later, he’s still hooked. “I didn’t think that one day it would give me a job,” he says.

Much of Meyer’s research has focused on charting their prevalence around the globe. The ancient history books offered a few pointers. In the 5th Century BC, for instance, the Greek historian Herodotus described a group of cave-dwelling Ethiopians. “Their speech is like no other in the world: it is like the squeaking of bats,” he wrote.  We can’t know for sure which communities he was describing, but Meyer says that several whistled languages can still be heard in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley.

Indeed, Meyer has now identified whistled languages in every corner of the globe. Given that the whistles can travel much further than normal speech – as far as 8km (5 miles) in open conditions – they are most commonly found in mountains, where they help shepherds and farmers to pass messages down the valley.

But the sounds can also penetrate dense forests such as the Amazon, where hunters whistle to locate each other through the dense foliage. “The whistles are good for fighting against reverberation,” says Meyer. And unlike regular speech, they tend not to scare the potential prey. They can also be useful at sea: the Inuit communities of the Bering Strait whistle commands to each other as they hunt for whales.

Read more at:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170525-the-people-who-speak-in-whistles

The vanishing words we need to save

Robert Macfarlane collects words that describe nature and landscape – and which are dying out. He explains their power to shape our relationship with the earth itself.

Robert Macfarlane is a compiler of words: an explorer of hedgerows and roadsides, salt marshes and sea-caves. But he is also a magician, of sorts – one who weaves spells using lost phrases that recall a different connection with our landscape. In his latest book Landmarks, the British naturalist calls for “a glossary of enchantment for the whole earth, which would allow nature to talk back and would help us to listen”.

We speak on the phone the day before he is due to talk at the Hay Festival. I am sitting in my car at a rest stop next to the river Wye in Wales, opposite public toilets, trying to stay still to keep my mobile from cutting out. Macfarlane is in the kitchen of his home in Cambridge, also clinging to a patch of reception. He laughs as I describe my location. This is a man who has found peregrine falcons at a power station and water voles at a municipal dump, claiming in his 2007 book The Wild Places that “the human and the wild cannot be partitioned”.

Similarly, he doesn’t believe that the words he has collected in Landmarks are just for shepherds or hill-walkers. “I’m talking to you from my edge-of-the-suburb house in Cambridge – most people are in cities now,” he says. “The book is about all of us finding ways to celebrate and enrich the language that we have for landscape and nature.”

In Landmarks, Macfarlane pulls together nine glossaries of terms taken from 30 languages, dialects and sub-dialects around Britain and Ireland. They all describe aspects of weather, nature and terrain – and many of them are dying out, slipping out of conversation and off the tongues of those who once spoke them. They have been lost. Macfarlane wants them to be found.

He describes two of his favourites: “One is this lovely Cornish word ‘zawn’, which means a wave-smashed chasm in a sea cliff – it’s so evocative of that gaping mouth, and the power of those places,” he says. “Another is this soft, Gaelic phrase ‘rionnach maoim’, the shadows that clouds cast on moorland on a windy day. There’s something about the poetry of that, the precision and the need to compress that phenomenon down into that gorgeous soft phrase.”

In his book’s lists, he has included words coined by poets along with agricultural or geological terms. There is the ‘shepherd’s lamp’ imagined by the 19th-Century poet John Clare to describe the first star that rises after sunset, and a smattering of terms from the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘heavengravel’ for hailstones, ‘endragoned’ describing a raging sea, and the ominous ‘doomfire’ – meaning, as Macfarlane puts it, “sunset light which has the appearance of apocalypse to it”.

Macfarlane delights in the language. “There’s just the sheer joy of exactitude; I see it as a form of beautiful elegance. These lovely poems that fold up inside these words and spring out of them like jack-in-the-boxes – they’re gorgeous forms of precision,” he says. 

The glossaries include ‘zwer’ (Exmoor dialect for “the noise made by a covey of partridges rising in flight”), ‘frazil’ (“loose, needle-like ice crystals that form into a churning slush in turbulent super-cooled water, for example in a river on a very cold night”) – and ‘blaze’, which along the North Sea coast means “to take salmon by striking them at night, by torchlight, with a three-pronged spear”.

As might be expected in Britain, there is an entire list devoted to words for rain, most of them Gaelic. From ‘virga’, meaning “observable streak or shaft of precipitation that falls from a cloud but evaporates before reaching the ground”, to a ‘beum-sléibhe’, or “sudden torrent caused by the bursting of a thundercloud”, every drop is accounted for. Some of the definitions are lyrical – like ‘smirr’, “extremely fine, misty rain, close to smoke in appearance when seen from a distance”, and the “torrent of brutal rage” that is ‘burraghlas’. Others are more prosaic, like ‘clagarnach’, Irish for “clatter of heavy rain on an iron roof”, and ‘letty’, “enough rain to make outdoor work difficult”.

But Landmarks is more than an ode to language. By enriching our vocabularies, Macfarlane believes, we can change the way we interact with our landscape. “We increasingly make do with an impoverished language for nature, a generic language: ‘field’, and ‘wood’, and ‘hill’, and ‘countryside’. It’s a very basic way of denoting, and that’s fine, and sometimes we need to speak generally,” he says. “We can’t always speak absolutely precisely. But I’m fascinated by details and by the specifics of nature, and its particularities – and language helps us to see those.”

Early in the book, Macfarlane describes flying over the Scottish Outer Hebrides in a twin-prop plane. He saw “the tawny expanse of Mointeach riabhach, the Brindled Moor: several hundred square miles of bog, hag, crag, heather, loch and lochan that make up the interior of Lewis”. Across the aisle from him, two people looked out of the window. Macfarlane recounts: “One of them laughed. ‘We’re flying over nothing!’ she said.

Seed fund

“If we just see a landscape as some kind of waste space and devoid of detail, it becomes more vulnerable to dismissal or disinterest or improper use,” Macfarlane tells me.

In Landmarks, he quotes the American essayist and farmer Wendell Berry: “People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.”

A chapter in the book is dedicated to the Scottish-American John Muir, whose writings inspired the US president Theodore Roosevelt to create the country’s first national parks. “Muir gives me hope,” Macfarlane said in his talk at Hay. “His writing changed the course of landscape history. It’s the idea of hope in the dark.” He described the seeds of the bristlecone pine, which lie dormant in the soil and are germinated by forest fire. “Individual actions in culture – art, writing – can be dropped, like the pine seeds. They seem dead but decades later they can flare into life.”

Subtitled a “field guide to the literature of nature”, Landmarks is a work of great scholarship – but also a call to action. It explores “how reading can change minds, revise behaviour and shape perceptions”. And it fits within a wider resurgence of nature writing in Britain, including Costa award-winning H is for Hawk and The Shepherd’s Life, the memoir of a sheep farmer.

Macfarlane believes there is an “astonishing surging cultural energy that’s working across photography and art and in literature”. He credits it to an acute sense of loss. “It’s because we live in the shadow of destruction and damage, because we are a generation that’s grown up conscious of climate change, and that internalised anxiety at the world’s ongoing peril is a really powerful imaginative force that we don’t quite register in its full form but is deeply in us,” he says.

‘An A-Z of words lost’

Macfarlane was inspired to write the book both by discovering a “peat-deep word-hoard of Hebridean Gaelic” and after the culling of nature words such as buttercup and kingfisher from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which he described at Hay as “an A-Z of words lost”. He thinks we can learn from how children encounter nature.

“The last chapter is about a group of children in a country park which has the busiest A road in the east of England on one side, and a hospital on the other,” he says. “It’s about the limitless wonder with which children meet even a very unwild place, which is an inspiration to all of us who’ve forgotten how to speak ‘childish’.”

Just as important as the words that are vanishing are the words being created every day. Macfarlane explains in the book that his seven-year-old son, when told there was no word for “the shining hump of water that rises above a submerged boulder in a stream”, quickly suggested ‘currentbum’. “Since the book was published, I’ve been sent many words – on postcards, and letters, from diaries and clippings, as well as emails and Twitter – and children and parents have begun to send me ones that they make up,” Macfarlane tells me.

The collecting of terms in Landmarks is not a form of hoarding, an attempt at control in the face of loss. At his Hay talk, Macfarlane expressed how he hoped the book might give new life to the place-languages within. “I want these words to be released and let their energies and their poetries run wild,” he said.

To that end, the last glossary, Childish, is left blank. It is a sign of hope. As Macfarlane says in Landmarks, “We have forgotten 10,000 words for our landscapes, but we will make 10,000 more, given time.”

His glossaries, then, are much more than vocabulary-expanding lists. This is where Macfarlane the magician takes over.

“I wanted them to become spells, really; chants, incantations – you step into them like you might step into a flowing stream and let the words run over you. They do have their own magic, which is nothing to do with me. I just put them on the page,” he says. “But they become spells.”

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http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151126-robert-macfarlane-on-the-wild-words-were-losing?ocid=fbbrt

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Le parole per descrivere la felicità in 26 lingue

Lo psicologo Tim Lomas raccoglie termini, non traducibili, che raccontano uno stato d’animo o un’esperienza positiva in idiomi diversi: dal corano all’inuit.

Un vocabolario della felicità, in continua evoluzione. Ecco cos’è «The Positive Lexicography Project», raccolta di parole intraducibili, ideata da Tim Lomas, docente di Psicologia Positiva della University of East London. «Ho cercato i vocaboli online, su siti, blog e tra i paper accademici — racconta a “la Lettura” —. Le persone, inoltre, mi inviano suggerimenti per sottopormi termini nuovi». I quali entrano a far parte del vocabolario a due condizioni: non devono avere un equivalente in inglese e devono descrivere esperienze, stati d’animo e tratti personali positivi. 

«Non utilizzo criteri stringenti — continua Lomas — perché parte del progetto è proprio esplorare cosa è il benessere umano in tutto il mondo. Trovo quindi suggestivo includere parole indirettamente collegate all’ambito della percezione e dell’emotività». Tra cui, ad esempio, «chiaroscuro», inteso come esperienza estetica, una versione visiva dello«yin» e «yang». Seicento sono i vocaboli raccolti finora e organizzati in tre categorie: sentimenti, relazioni interpersonali e carattere umano. Ventisei, invece, sono le parole selezionate per «la Lettura». Per provare a descrivere una sfumatura in più dell’animo umano

Agape

(Amore incondizionato, disinteressato e smisurato. Greco). Tre sono i tipi di amore in greco: eros, legato all’attrazione fisica; philos, sentimento fraterno e di profonda condivisione e, appunto, agape. Il vertice più alto dell’amore, provato da chi dona tutto se stesso senza pretendere nulla in cambio. Come Gesù: nella tradizione cristiana, infatti, il termine indica l’amore di Dio per gli uomini.

             

Balikwas

(Saltare improvvisamente in un’altra situazione e sentirsi sorpreso. Tagalog). Scrive in Balikwas: How to Emigrate to The Philippines Chris Payne, ex professore della University of Maryland emigrato a Tanauan, nelle Filippine: «Il termine significa saltare dall’altra parte, sentirsi sorpresi per una nuova situazione ma anche andare contro corrente». Ossia: abbandonare la propria zona di comfort. Come fanno i visionari, spiega Hal Gregersen del Mit, che dubitano delle certezze, cambiano situazioni, raggiungono risultati sorprendenti.

Chrysalism

(Amniotica tranquillità di essere in casa durante la tempesta. Inglese, neologismo). È una delle parole ideate dal designer John Koenig e raccolte in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. L’autore immagina termini nuovi con l’obiettivo di colmare un vuoto linguistico e attribuire un nome alle emozioni difficili da descrivere. Chrysalism viene da crisalide e vuole rendere l’idea di sentirsi protetti, come in uno stato embrionale.

Dadirri

(Atto di profondo e riflessivo ascolto. Ngangiwumirr, lingua aborigena). «Dadirri è dare voce alla primavera dentro di noi», ha detto Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr Bauman, attivista e artista aborigena. «Quando vivo una esperienza dadirri torno a essere completa. Anche se qualcuno caro se ne è andato posso ritrovare così la mia pace». Perché dadirri, spiega Judy Atkinson della Southern Cross University, è un metodo di cura, una pratica per superare traumi e dolore.

Engentar

(Desiderare di stare soli, ricercare una serena solitudine. Spagnolo). Parola diffusa in Messico, indica il desiderio di allontanarsi dagli altri gioendo della propria solitudine. E per chi non sa stare engentado, esiste una guida, How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself di Robert Paul Smith, che spiega tutto in una frase di commiato: «Mi scusi, ho un appuntamento con me stesso per sedermi a guardare l’erba che cresce».

Fargin

(Orgoglio e sincera felicità per il successo di qualcun altro. Yiddish). L’opposto dell’invidia. Ma attenzione, ammonisce Michael Wex, scrittore canadese: il fargin è raro e, avendone l’occasione, pochi lo provano. Come racconta in Born to Kvetch: «Un angelo appare a un uomo. “È il tuo giorno fortunato — gli dice — puoi avere tutto quello che desideri, in quantità illimitata, ma il tuo vicino ne riceverà il doppio”. È esasperante, pensa l’uomo. Poi ha un’idea e dice: “Voglio perdere la vista da un occhio”».

Gumusservi

(Il riflesso della luna sull’acqua. Turco). Termine evocativo che Yee-Lum Mak ha inserito nel blog di parole stravaganti «OtherWordly», da cui è nato l’omonimo libro. Grazie al suo potenziale estetico Gumusservi è parola nota anche a chi non parla turco: è un hashtag sui social e anche il titolo di un brano. Malinconico, ovvio. E romantico insieme.

Hygge

(Senso di calore, atmosfera accogliente e amichevole. Danese). Nella classifica 2016 delle parole dell’anno dell’Oxford Dictionaries è finita anche hygge. Termine di moda, ma non nuovo. Tanto che nel 1957 Robert Shaplen sul «New Yorker» ha scritto che l’hygge è dovunque a Copenaghen. «Provo a rendere la mia casa hygge», dice Lomas. La stagione più hygge? L’inverno. Perché, ha scritto Helen Russell in The Year of Living Danishly, hygge è una tazza di tè caldo o un paio di calzini di cashmere. Mondadori ha appena pubblicato in Italia Hygge. La via danese alla felicità di Meik Wiking.

Iktsuarpok

(Quando si aspetta qualcuno e non si riesce a smettere di controllare se sta arrivando. Inuit). Tiffany Watt Smith della Queen Mary University non ha dubbi: iktsuarpok è una sensazione che proviamo tutti, tanto da meritare un posto nel suo The Book of Human Emotions dedicato ai sentimenti più comuni. Per la studiosa la nostra tentazione di controllare ripetutamente la casella email non sarebbe altro che una versione «aggiornata» dell’iktsuarpok. «Non è colpa della tecnologia — spiega — ma del nostro desiderio di contatto in un mondo sempre più isolato».

Jugaad

(Trovare soluzioni innovative, improvvisate e geniali, utilizzando quello che si ha. Hindi). È l’arte del life hacking, la capacità di trovare soluzioni creative, frugali e inaspettate. Proprio come spiega il libro Jugaad Innovation. I due autori, Navi Radjou e Jaideep Prabhu (Cambridge Judge Business School), lo spiegano così: jugaad è una rivoluzione culturale, l’innovazione dal basso, diffusa nei Paesi emergenti. Senza grandi investimenti.

Kanyirninpa

(Abbraccio protettivo e salutare. Pintupi). Per il popolo Pintupi l’abbraccio non trasmette solo affetto, ma infonde salute fisica e mentale. Ha scritto Brian McCoy, studioso di tradizioni aborigene, in Holding Men: «Kanyirninpa è la protezione della famiglia verso un nuovo nato. Per gli adulti il significato cambia: non cercano più l’abbraccio della madre ma quello degli altri uomini. Così i più anziani introducono i giovani all’età adulta».

Lagom

(La giusta misura, né troppo né troppo poco. Svedese). Il lagom è lo spirito della Svezia, dove tutto è misurato, dai temporali al design. «Il termine ha molte applicazioni — scrive Meg, autrice del blog “Something Swedish” — e rappresenta l’ideale sociale e culturale svedese di uguaglianza e libertà». L’origine? Dalla locuzione laget om usata dai vichinghi per indicare l’esatta quantità di idromele che si può bere dal corno prima di passarlo ai compagni.

Mepak

(Il piacere delle piccole cose. Serbo). La felicità? Non dipende dai grandi avvenimenti della vita ma dalle piccole esperienze. Lo spiega il termine mepak e lo conferma l’indagine Little Things in Life Make Us Happiest, in cui Glenn Williams, della Nottingham Trent University, dichiara: «I piccoli piaceri ci aiutano a costruire vite più significative». Qualche esempio di mepak? La ricerca ne cita molti: mangiare cioccolata, stendersi su lenzuola pulite, prenotare un viaggio.

Nunchi

(Capacità di interpretare gli sguardi e di leggere le emozioni altrui. Coreano). Si legge sul blog dell’ambasciata coreana in Canada: «Per un canadese sì significa sì e no vuol dire no. In Corea, invece, sì può significare: è una buona idea ma so che il mio capo non l’approverà e poiché non voglio farti preoccupare preferisco dire sì». Per capire l’interlocutore è necessario leggere il linguaggio non verbale. Ossia sviluppare il nunchi. Come? Osservando: uno sguardo laterale o un respiro profondo dicono molto più di una parola.

Orenda

(Il potere di cambiare il mondo a dispetto di un destino avverso. Urone). Per l’Oxford Dictionariesorenda è il potere magico che i nativi americani Iroquois credono pervada tutta la natura sotto forma di energia spirituale. È la forza dei temporali e del vento ma anche il potere miracoloso che solo alcuni uomini possono esercitare. Gli sciamani, per esempio. Orenda, però, è anche una benedizione: permette a chi ne è dotato di sfidare gli eventi avversi e superarli.

Passeggiata

(Camminata piacevole, tranquilla e rilassata. Italiano). «Non avevo mai sentito la parola finché non sono stato in Italia. Qui — dice Lomas — ho capito il piacere che ne deriva. La passeggiata come il cibo fa parte dell’immagine del Paese». Ne è convinta anche Diane Hales autrice di La Bella Lingua: «All’imbrunire — scrive — qualcosa sembra attirare le persone fuori da case e uffici per partecipare alla passeggiata». Segna la fine del lavoro, a vedere e a farsi vedere — spiega. Indossando, magari, gli abiti appropriati.

Queesting

(Accogliere l’amante nel proprio letto per chiacchierare. Olandese). Il termine, in pieno revival su internet, ha una storica tradizione, descritta dal medico statunitense Henry Reed Stiles nel 1871 in Bundling: its origin, progress and decline in America. La donna, spiega, lasciava di notte le porte della propria camera aperte nell’attesa che l’amante entrasse e le parlasse. Lo faceva per conquistarlo e con il pieno consenso dei familiari.

Ramé

(Caotico e gioioso insieme. Balinese). Qualcosa ramé a Bali? Il gamelan. Si tratta di un’orchestra composta da numerosi strumenti, tra cui tamburi, gong, xilofoni, flauti di bambù e strumenti a corda. La musica prodotta è complessa e articolata, con melodie sovrapposte e più linee ritmiche suonate insieme. Il risultato? Caotico, allegro, vitale. In una parola: ramé.

Samar

(Sedersi insieme per raccontare storie all’ora del tramonto. Arabo). «Samar — dice Lomas — racconta in una sola parola un’intera cultura». E una tradizione antica nel tempo. L’ha descritta il teologo Kenneth E. Bailey su «Themelios», rivista di studi religiosi: gli abitanti dei villaggi si incontrano la sera per raccontare storie e declamare poesie. L’atmosfera è informale e chiunque può partecipare anche se a parlare sono di solito gli individui più in vista. E i più anziani: uomini in grado di tramandare la tradizione orale della comunità.

Tithadesh

(È l’augurio che si rivolge a chi ha acquisito qualcosa di nuovo. Ebraico). Un’auto nuova? Tithadesh! Il termine, allegro, ha però un retrogusto amaro, rivelando l’attaccamento alle cose materiali, come ha spiegato con una storia David Frishman. Il figlio di un povero sarto, ha scritto, si lamenta con il padre che realizza abiti nuovi per i ricchi ma non può permettersi di regalargliene uno. Nessuno, così, in sinagoga gli rivolge tithadesh. Un giorno, però, lo riceve: per il suo funerale. Indossa un abito luccicante per l’occasione ma ha perso quello che conta: la vita.

Ubuntu

(Umanità verso gli altri, sentirsi parte di una grande comunità. Bantu). Sono chi sono in virtù di ciò che tutti siamo. Ecco l’etica ubuntu che ha ispirato anche il nome e la filosofia dell’omonimo sistema operativo basato su Linux, con l’obiettivo di portare l’idea di condivisione anche nel mondo software. Chi ha l’ubuntu, infatti, non può perseguire solo il vantaggio personale. Lo ha spiegato l’attivista e arcivescovo sudafricano Desmond Tutu: «Una persona con l’ubuntu è aperta e disponibile. Quando fai del bene si diffonde, è per tutta l’umanità»

Vorfreude

(La gioia che deriva dall’immaginare piaceri futuri. Tedesco). Vorfreude è «il sabato del villaggio», il piacere di pregustare la festa. Rivela allegria e una sottile apprensione. «Le parole possono essere polivalenti — spiega Lomas —. Il gusto di assaporare il futuro è combinato con la paura che non possa arrivare. Come nell’italiano magari, che significa “forse”, “nei miei desideri” o “se solo”, tenendo così insieme un augurio speranzoso e un pensieroso rammarico»

Wabi-Sabi

(Bellezza imperfetta e consumata. Giapponese). «È la capacità di apprezzare la bellezza di fenomeni vecchi o degli oggetti rotti — spiega Lomas —. Siamo costantemente incoraggiati alla ricerca del nuovo, parole come wabi-sabici permettono di percepire il mondo da un’altra prospettiva. È un termine esteticamente rilevante ma può essere utile anche per considerare la propria vita, per accettare il personale processo di invecchiamento e capire che anche lì c’è un valore».

Xibipiio

(Esperienza di un fenomeno ai limiti della percezione o della coscienza. Pirahã dell’Amazzonia). Qualcosa di simile allo Xibipiio? Il bu-bu-settete dei bambini. Lo spiega Daniel Everett, linguista, nel libro Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: «La parola si riferisce a quella che chiamo l’esperienza della transizione, l’atto di cominciare o terminare qualcosa, di trovarsi al limite di un fenomeno. Come una fiamma tremolante, che entra e esce dalla nostra percezione».

Yuán fèn

(Relazione determinata dal destino. Cinese). La fatidica coincidenza delle relazioni: non avvengono per caso, ma dipendono dalle azioni commesse nella vita precedente. Chi si incontra, insomma, lo fa grazie a una innata connessione universale. Lo yuán fèn, scrive Kwang-Kuo Hwang della National Taiwan University, offre una prospettiva in cui inserire i sentimenti negativi, come incidenti nelle relazioni, rendendo così più facile il loro superamento.

Załatwíc

(Risolvere una situazione e sistemare le cose arrangiandosi. Polacco). Nel 1986 l’antropologa Janine Wedel in The Private Poland ha intervistato sociologi ed economisti per descrivere la società polacca, di cui, spiega, załatwíc è una delle parole chiave. E lo è stata soprattutto in passato quando, per ottenere documenti e beni si ricorreva all’aiuto di amici e parenti. Che mettevano a frutto quello che avevano: competenza, relazioni o anche solo fantasia.

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