Five Hundred And One

A bold new beginning. No more of those wonky attempts at badly written prose, but grand shining examples of wit and intellect! On the other hand, that does sound rather hard, now that I think about it. Perhaps the old attempts weren't all that bad after all. Perhaps an aimless and self-indulgent mess with no clear throughline is the way to go. After all, it has worked so far while recruiting minimal readership. What a way to go! Okay, an uninspired retread of a beginning, with a complete lack of expectations for anything different. Excellent, that's how mental stability exercises should be sometimes.

With my new business cards beside me - artfully managing to have no mention of location on them anywhere, sigh - it would be easy to get all lazy and bob up and down on the waves of fate like human flotsam, but no, they must be distributed to the masses. How on Earth do people get rid of business cards anyway? Is there some secret skill to it? One hundred sounds like a lot, bus is it really? The lack of tutoring has been very strange, almost a void where nothing has happened at all. Will business cards make a difference, or would effort be better off invested in brushing up foreign language skills?

Actually, if there were one thing I would love to do, it would be to really relearn and refresh my French and Spanish skills, and add Greek into the mix. There's something about the intellectual challenge of learning a language that is very appealing, especially one in which you need to learn a new symbology too. A new alphabet is fascinating. Japanese is very interesting too, but goes too far in having two native alphabets and employing Chinese kanji too. It's less of a challenge and more of an ideal, especially with the artistic elements of writing the three different sets of symbols. Yes, languages are great things to learn, and also allow you access to new ways of thinking. The Open University has a Language Studies degree too, if only money were in abundance.

Different cultures are defined far more than you might think by their languages, and their underlying mechanisms. They are a large part of the reason why different societies think so differently to each other, as well as genetic differences and different histories of course. Not every language is based on a subject hitting an object with a verb, in a problem-based tool-oriented way. Hungarian, for example, is very construction based, building from stem-words out in a very structured manner, while French is irregular and contrary and German is indescribable as it it hasn't crossed this author's radar yet. Every language has its own quirks. Spanish is lovely and regular, but hard to be imaginative in somehow.

How was that for post five hundred and one? We can get back to proper post titles again now? Excellent...

O.