From Mark Twain

Wordly Inspiration from the immortal Mark Twain (well, a bit dated with his use of 'man') for those days when you feel your writing is derivative:

"The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his."

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The market - a solution to what?

I've been thinking about the market lately. Not the local market where I buy fruit and vegetables, chat with the growers about conditions on the farm, see a few people I know, and maybe watch a busker.

See you there Mr Bean! Source

It's this market I hear endlessly about: the energy market needs major revamp; the chief executive has reassured the market; there is no true market for overland flow licences; an Australia-wide view of the aged care market; reform our broken housing market; the labor market added around 242,000 jobs for the month.

So many people seem enamoured with this amazing thing called the market and 'fixing the market' or 'finding a market solution' when we discuss numerous diverse aspects of our society - electricity supply, airline viability, water, aged-care, housing, finding a job. 

But just what is the market? It seems big and ubiquitous, but strangely vague. It's obviously not a place, like my local market. So, what kind of thing is it?

And what makes the market the solution to all sort of pressing social and environmental issues?

TATKOP 126

If you're a new follower, welcome to my monthly exploration of dichotomies: the TATKOP series.

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who 'want it fixed right now!' and those who know there is no 'fix' to many problems. (I've worked for some of the former.)

 

See more in the TATKOP series.

Wordly Explorations manifesto

Welcome to Wordly Explorations, a blog exploring how humans use, misuse and sometimes abuse everyday words. There's so much to explore!

For a text version of the Wordly Explorations manifesto, read the first post Introducing Wordly Explorations.

From Mary Pipher

 Wordly Inspiration from Mary Pipher, the author of Writing to Change the World:

"A writer's job is to tell stories that connect readers to all the people on earth, to show these people as the complicated human beings they really are, with histories, families, emotions, and legitimate needs. We can replace one-dimensional stereotypes with multidimensional individuals with whom our readers can identify."

See more Wordly Inspiration. 

TATKOP 125

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who blame others and those who blame themselves.  

Is there a third: those who don't use blame as a way of understanding other people and the world?

See more in the TATKOP series.

Coronavirus - a story of semantic boundaries

We know a lot more now about pandemics than we used to.

Sure, we'd heard of The Plague - the big one in terms of numbers of deaths and social impact back in the 1300s. We know surprisingly little about The Spanish flu despite its global devastation one hundred years ago. Maybe we saw reports on Ebola, HIV, MERS and SARS; but they happened somewhere else to other people. They were managed and stayed outside our immediate sphere of concern. 

See full infographic at Visual Capitalist

But we've been educated recently. 

This snippet of an infographic from Visual Capitalist with disturbing fluffy things as the number of deaths reminds us we have had pandemics and plagues for at least as long as we've recorded human history. (It's seriouly worth a look at the full infographic.)

Personally and socially, pandemics and plagues are devastating, politically they are exploitable crises, environmentally they are warning bells about humanity's disregard for other life forms, and existentially they refuse our preference to ignore our mortality. 

But semantically they are all over the place. 

The naming of pandemics, including the coronavirus, is an intriguing story.

It's a story of semantic boundaries (try singing it to the Brady Bunch theme).