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| May-29-14 | | Petrosianic: Yes, that's a good example. I seem to remember once hearing a story about a native linguist who was proficient in many languages and wrote about them. When he was asked to write about the grammar of his own language, he said that his language had no grammar. In one sense he was so aware of it that in another sense he wasn't aware of it at all. A few months back, I saw a video of a girl in Scandaniavia who could talk gibberish in a dozen different languages, including her own. Doing other languages isn't so amazing. I could make a stab at talking in gibberish that sounded vaguely like German or Spanish or Japanese. But English? No way. I'd have absolutely no idea how to do that. I'm so close to it that I have no idea how it sounds to someone who doesn't speak it. Capa was probably the same way. He thought about chess in "machine language", but found it too cumbersome to translate into terms for the rest of us. He could look at a position and just know the eval, but converting his knowledge into a verbal explanation was harder. |
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| May-29-14 | | TheFocus: <A few months back, I saw a video of a girl in Scandaniavia who could talk gibberish in a dozen different languages> Bah! Sid Caesar did this all the time in his comedy act and on his shows. Nothing new there. And he did it better than her. |
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| May-29-14 | | TheFocus: Here is the great Sid Caesar doing a monolouge in four languages that he did not speak. All four speeches are gibberish. http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_... |
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| May-29-14 | | Petrosianic: I can't watch it here, but I'm saving the link for later. Anything from Sid Caesar is probably good. I once saw a Hispanic comic try to do English gibberish, but all he did was to toss out random words. (Elephant, fire hydrant, perambulator, unicycle, that kind of thing). The trick is to pick up on sound patterns that get repeated and combined frequently. That's why it's so hard to do this with your own language, because you don't notice those things. The girl I mentioned earlier did both US English and UK English. It was hard to tell how well she had nailed it just because you don't notice. But all the other languages she did sounded good. The funniest thing about her USA English speech was that it ended with "Hel-LO??", like she'd been hearing too much Valley Girl Speak. https://www.google.com/#q=girl+gibb... |
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| May-29-14 | | TheFocus: I saw that video too. |
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May-29-14
 | | maxi: From reading Capa's writings it is clear that sometimes he worked hard, during a game, at some variations. Sometimes He worked thru some rather long variations. I think part of the reason for his telegraphic annotations is that it seemed to him that writing them down was too much work. And for something as trivial as chess, too... |
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| May-30-14 | | Petrosianic: That's why he wasn't a great writer. There's a lot of grunt work in writing. We had a class once where everyone had the task of writing down the steps to make a paper airplane. No pictures, only verbal descriptions. You had to write it down, give it to someone else, and see if they would build a plane using your instructions that looked like the one you had built. It sounds easy, but it's not. It's very easy to think something but fail to include it in your instructions (because it seems so obvious you shouldn't need to say it). The other guy built my plane right, but the plane I built from a 3rd person's instructions wasn't even close. I was in another one fairly recently, where everyone paired off with a Lego plane set. One guy would look at the instructions (pictures only), and give verbal instructions to his partner, who would have to build the item from the descriptions without seeing the instructions. It's definitely not as easy as it sounds, which is why the best players aren't always the best writers. |
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| May-30-14 | | Petrosianic: The Lego test was much harder than the paper airplane test, by the way, just because there are so many notches and holes that had to be lined up just right, entirely by verbal descriptions. |
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| May-30-14 | | TheFocus: My father, a military man, once tried to describe a test he had taken. It was to verbally describe how to open a cigarette package and take a cigarette out. No one he knew passed.
Some things cannot be described with words. Some things cannot be described with visuals. |
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Jun-01-14
| | maxi: <Petrosianic> "There's a lot of grunt work in writing." Fact. I do nonfictional writing for a living, and I have this mental disorder that does not allow me to write a phrase unless I know that what I am saying is true, or that at least that I can qualify its veracity. And I write sooooo slowly. I have always wondered if things would be different if I were writing fiction. You can have your characters doing anything at the touch of a keyboard: "She shivered in the evening breeze". I wonder if I could write fast then. But probably I would still be writing slowly. Should I write "She shivered with the evening breeze"? Oh, wait, I should say the "cool evening breeze"... |
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| Jun-01-14 | | Jim Bartle: <I have this mental disorder that does not allow me to write a phrase unless I know that what I am saying is true, or that at least that I can qualify its veracity.> Is it contagious? If so, I know some kibitzers I wish you could spend some time with. |
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| Jun-01-14 | | Jim Bartle: <And I write sooooo slowly.> And the worst of it is, when you finally get it right it looks so simple. |
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Jun-01-14
| | maxi: <Jim Bartle> "I know some kibitzers I wish you could spend some time with". You are not kidding, some of these guys are amazing. You can polish your script a few times, and it gets better at first, but then you have to stop because of the Heisenberg Composition Uncertainty Principle: after a while any improvement or correction introduces more errors and awkwardness than are being excised. |
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Jun-01-14
 | | keypusher: I think fiction writing requires its own verisimilitude. People who have done it (I haven't) say it requires enormous amounts of research. Years ago I read Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, which is a romance/fantasy/high-class bodice ripper about a 20th century English nurse traveling back in time to the 18th century Scottish highlands. Somebody loaned it to me, I never would have read it on my own. My God, the effort Gabaldon put into getting the Scottish stuff right...it was amazing. And quite apart from research, making a particular episode plausible...I was reading a Hardy boys book yesterday (riding in the subway, a kid I had with me had three of the books in his backpack, and I'm always looking for distractions on the subway). The Hardy boys are with their fat friend Chet when a car comes barreling down the road. One of the other boys shoves the others out of the way and then turns around and warns a kid on a bicyle, who avoids the car but hits the curb and lands right next to the Hardy Boys. Then the driver comes over and insists on giving the kid $5 so he can get the bike fixed. That couldn't happen. There is no way a Hardy Boy (I think it was Frank) would have time to shove his friends out of the way and then turn around and warn the bicyclist, who would then manage to avoid the car, unless it was parked. But Stratemeyer (or whoever) needed to get his plot underway, he had to introduce the bicyclist (and his fancy Belgian bike, and his reluctance to explain What He Was Really Up To) and the erratic driver, and the policeman, and incidentally to show the pluck and casual command of his teenage heroes (they even calm the angry crowd down after the accident). But he lost me, right there. It reminded me, in a negative way, of the duel between Pierre and Dolokhov in War and Peace. Dolokhov is a competent and experienced duellist, and Pierre has no idea what he is doing. But Pierre wounds Dolokhov, who misses Pierre. You're fully aware of how unlikely it is that things would turn out this way, but Tolstoy makes it completely believable that, on this day, that is exactly what happened. |
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Jun-01-14
 | | Gypsy: <<I have this mental disorder that does not allow me to write a phrase unless I know that what I am saying is true, or that at least that I can qualify its veracity.> Is it contagious? If so, I know some kibitzers I wish you could spend some time with.> It is with political crowd where you could really do humanity some good! |
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Jun-01-14
 | | perfidious: <Jim Bartle: <I have this mental disorder that does not allow me to write a phrase unless I know that what I am saying is true, or that at least that I can qualify its veracity.> Is it contagious? If so, I know some kibitzers I wish you could spend some time with.> If only. |
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| Jun-01-14 | | RedShield: < My God, the effort Gabaldon put into getting the Scottish stuff right...it was amazing.> But how could you tell tartan flannel from the real thing unless you were an expert on the period? <I was reading a Hardy boys book yesterday (riding in the subway, a kid I had with me had three of the books in his backpack, and I'm always looking for distractions on the subway).> Distraction, my foot. Admit it, you're still reading it. Have you read the one where Iola gets pregnant, and Joe tracks down the culprit? Pssst- it was Fenton, in the study, with the lead pipe. |
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| Jun-01-14 | | Jim Bartle: <You're fully aware of how unlikely it is that things would turn out this way, but Tolstoy makes it completely believable that, on this day, that is exactly what happened.> A likely story. Next you'll be telling me Bucky Dent hit a big home run. |
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Jun-01-14
| | maxi: Tolstoy is a magician; when I was reading War and Peace (recently and for the first time) I was there, living in Russia during the Napoleonic Wars. |
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Jun-02-14
| | keypusher: <Distraction, my foot. Admit it, you're still reading it. Have you read the one where Iola gets pregnant, and Joe tracks down the culprit? Pssst- it was Fenton, in the study, with the lead pipe.> Time was, I'd finish every book I started, because I just couldn't help myself. No more, alas. <But how could you tell tartan flannel from the real thing unless you were an expert on the period?> Well, I can't. Although I've come across some admiring things about Gabaldon's scholarship. I can tell, reading her description of a castle or the back story of a lawyer who keeps the heroine from being condemned as a witch in the early going (you can imagine what impression a nurse with 1940-era knowledge would make in the Scottish highlands around 1740) that she's made an effort to get things right. |
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Jun-02-14
 | | Sally Simpson: I found a chess story in a 1982 'Eagle' comic.
Two guys play chess, every game ends in a draw.
One day one of them has a winning position but his opponent dies. So....(as you would) he finds a medium to contact his dead opponent so he can finish the game. I won't spoil the ending....
It is done with actual b/w pictures and speech bubbles. http://www.redhotpawn.com/blog/blog... The just don't write them like this anymore. |
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| Jun-02-14 | | zanzibar: Sample Dialog!
<Stay away from me you fool woman!> <Crazy... chess crazy... you are!> Maybe it's good they don't write 'em like this anymore! (I'm kidding... just kidding!) |
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Jun-02-14
| | maxi: <Sally Simpson> That was interesting. You know, comics, magazines and the like are a vanishing genre. Even newspapers. I give them 20 more years and it's bye bye. Going back to my previous note about Tolstoy, I really recommend War and Peace if any one of you wants to read something really fascinating, both from a military and human point of view. |
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| Jun-02-14 | | TheFocus: I tried reading <War and Peace>. It is actually the oldest book in my library; I won it in a reading contest when I was 8. I have never gotten beyond page 50. Three times I tried to read it. Maybe i should try the Cliff Notes. |
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Jun-02-14
| | perfidious: <TheFocus> Had the same experience with <Dune>, only I did not manage to get past page 20--turgid rubbish (almost wrote prose--misuse of that word if there ever were one!). |
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