language

A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows: How Groups of Birds Got Their Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith

Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of blue and the wonder of being alive. But it is also a thing of great pliancy and creativity — a living reminder that how we name things changes what we see, changes the seer. (This, of course, is why we have poetry.) It is the birthplace of the imagination and forever its plaything: I remember my unabashed delight when a naturalist friend first introduced me to the various terms for… read article …

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Saying the Ineffable: Poetry and the Language of Silence

“The survival of poetry depends on the failure of language.” …

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Nick Cave on Songwriting, the Mystery of the Unconscious, and the Sweet Severity of Truth

“Metaphor can create a merciful sense of distance from the cruel idea, or the unspeakable truth, and allow it to exist within us as a kind of poetic radiance, as a work of art.” …

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Poetry Is Not a Luxury: Audre Lorde on the Courage to Feel as an Antidote to Fear and a Fulcrum of Action, Power, and Possibility

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.” …

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William Godwin on the Advantages of the Multilingual Mind

How the ability to call your idea “by various names, borrowed from various languages,” empowers you to conceive that idea “in a way precise, clear and unconfused.” …

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Music for Language Learning: Best Practices

You’re reading Music for Language Learning: Best Practices, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

Whether you’re studying for fun, or to pursue a career in trade, diplomacy or translation, learning a language can be one of the most challenging and one of the most rewarding things you’ll ever do.

Several studies have pointed out that multilingual people earn more money, are open to greater career opportunities and can provide more value to the businesses they work in, whether at entry-level positions or as leaders. Multilingual people also rank higher than monolinguals on creativity tests and are more equipped than their counterparts to deal with the cultural diversity of our increasingly globalized world.

Especially if you’re learning a foreign language for the first time, or your target and source languages have little common ground, you should go out of your way to make…

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How to Punctuate with Style: Lewis Thomas’s Charming Meditation on the Subtleties of Language

“If you want to use a cliché you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society.” …

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How to Punctuate with Style: Lewis Thomas’s Charming Meditation on the Subtleties of Language

“If you want to use a cliché you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society.” …

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The Great 19th-Century Biologist and Anatomist Thomas Huxley on Darwin’s Legacy and What Makes Us Human

In praise of the faculty “making every generation somewhat wiser than its predecessor, — more in accordance with the established order of the universe.” …

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The Lost Words: An Illustrated Dictionary of Poetic Spells Reclaiming the Language of Nature

From acorn to wren, a vibrant encyclopedia of enchantments reweaving our broken web of belonging with the rest of nature. …

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French Philosopher Maurice Blanchot on Writing, the Dual Power of Language to Reveal and Conceal, and What It Really Means to See

“To see is certainly always to see at a distance, but by allowing distance to give back what it removes from us… To see is to experience the continuous and to celebrate the sun, that is, beyond the sun: the One.” …

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Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on Love and Resisting the Tyranny of Relationship Labels

“We name mostly in order to control but what is worth loving does not want to be held within the bounds of too narrow a calling. In many ways love has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it.” …

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How to Use Your Words to Change Your Life

Not only did I secretively shred zucchini into dishes I cooked for my husband and three sons I also tried to infuse wisdom into our dinner conversations. Our kitchen table overheard our most daring thoughts, our craziest dreams, and our silliest notions. Never judging or squashing even our most outlandish ideas, our words were free […]
The post How to Use Your Words to Change Your Life appeared first on Change your thoughts. …

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Nabokov’s Synesthetic Alphabet: From the Weathered Wood of A to the Thundercloud of Z

“The long A of the English alphabet… has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French A evokes polished ebony.” …

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