Book Review–The Power of Babel

Normally, my reading pattern is balanced by alternating between fiction and non-fiction.  A little bit of learning, a little bit of escaping into a magical wonderland.  But @NSQE had recommend this book so heartily that I picked it up immediately after finishing Applied Economics.

I’ve always found languages fascinating.  Maybe because Daddy used to yell at us in German and we had really random books in other languages lying around the house.  At one point in college, I thought it’d be fun to study linguistics.  Then I found out my school didn’t have any linguistics classes. So, that was the end of that idea.  I’ve studied German, French and Greek.  I learned some Spanish when I worked in landscapping, learned lots of Tonga in the Peace Corps (plus a wee bit of Bemba, Nyanja and Kaonde), and have dealt with more languages than you can shake a stick at while working at Creative Commons.  Languages are fun. 

My particular favorite “foreign” language to learn is other versions of English.  (My encounters with Nigerian English here.)  I love the puzzle of how languages change and why.  And that’s exactly what The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Languages by John McWhorter is all about.

The book discusses how languages meet and combine and turn into pidgins, which then fly away into their own languages.  It covers how word meaning shifts – my particular favorite is how silly went from meaning innocent to foolish – and how there really is no “standard” version of any language.  And the book does it all in an easy to read prose without a lot of jargon and with fun, memorable anecdotes.

McWhorter also dismisses the notion that languages are influenced by culture or surroundings.  I don’t completely agree with this, but I did appreciate his comments on the common example of ‘Eskimos have so many number of words for snow.’  So does English.  Think about it.  Snow, blizzard, sleet, flurries, powder, slush, etc.  All different forms of snow.

I really liked that the book did not focus only on Romance or even Western languages.  It included a lot of examples from Pacific Islands, Native American languages and even a few examples out of Africa.  Personally, I’d love a similar book focused on Bantu languages, but I have a feeling the only way I’ll get that is if I write it myself.

Highly Recommend.

Shoulder Shawl

It was the most beautiful yarn I had ever seen.  A delicate cream color, tiny glass beads strung through it, their deep brown, glittering gold and muted yellow shining in the light.  I lightly touched the soft mohair, the ball of thin strands felt almost fragile.  I smiled at the yarn and at my knitting teacher.  What a beautiful present. Months passed before I figured out what to knit with yarn.  Even more months passed before I started the project.  The yarn almost felt too beautiful to use.  What if I messed it up?  What if I ruined the yarn?  But what good is a ball of yarn if you aren’t willing to turn it into something else?  So I began my project, a one-skein triangular shawl.

The pattern was simple enough, knit, add a stitch, knit, repeat, eventually add two stitches, knit repeat, until the yarn is gone.  It took a day, one State Bar IP Section Executive Committee meeting to be exact.

I wasn’t sure about it at first.  What could I do with it?  Should I add to it?  Incorporate it into something else?  Then I showed my friends and knitting and the decision was unanimous, it’s perfect the way it is.

Now, I no longer have a ball of beautiful yarn, but an exquisite small shoulder shawl.

Yarn: Be Sweet African Bead Ball in Natural

Little Round Berries

I was walking down the BART path on my way to the dentist, cruising along at my usual brisk pace when something caught my eye.  I stopped dead in my tracks.  Little berries.  Little round berries.  Little round red berries.  Memories came flooding back.

When Alfred and I were little girls at the old house, we had a backyard full of amusement.  Sandboxes, swing sets and swimming pools migrated around the yard, with much help from Daddy, until Daddy found them their permanent homes. 

One place the swing set lived for awhile was the side of the back yard, just off the driveway, right under a small tree.  A small tree with little berries.  Little round berries. Little round orange berries.  They grew in bunches on that tree, the same way the little round red berries were growing in bunches on the tree along the BART path.

Like the birch tree we fed to the pandas, the berries were just another toy in our giant whole-world playground.  Mommy had told us not to eat the berries because they were poisonous.  Somehow, we got it in our heads that berries were not poisonous only if ingested, but utterly and completely poisonous.  The berries would fall from the tree onto our slide. We’d roll them down, an orange river flowing to the ground, always careful never to break a berry for fear the poisonous berry juice would seep through our skin.

As I stood looking at those little red berries, so exactly like my childhood berries in everyway but hue, I wondered momentarily if they too were poisonous.  I briefly wondered if the orange berries even were.  Certainly not to touch, but to eat?  I didn’t squish a red berry or try to eat one to find out.  I smiled, turned back down the path and walked away in a haze of happy memories

A berry-les berry tree. Alfred with a shovel on a swing.

The costs and benefits of over-regulation

I didn’t like the idea at all, but I knew he was right.  The law is something to weigh when doing your cost-benefit analysis.  Whether or not to break the law is simply part of a business decision.

To me, this exemplifies everything that’s bad about our over-regulated society.  Law is no longer a dictate of what is right or wrong.  It’s far beyond keeping some semblance of order in society.  Law is just another weight to be put on your scale when making decisions.   And we all do it, whether we realize it or not.

When was the last time you drove above the speed limit, or crossed the street when the red hand was lit?  The last time you didn’t bother to pay a parking meter or posted a picture you found somewhere online to one of your social networking sites?  And when do you do these things?  When the cost is lower than the benefit, when the risk of getting caught or the risk of being punished if caught is minimal.

As plain-old-Joe’s, most of the laws we break are what we would consider minor.  The laws are often there to protect us; the punishments are relatively small fines and there’s no risk of ‘a record’ that might hurt us later.  (Note: my last example above does not fall into this category.)  But for businesses, these are real, heavily thought about decisions.

Perhaps nowhere is this more true than when dealing with intellectual property.  The law is so grey that it’s often difficult to know when something is against the law.  People spend hours and lots and lots of money trying to answer this question.  Then they spend more hours and lots and lots more money trying to decide, if it is against the law, what are the risks to the business.  They buy insurance to protect themselves from this risk.  The law is like a fire or flood, a quasi-predictable occurrence of which you can only estimate the chance of its harm to you.

Of all the laws out there,  I can only think of two groups that truly regulate right and wrong, and they have the cost benefit analysis built in; society has decided when the benefits outweigh the cost:  causing harm to someone else or causing death.  If you’re defending yourself, there’s an excuse; the benefit of protecting you outweighs the cost of the loss of the other person.  If you’re completely enraged because you found your partner in bed with someone else, society understands.

Does it have to be this way?   Can we expect people to respect the law when disobeying the law is only a question of how it will affect you?

Photo: Statue of Lady Justice at Nasarawa Law School in Nigeria

Knit Wool Stockings

I would be the one to knit wool stockings in August.  But hey, in the Bay, August isn’t summer, and summer isn’t that hot anyway.  And, I absolutely love my stockings.

The purple-dominated multi-color yarn was a Christmas present from my knitting teacher last year.  A wool blend, it was soft and fuzzy, purples, pinks and greens rippling through it.  I love stockings and was certain that this yarn was perfect for knitting my first self-made pair.

My knitting teacher sent me lots of pattern websites and I searched through dozens of patterns until finding the perfect one. (It was on cattymakingout.com but is no longer there.)   A lacey, thigh-high with new techniques I hadn’t tried yet - yarn-overs, knit-two-togethers, slip-knit-passes - and, as it turns out, a great pattern for hiding mistakes.

I started the first stocking at least three times before really getting going.  It seems I have to start all my projects three times.  But once I got going, I was going.  And then I got to the end and had a new problem.  These “thigh-high” stockings were obviously designed for someone with much smaller feet and much, much shorter legs.  I tripled the foot length and tried on my first stocking. It was barely a knee-high sock.

The pattern was a top-down pattern.  I had several inches of ribbing at the top and my yarn was down at the other end where the pattern had ended.  I was not starting over a fourth time, not after finishing an entire sock.  And I was not settling for knee-highs.  So I bound off at the toe and went back to the top.

I picked up all the cast on stitches on my needles and began the lace pattern again, knitting up from the ribbing.  When my stocking was a few inches shorter than I wanted it to be, I added a new section of ribbing and bound off.  I knit the other stocking the same way.  And viola!  A beautiful pair of knit stockings.

Next time, I’ll remember to also compensate for the width of my thighs.

Yarn: Lion Brand Yarn Amazing in Violets