Bibelot & other words; No I don't spend too much time online?

Dictionary.com's word of the day is bibelot! You heard it here first! (Well, probably.) Now go look up anfractuously. Just because you know defenestration and antidisestablishmentarianism doesn't mean you have to pretend you know them all.

In other news, I am having way too much fun on Twitter. But I have lots of reading for class...and I need to shop for textbooks online. So perhaps I should get off Twitter, off this blog, perhaps even- gasp- off the computer entirely! A girl can dream, can't she?

After the recent report saying that kids these days (I say that like I'm old or something) spend more hours using media than there are actually hours in the day (waking hours anyway) then perhaps I should be more careful. One could metaphorically say it like this:

[Twitter/ Facebook/ blogs/ insert preferred social media of choice] is a drug. You start saying you'll only use it a little bit and then suddenly you find yourself saying, I can quit whenever I want. Only you don't. And slowly it consumes your normal life, until your social life is semi-dependent on it and you just can't stop...

Scary stuff, eh? But that won't stop anyone from continuing, will it Let alone me and I said it! I make excuses of why I need it. We all do. But sometimes I have to wonder- how would my life be different if all this stuff didn't exist? Or if I had never gotten started using it?

Obama's Nobel Speech- Some Thoughts on War and Peace and Society

I wanted to do a full analysis of Obama's speech, the transcript of which I just finished reading. But I haven't the time to do it justice at the moment. So a just a few thoughts and impressions here.

I will say that I was impressed. By his opening, by who he chose to quote and acknowledge (not who you'd necessarily expect), and by the issues he brought up and discussed. I like how he acknowledges the need to struggle against evil even though we cannot win in our lifetimes, and I like the fact that he uses his brain when he talks and his ideas are well thought out and presented- on both moral/ethical and intellectual grounds.

I think there were some issues that he did not bring up, and could have, maybe should have. But he chose to stick with the obvious topics pretty much throughout- although it was bold to give specific examples of countries that fell short. Not so PC but nothing too offensive to anyone either.

I'd need to do a lot of thinking before I figured out myself exactly where I think he's right and where I disagree. As he's obviously put a lot more thought into the subject of war and peace than I have. (Maybe that's as it should be, maybe not.)

Not everyone will agree with everything he says. But I do think that there should be people in the society who think differently from the leader of the society when it comes to issues like this. Let the leaders take the stance that's best for the whole world overall, if someone must. In general, it should be the job of individuals, not a leader, to be wholly anti-war and stand up for the individual lives that are destroyed in fighting. Only if you have those voices raised up, and heard, can you have a leader who argues, like Obama is doing, that some wars do need to be fought as a matter of conscience (and he said it very well).

I think sometimes you need people around who remind you of all sides, the collective and the individual rights and welfare, who can help society find the right balance for each situation. Every country's job is to set up a system in which the right things in that balance can happen; where no one person's plan of action blocks consideration of any other option.

I do like how he cites people from JFK to Nixon to a pope. It's kind of fascinating, how he works-it's like how he made a staff out of his electionary opponents (Biden, Clinton) and admires Reagan as a president despite how different they all are.

Here's a sampling of which words he used most frequently- can be telling sometimes. I saw elsewhere on the internet that he used the word war double the number of times he used peace- but I don't think it was quite that drastic, he used peace a lot too, and one cannot entirely forget context (not taking into account if he said something like, no more war, for example). But for what it's worth, and because wordles are lots of fun, take a look.

The Smile Domino Effect

I walk down the main walk on my college's campus, and people look up, smile, wave if they know me. My aunt went to this college many years ago- and when I tried to tell her how people are so friendly here, she snorted in disbelief. "NO way. Not the same college as I went to." How did it change? Is it just the particular students in my year?

What gives a group its character? Who is the first person to smile at someone else, who then smiles at someone else, so on and so forth until everyone is actually nice to each other? If I had scowled at someone the first day, and that put them in a bad mood and they scowled at someone else...could that have broken the chain and now I would be living in a scowly, unfriendly enviroment? One of my own (unconcious) making?

How responsible are we for the enviroment we live in? And how much of it is out of our power?

Everyone knows, they say

Common knowledge is a complex thing. Defining it is difficult, and applying specific bits of information to belong to that definition, once you find one, is even harder. What can you assume people already know? Should you aim high or low? The pros and cons can be heavy stuff, for either.

If you assume a lot of knowledge on the part of your audience, you can cause people to learn by making them look things up. Or make them angry that you are being pretentious and arrogant, and throw down your writing in disgust.

And writing down, explaining things overmuch, might make sure that everyone understands, but is no better because then you're talking down to the rest who already know the information, or boring them. This comes up when you write a paper on a specialized subject, or just when you're talking to people you don't know well.

"Everyone knows science fiction is dying. Everyone knows science fiction is doing just fine, even thriving. Everyone knows the future of science fiction is in debate. Everyone knows the future of science fiction has shifted into YA while most people weren't paying attention."

You can find all of this as "everyone knows." See the problem?

And don't forget the dreaded "They say". English teachers hate to see it, don't they? Not just the teachers, though. You yell at your friend, "Who says? What's your source?" And in reply, you recieve only the nebulous "I don't know, everyone"- the ghostly archetype haunting the societal zeitgeist. Frustrating.