words

Thought behind the Thought

I have lately been suffering from an obsessive compulsive disorder ... to write! This writing is so impulsive, it seems almost as if there are all these words crowding my mind, waiting for their turn to appear on paper.
On being asked how I am able to write, and the origin of my words, the only answer I can offer is, "I don't know". Because I really don't. All I know is that if these words are put down with care, they surely communicate what I want to say, to the other person.

Where do these words really come from? Is it that words just 'are'? Or can we make our own words? If we can, surely it is a very creative act, an art in itself!

About the art:
In this fun, short talk from TEDYouth, lexicographer Erin McKean encourages — nay, cheerleads — her audience to create new words when the existing ones won’t quite do. She lists out 6 ways to make new words in English, from compounding to “verbing,” in order to make language better at expressing what we mean, and to create more ways for us to understand one another.

About the artist:
The co-founder of Reverb Technologies, and the maker of the online dictionary Wordnik, Erin McKean is reshaping how we interact with language itself.
Erin McKean's job as a lexicographer involves living in a constant state of research. She searches high and low -- from books to blogs, newspapers to cocktail parties -- for new words, new meanings for old words, or signs that old words have fallen out of use. In June of this year she involved us all in the search by launching Wordnik, an online dictionary that houses all the traditionally accepted words and definitions, but also asks users to contribute new words and new uses for old words. Wordnik pulls real-time examples of word usage from Twitter, image representations from Flickr along with many more non-traditional, and highly useful, features.


Source and credit for all information and video:

http://www.ted.com/talks/erin_mckean_go_ahead_make_up_new_words#
http://www.ted.com/speakers/erin_mckean

journeys

Two poems by two great poets almost paintings made with words. There cannot be a piece of art that is more apt for this quote. Nostalgia and flashbacks are always accompanied no matter how many times you read these poems. In the school days learning poetry that was this prolific was indeed a pleasure. A salute to the master poets from designjatra.

The Railway Train

I like to see it lap the miles,

And lick the valleys up,

And stop to feed itself at tanks;

And then, prodigious, step 

Around a pile of mountains,

And, supercilious, peer

In shanties by the sides of roads;

And then a quarry pare 

To fit its sides, and crawl between,

Complaining all the while

In horrid, hooting stanza;

Then chase itself down the hill 

And neigh like Boanerges;

Then, punctual as a star,

Stop - docile and omnipotent -

At its own stable door. 

Emily Dickinson

From A Railway Carriage

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;

And charging along like troops in a battle

All through the meadows the horses and cattle:

All of the sights of the hill and the plain

Fly as thick as driving rain;

And ever again, in the wink of an eye,

Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,

All by himself and gathering brambles;

Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;

And here is the green for stringing the daisies!

Here is a cart runaway in the road

Lumping along with man and load;

And here is a mill, and there is a river:

Each a glimpse and gone forever!

Robert Louis Stevenson

better and better

Write as an instinct. Read as a habit. The video talks about how the whole process of writing is an extremely personal journey filled with trying times. It addresses what exactly we achieve at the end of that journey.

Here’s listing some iconic authors and authors that influenced them:

P.G. Wodehouse:  Shakespeare, Tennyson , Rudyard Kipling, Omar Khayyam and Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie: Wilkie Collins and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Dan Brown: Sidney Sheldon, Douglas Hofstadter, Fred Wrixon, John Steinbeck, John Langdon, Shakespeare, James Bamford and Robert Ludlum.

credits:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1h4rm57UIg
http://en.wikipedia.org/

forward

“I think the single biggest thing that money gave me—and obviously I came from a place where I was a single mother and it really was hand to mouth at one point. It was literally as poor as you can get in Britain without being homeless at one point. If you’ve ever been there you will never, ever take for granted that you don’t need to worry. Never.”

“I've no idea where ideas come from and I hope I never find out; it would spoil the excitement for me if it turned out I just have a funny little wrinkle on the surface of my brain which makes me think about invisible train platforms.”

J.K Rowling

Credits: http://mentalfloss.com/article/56940/20-wise-and-witty-j-k-rowling-quotes

unspoken words

Robert Fulghum in his book, “All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”, tells us a wonderful story titled “Yelling”. There are some villagers in Solomon Islands in the South Pacific that have found a unique way of felling trees. If a large tree is to be felled and it’s too large to be cut down wit an axe they have come up with a unique way of doing so.

Early at dawn villagers creep around the tree and yell at it incessantly. Legend is that woodsmen with special powers yell at the tree for a month or so until it slowly withers and dies. Such is the 
power of yelling and harsh words. 

Words have tremendous power when used as well as not used.One is forced to look at mechanised tree felling operations which take place with latest technology  new age machines . A wordlessly
committed action. One with words the other without. Yet the tree dies in both situations. Spoken 
and unspoken words have tremendous power to damage things. They need to be used with extra 
caution.