Barbra has the best voice of anyone in this and the last century. Nobody even close. Frank was a better stylist but he didn’t have the vocal quality she has.
What a humbling experience it is to put words down on paper, words you’ve labored over, sighed over, pored over, sweat upon, wept upon, cursed, blessed, kissed. And when the child is finally born, the labors over, you think he’s so handsome. And onlookers turn away, with a look of disgust or sympathy, or a veiled smile, maybe a little chuckle behind masking fingers.
The unfed mind devours itself. Gore Vidal
I’ve decided that what I do almost daily isn’t computering—it’s computtering
Another quote from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, this time about English complexity and its influence on the other languages of the world.
“English is the largest of the human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language—this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and the most flexible—despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it. Nobody tried to stop this process, the way some languages are policed and have official limits. . . . English was in truth a bastard tongue and nobody cared how it grew . . . and it did!—enormously. Until no one could hope to be an educated man unless he did his best to embrace this monster.”
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