An unfinished book of letters Sherman was writing for Ida & Unni

 

AB CD EF G

HI JK LMNOP

RS TU WXY and Z

Now I know my ABC’s

This is the alphabet song which you have no doubt learned already.

This is the most common form of learning and teaching the alphabet in my day.

Can you say the alphabet backwards?

This song is the most hated example of using music for brain training. But, it is highly effective to link songs to things to be memorized.

The linking of one thing to another is the primary force of reason
And, building these links into ideas and concepts, more complex memories,
is learning. You don’t need to learn how to do this. You’ve been doing this from
the first heartbeat.

* * *

Music lends itself to this because music is coherent on many levels at the same time.
Music is rhythm and rhyme, rock and row, the groove.

The Latin alphabet was invented by the Greeks by way of the Phoenicians and Etruscans.

Alpha, Beta are the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.

Our alphabet is called the latin alphabet.

There are 24 letters in total.

6 vowels and 18 consonants.

AEIOU and sometimes Y are the vowels.

Vowels are called the sounding letters because it tells air to be pushed out to make these sounds and the pitch is shaped by the shape of the mouth and lips.

Consonants are the sounds that require the teeth and tongue to make like T or D
Or lips to make like P and M

Momma mimics breast feeding
Poppa is the opposite expression and pushes away from the breast.

The alphabet is a handy system for cataloging anything in alphabetic order.
Putting things in order is a powerful way to keep track of things.

The alphabet is a range of symbols arranged in a fixed order. The individual letters are tabs on a set of folders.

The alphabet is one of mankind’s greatest inventions along with: time, music, and mathematics.

John Dewey attempted to use a numeric system to catalog books.

The dewey decimal system uses numbers to designate relationships and provides a numbering systems that can identify every book by subject matter according to the system.

Not using an alphabet, Chinese words are individual symbols which have sounds which must be memorized a character at a time. The same written word could be pronounced differently in different parts of the country. This was not an accent but a dialect.
Imagine how hard it is to communicate without a symbol system that was both syllabic and sign at the same time, ( The Japanese uses different symbol systems for sounds and meanings) and comprised of sufficient combinatorial power that it has become the international, universal mode of modern communications.

Some words are curiously ideogrammatic, i.e. eye: two eyes separated by a nosey Y.
I of course exaggerate.

Words can add and change meanings. Language changes reflect changes in the environment occupied by human beings and human concerns. Humans change and remain the same, it is a condition of time and memory.

 

Aa

aardvark – How many words have double aa’s?

aged – is a curious word. It can be a one syllable or a two syllable word. It can be a verb or an adjective, as in “age-d” one. One who has aged enough to be old – that’s somewhere past middle age and post middle age into a category which contains feeble or soon to be feeble individuals. “Age-d” carries an emphasis about aging to a certain stage. Wine is never age-d, it is aged, theoretically a process which enhances the value if not the flavor of the wine.

“Age-d” applies to a condition which all life forms succumb to, provided they do not encounter an earlier form of termination. You have to be as old as the oldest human in your acquaintance to be age-d.

Meat is aged by hanging it on a hook
And letting microbes tenderize it for us

accident – The idea that somethings happen that can be completely unplanned, unexpected for which you are totally unprepared.

However, upon closer examination, an accident could purely be a matter of ignorance. Something unexpected only because you failed to prepare for the contingency of its appearance.

In either case, accidents have no cause, are not blameworthy and always involve a discomfort for you. So stay calm, accidents happen. The good news is that ignorance can be corrected.

act

algebra

analog

Antediluvian – before the flood.

art – this term covers a broad number of human activities. In current times, it has come to mean objects which have no other useful purpose other than art. This would exclude bread from being an art object since it’s main purpose is to be eaten rather than admired. But we all know the art of bread-making is one of the triumphs of human civilization, great bread prized now as ‘artisanal’ apposed to ‘industrial’. Great art tells you something, shows you something, makes you feel things. Great art is a shock to the senses, especially when you get it – a feeling everyone experiences when they are moved by a work of art – when you become the instrument upon which the artist can create music. By which I mean that art has this property of being communicated in real or revived time. Music must be heard to be music. It is the ineffable product of a process caused by sound waves created in real-time whether by machine or live performers. What is music to some is just noise to others. So it is with other forms of art. What makes it the same is the dual requirement: 1) Art creates real-time experiences 2) Getting it – receiving the experience requires literacy. The issue of craft vs art may never be settled since the making of things has other aspects which may not be apparent in the thing itself without the context and the meanings that come from their times ( and ours).

ascii -The upper and lowercase letters encoded in a standard for digital/computer use.
This was augmented by unicode to use the standard extending it to all human languages by adding pages to represent all coding systems of standard characters.

asymmetry – one end of an important pole of ideas. Symmetry is at the other end. There are many kinds of symmetry, infinite kinds perhaps. The ability to imagine the mirror image, the upside down, inside out, flip and rotate, stretch and fold. When the transformations are regular, one can say there is symmetry. When it is not, it is asymmetric. As is said of change, things just aren’t the same anymore.

axiom – a given, of which you are often unaware.

azimuth – degrees from N going clockwise from the point of view of the observer. It is a local use of compass points without regard to true north.

 

Bb

Babylon – The Babylonians had a number system base on 60. This is the source of our clock-time and circle/degree measures.

balderdash

balaclava

beauty – Keats wrote Ode to a Grecian Urn which ends with the lines:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Beethoven, Ludwig

binary – Binary means 2
Counting in binary is limited to 2 signs: 0 and 1
Binary is the simplest number system and the basis of the digital world
Two is how we spell out 2

bit – A bit is the smallest unit in the digital world.
A bit is either 0 or 1
8 bits make a byte

byte – a byte is 8 bits
a byte can represent 256 numbers 0 – 255. This is enough for ASCII, but not for all the non-alphabetic languages. See unicode.

 

Cc

catastrophe – the concept of the full-catastrophe life has always appealed to me. The only way to go is to go all in. Don’t stop learning.

cheongsam – A chinese dress which has a cut at the knees in a long slim ankle-length chemise made of embroidered silk. Literally means, long dress.

chiaroscuro – The light and shadow technique in the paintings of Rembrandt and Leonardo DaVinci. The dramatic effect.

coalition

codex

color – paint and light. The power of paint is especially a matter of color. That shadows were colored and textured was discovered by the impressionist.

conundrum

continuum

 

Dd

dapple

Dalmatian

doppler effect

 

Ee

eclectic

ego

egregious

empathy

entropy

eponymous

Escher, M.C.

experience

euclidean, non-euclidean

eureka – We all have had the “aha” experience where suddenly everything seems to fall into place and you realize that you understand something clearly for the first time. The “click” is something that has happened to you, to your understanding of a set of data that appeared murky and incomplete which was transformed by a revelation of the meaning of the chaotic data set. What required guessing or “just so” explanations, becomes a matter of interpretation. What begins as noise is recognized as message. The passage from ignorance to knowledge is the range of rational thought. It is one directional, somewhat akin to the arrow of time.

 

Ff

feng shui

Freud, Sigmund

fugue

 

Gg

geometry

gestalt

glissando

 

Hh

harmony

Heisenberg, Werner

heuristic

hierarchy

homeostasis

horizon

 

Ii

inane

innate

innocence

insidious

insouciance

irony

isometric

 

Jj

jabberwocky

janus

jejune

Jocasta

 

Kk

Kafkaesque

Keats, John

kinetic

 

Ll

Louvre – The Louvre must be visited at least once in a lifetime. Do not think that you have seen a painting when seeing it on an LED screen or printed page. Paintings have presence in the same way a person has presence or not.

 

Mm

mathematics – the art of pure form

Melville, Herman – Moby Dick

Möbius

 

Nn

negative capability – A Keatsian concept about the imagination. How to perceive without bias, to be open to all possibilities and interpretations.

noise – a sound which cannot be parsed is noise.

nonsense – cannot be construed as sense, demonstrating the interesting properties of sense.

non sequitur – not quite nonsense, but does not follow from the premises

 

Oo

odalisque

ordinal

 

Pp

paradox

pattern

pierrot

 

Qq

quantum – a property of physics discovered/invented in the course of understanding light. This is related to the concepts of discrete and continuous.
A particle is discrete. A wave is continuous. See Heisenberg.

Queequeg

quotidian – everyday

 

Rr

recursion

 

Ss

surreptitious

Shakespeare, William

Shannon, Claude

 

Tt

Tempo – a musical term, related to pace. A fast tempo communicates energy, excitement.

 

Uu

unicode – a clever coding scheme to provide extensible table space for machine fonts. If not the common language it is a transport mechanism for human languages which maps symbols to table space.

 

Vv

Vesuvius – A testament to how some humans will live in the shadow of a volcano.
Is this that snapshot of ordinary life, that we will persist to the last, doing what we have always done, despite the strong evidence that things are afoot, that there is a major rearrangement going on outside the front door.

 

Ww

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Woo – Common as “smith” or “jones”.

 

Xx

xenophobia – fear of the other from a caution about strangers to a full-fledged bias about others being dangerous and threatening based solely on their identity rather than their actions. Mob-rule is often xenophobic; it is the humanly easier to judge a book by its cover than read it and, this is the default response which changes once strangers become acquaintances and fear is quelled by compacts and accommodations.

 

Yy

yeh yeh – grandfather on the father’s side. With a bit of a yawn it could mean like “OK already” Yeah-yeah, a teenager’s bored reply to a nag. This will happen. It is inevitable like apples falling from trees.

Yin and Yang – a meta concept which embraces each change/movement as a factor of opposing forces. Forces which are a range of values which encompass opposites as the polar features; the list is endless: positive/negative, foreground/background, meaning/context, white/black..

To see life as a struggle to survive, embraces the fundamental insight of YinYang. Living things are by definition, survivors. Competition for resources, for power, for sex, for glory and other forms of aspiration and need are, or have been the fundamental issues of form and function which our culture has been embroiled in and has culminated in the current climate of despond. But the powers of destruction and insanity are called upon by other world views as a necessary swing of a pendulum. One consequence of such a world view is the acceptance of evil among human beings that can only be held in check but never eliminated. And to celebrate destruction as a necessary aspect of creation. There is no doubt a mystic aspect which is either attractive or repulsive to the world view of Yin-Yang. Is it fatalistic or merely realistic? In the sciences: evolution theory and Yin-Yang may be capturing the same insight about living things: competition is how success is determined. This is how it has worked out ever since the big-bang.

 

Zz

zen – a way of being in the world which reveres sentience.