Category: Random Tidbits

Random Musings

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The Difference Between Jealousy and Envy

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This piece of knowledge I have to initially tribute to my high school, freshman year, English teacher, Dr. Lane. I don’t know why I chose to remember this, as she only went off on this tangent for what seemed about a minute or two before continuing with the lecture. Maybe it chose to be remembered by me, sticking out like an intentional detour that a tour guide might take to promote the local vendors.

The gist of her commentary was that the vast majority of people inappropriately use the term jealous when they really mean envious. Moreover, she lamented, because so many people (students and professors alike) were misusing the term jealousy, it was becoming synonymous with the term envy.

That was news to me at the time. I had thought they were cousins all along…

She went on to explain that envy means to covet something owned by another, whereas jealousy was more akin to the fear of losing someone’s loyalty and/or resentment of a rival, before returning to the topic at hand… something about parts of speech or Les Miserables, I can’t recall. My brain was still downloading content, I guess.

Sure enough, while working on Affect Engineering and pouring over hundreds of entries in psychology dictionaries I discovered that she was right, but that’s not really the point I want to make here.

If I could be mistaken about one interpretation of one word, then what other words might I be using incorrectly? What other tools of the trade might I be bending, warping, or breaking through their incorrect usage? Though no language is indestructible, some, it would seem, are clearly hardier than others.

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Living in the Shadow of Creativity

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Creativity has long been the buzzword of choice for entrepreneurs, inventors, and visionary types looking to market themselves. It has become nearly synonymous with genius. There appears to be no shortage of creativity anywhere; a steady stream of articles on improving one’s creativity can be found in just about every nook, corner, and cranny imaginable. For instance, a Google search on improving + creativity will churn up some 85,000,000 results.

Yet, a search of creativity’s lesser-known twin sibling, improving + destructivity, will only yield about thirty-five thousand results.

I’m not talking about the garden variety nihilist here, but the selective kind of destructivity that permits someone to cut through the endless swath of backward metaphors, hyperboles, oxymorons, and figures of speech in our world to find out what truly matters, what doesn’t, and where the path of least resistance lies.

The sculptor does not look at a block of marble then start decorating it with ribbons and paint.

The whittler does not look at a block of wood and start gluing more stuff on it.

The destructive genius wields Ockham’s Razor as if it were… Ockham’s Razor.

Consider the following two sentences:

1) “Jimmy grew from 5′ 11” to 6′ 6” in three years.”

2) “Jimmy’s a skyscraper of a man who shot up like a rocket in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

One may have been written by a destructive genius while the other by a creative one.

One has substance and the other has flair.

One is all icing and the other is all cake.

One genius is living in the other’s shadow.

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The Bridge Is Still the Barrier

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Some words convey ideas of such magnitude that one can never forget the circumstances under which they were learned. For me, that word is ineffable.

I first came across it while reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby in high school; it was paired with an equally interesting word in the context of ineffable gaudiness. The latter I was already familiar with, i.e. something ostentatious, showy, or tastelessly ornamental and extravagant. But ineffable, that one was new, intriguing, and sent me sprinting for the dictionary.

The main entry for ineffable, an adjective, implies that something is incapable of being expressed in words, for instance, on account of being too great or extreme.

A word to describe the indescribable? My first reaction was horror… no self-respecting writer, poet, artist, etc. should even have that word in his or her vocabulary, let alone use it in a work of fiction meant for publication. We can explain everything!

However, recently I’ve asked myself, “What is language?” Not just English or Latin, but math too. Are they just a collection of symbols used to re-present physical objects in the world, like an emotion? Are they mere substitutes? “Yes,” the answer would appear. Language is but a tool at our disposal to help us organize the world. Though, if this is forgotten, then I would reason that one can easily become dominated by it just like any other tool that one is not masterful at using.

Two can never be one,
One can never be two.
The floodgates may open,
But if the dam holds true,
Then the bridge is still the barrier.

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Learning Curves and Tangents

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Ahh!  There’s nothing quite like the rush one gets from witnessing one’s website turn up on a Google search… except the realization that it’s a link to the first site one made upon installing WordPress to the wrong directory, not the one made after deleting and reinstalling it to the correct one. One’s initial ineptitude during the learning curve of creating a website would be on full display for the world to see.  That sounds pretty embarrassing doesn’t it?

It’s still early.  Maybe nobody noticed.