[xkcd. “Schwa.” March 14, 2024.]
A related post
My proof that I never knew phonics
Saturday, March 16, 2024
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Michael Leddy“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”
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Nancy, October 19, 1950.
“Knock, knock, who’s there?”
Michael Leddy
Don’t look for premiums or
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the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.
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Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
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Simone Weil, in a letter
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Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
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Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
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Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
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comments: 2
Oddly, in UK English well over half of those vowels would not be schewa! But we do use it a great deal, perhaps in slightly different circumstances. For example, one of the valleys near here, Borrowdale, is pronounced by older locals with only the first o sounding, and both the second o and the a flattened into schewas.
I just — literally, just before I came in the door — heard an episode of A Way with Words that addressed dissimilation. Wikipedia: “a phenomenon whereby similar consonants or vowels in a word become less similar.” That seems to be what’s going on with “Borrowdale.”
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