Language & Grammar discussion

If this is true--and I have no doubt--

In short, the Romans conquered most of their known world as much as with the deeply institutionalized pen as with the sword, shield, and catapult.

--no wonder Benjamkn Franklin was concerned. The English language had had no dictionary until 1755 and the American English language had no dictionary until 1806. In the Modern Period, a dictionary ks a marker of cuktiral literacy.

I recently read Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson's Dictionary by Henry Hitchings

Quote:

[T]he fact remains: the overwhelming majority of ordinary Romans could not read or write, and thus had no real wayof influencing those in power.

For just a moment, I thought you do not need to read and write to protest. But the protest itself requires literacy enough to create agenda, website, ad space, placards, campaign slogans, and more.

During Diocletian's reign the Christians' message spread. Letters were written, gospels were written, documentation recorded. The written and personal messages had spread so wodely that there was no more stopping the Christians. After Diocletian died and Constatine became emperor, public funding for pagan temples decreased and public funding for Christian churches increased. Constatine became a baptized Christian later in life.

Reading Chapter 4
Spacing matters.
When people tell me that they "don't read so well," I suggest they read the black on the white and that they read between the periods. With these two simple suggestions--which do not originate with me--I hope to help people focus on what is on the text and to read in complete thoughts. Sometimes people show me how they cannot read well--starting and stopping thoughts any which way. Then sometimes they show me how well theu are reading now, reading the each word and each sentence-thought separately. Sometimes they even tell me that yea, readingnis a better way to go to sleep than taking a pill that would cause other problems. Easy success.

I grew up Catholic, I live in South Texas (many Catholics here), taught at Catholic high school, brought my sin up in Catholic Church so he could have clear message of salvation, one I was familiar with and could communicate. So I have a good grasp of the Inquisition.

Last year I read The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.

My Review
This year I have read two nonfiction books about medieval cities and one historical novel about a French medieval cathedral. Now that I have read In The Name of the Rose, I have read a historical novel about the Italian Inquisition. With this reading background just from this year, I would have enough grasp of of concepts to write a historical novel.

Add to this my own Catholic family, my western Civilization-driven education, and my teaching at a Catholic high school, my attending and teaching university in Kingsville, Texas that helps me to recognize while reading in the Name of The Rose the religious orders, the names of the historical personages, the techniques of Inquisition.

If I were still a practicing Catholic, I would have taken this opportunity to move past familiarity with historical personages and start matching names and philosophies.

I will reread either next year or the following year, no later to make opportunity

to reread bits of worldly wisdom embedded in the novel.

to read book on Benedictines.

to reread The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt who tells the story and importance of the following book.

to read On the Nature of the Universe by Lucretius , another text hidden in a monastic library. The title says much of it's truth and ours.

to reread Poetics by Aristotle. I previously read with some Goodreads friends at Catching Up on the Classics. I will review our notes and reread. It will not be a full re-study.

While I was somewhat bored when listening to audiobook published by Naxos and reading this book edition above, the fact that the reading book provides this much impetus to read further, I can only rate the book 5 stars. I see no other option.

Not only Wycliff translated the bible into English. A list of others did too and died for it. As English major long ago when M. H. Abrams was the editor of the Norton English anthologies. In the 6th or 7th edition is a sampling of the various early English Bible translations.

William Caxton was named in the Norton. Caxton printed books that were intended to be looked at, read by, and shown off by wealthy people.

Reading Chapter 5: Punch and Counterpunch
Always good to read and see something about the technology that brought social changes. Never before much thought of a H punch having been created from the inside our or of how letters were sized.

So with spacing, metallurgy, printing, and educational developments, easy quiet reading became possible which then drove the desire for reading materials, whether books, papal bulls, indulgence certificates, lecture notices.

. . . . I have more to say, particularly about the mercjant class ans national governments helped create economic zones and print culture.

Cynda wrote: "Maybe. Maybe not. Part of nation building was developing a basic literacy, and that basic literacy was pretty basic. Example: The newspapers for the masses were image-dependent. Consider propaganda..."

I think this is a very powerful review!!! I really appreciate it. When we read that boys were worth an education and girls were not worth much...we really cannot sit around as judges to the least of these.

I have started reading chapter 3. I got a little bogged down in chapter 2 but decided to push on. Chapter 3 is interesting. The slaves were the literate ones! They had come from Greece. Now it just shows that "the pen is (not always) mightier than the sword." I kinda think his repeating this is form of propaganda. An army is part of the technology as was the pen, as was a ship.

But on the whole it is interesting the evolution of writing and literacy.

I really loved it that the Roman elite liked to be read to. I have people that believe that audio books are not read reading compared to reading a book. I think this is like a musician telling you that you can't enjoy music if you don't play the song on an instrument.

I digress.

But I think the fall of Roman was because the whole empire was built on a ponzi scheme of plunder. But also i think the weather and food to feed an army was a bigger deal! Can't eat words! Lol

The pen is mightier than the sword

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_p...

Earliest sources

Assyrian sage Ahiqar, who reputedly lived during the early 7th century BCE, coined the first known version of this phrase. One copy of the Teachings of Ahiqar, dating to about 500 BCE, states, "The word is mightier than the sword."

According to the website Trivia Library, the book The People's Almanac lists several supposed predecessors to Bulwer's phrasing. Their first example comes from the Greek playwright Euripides, who died c. 406 BCE. He is supposed to have written: "The tongue is mightier than the blade."

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Remember that some Roman's would value a slave if he was good at rhetoric.

I guess this is true if you can get your enemy to give up his arms (and become your slave, i.e. the Greeks).

"while the comitia centuriata was theoretically open to all citizens, the lowest classes found themselves disenfranchised in all but the closest votes in this body."

I reminds me of The House of the Seven Gables, where the Judge was going to be tapped for a political position. All of our leaders are tapped at a higher level than the lowest class. Even when someone that seems to be from the lowest class he is really just a puppet for the man with the money that paid to put him there.

"And so it goes."

"It bears repeating that in the ancient world, the civil and the military were inextricably intertwined." chapter 3

I just finished reading Infinite Jest

Now to compare this quote above to what is hinted at in Infinite Jest I would replace military with pharmaceutical. I think about this with the opium wars...and what the East India Company did to India.

I am really glad this book is giving me a birds-eye view of world history! I have enjoyed thinking about it on so many levels.

"Alas, the literacy skills of urban citizenry were far higher than in the far reaches of Italy, let alone in transalpine Rome, with grave consequences for the rapidly expanding Republic." Chapter 3

This is the same for the propaganda of any civilisation. Propaganda is spread by word of mouth..and through the group ...and also the news papers you choose to read. You go out to the country and they don't have the same social culture that is in an urban environment. And for the urban environment to rule the countries politics is very unfair. Creates divide and animosity. Because usually it is where the urban areas are is where the political power is.

"One of the most sacred of the Republic’s unwritten rules forbade military weapons within the confines of the city. Rome’s founders understood the centrality of this prohibition for maintaining order, and its flouting in the second century BC contributed greatly to the Republic’s downward spiral, a fact with no small relevance to today’s Second Amendment controversy."

Wish he would have given a reference for this statement.

"The ambitious Roman politician spent much of his working career conducting ambitus—literally, walking around the Forum, slapping backs and pressing the flesh."

Sounds like Washington DC and the lobbiest.

Yes indeed.

"The Republic’s delicate system of checks and balances operated, as in all democratic societies based on the rule of law, on the Tinkerbell Principle: it functioned only so long as its participants believed in it."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinke...

The Tinkerbell effect is an American English expression describing the phenomenon of thinking something exists only because people believe in it. The effect is named after Tinker Bell, the fairy in the play Peter Pan, who is revived from near death by the belief of the audience.

Another form is called the Reverse Tinkerbell effect, a term coined by David Post in 2003. It stipulates that the more you believe in something the more likely it is to vanish. For example, as more people believe that driving is safe, more people will drive carelessly, in turn making driving less safe.

Wow!!!

This is probably what Ben Franklin was talking about!!

"As late as 264 BC, the Roman Republic extended no farther than the central and southern Italian peninsula. The transition from a relatively small and easily governed Roman city-state into a geographical monstrosity that covered most of western Europe, combined with the fact that anyone could show up in the Forum and vote, meant that no one knew for certain how
many of the Republic’s new far-flung citizens, nearly all illiterate and unfamiliar with the traditional rules of the game, would trek to Rome for a given assembly. This uncertainty effectively shifted control to the one group that had the literacy skills and the mobility to communicate over such vast distances: the legions."

Which was more important the literacy or the rules of the game? I believe it is the rules of the game. I believe that this is why for propaganda to be effective the public must be educated (as in a school). (School so named as in a school of fish so that everyone is going in the same direction or tradition.)

..."Gracchus’s supporters rallied behind his cause and won the day; over the next four years, the land commission he organized broke up many large estates. In 123 BC the slain leader’s younger brother, Gaius Gracchus, was elected tribune; he ran again the next year and, unlike his brother, survived long enough to serve his second term. Gaius Gracchus took as his cause the extension of citizenship to Rome’s allies on the Italian peninsula. In 121 BC a relatively minor conflict in the Campus Martius caused his supporters to flee south to the Aventine Hill in fear of a repeat of the events of a decade before. They had every right to be afraid; the patrician consul Optimus (literally, “the best,” a name adopted by many patricians) led his forces up the hill and slaughtered thousands; Gaius Gracchus escaped but was quickly cornered and committed suicide. Ominously for the fate of the Republic, Optimus had called in foreign troops, including specially trained Cretan archers. Optimus likely knew that Gaius had been planning to extend citizenship, and this knowledge allowed Optimus to ensnare Gaius’s panicky plebeian supporters in the Forum."

Hmmm so they had no weapons in the city and this was how they kept order? Hmmm and they couldn't even defend their city from a foreign power. Hmm maybe this is why we have a Second Amendment.

"By this point, Rome was ruled, no longer by laws, but rather by force of arms, particularly at public meetings. By the first century after Christ, many politicians, most famously Publius Clodius Pulcher, specialized in legislation effected by thugs and murderers. Wealthy Romans often counted gladiators among their armies of slaves, for whom training schools were set up, and who “performed” in both private and public contests. The gladiators proved useful to ambitious politicians, whose retinues included large numbers of these skilled killers."

Just to chime in on the power of thinking/power of words. . . . In Buddhism there is this saying: What you resist, persists.

So if let's say Benjamin Franklin had really really feared that monarchy would take over, that the republic would cease to exist, then his friends might warn him to stop resisting monarchy and just start working on republicanism because, Ben, what you resist, persists!

"after about 100 BC, the only institution possessed of the literacy skills and a communications network adequate to span the now vast Republic, and after that the Empire, was the Roman army."

What is an army but a school?

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copti...

"In the words of historian Keith Hopkins, Literacy was not simply a passive technical skill; it was itself a cultural creation and a creator of culture. After all, the Roman Empire was conquered by the religious coherence of Christians a century before the western empire was conquered by invading barbarians."

What is a cult? A cult is something you can see but those that are in the cult can't. Cult(ure).

No. Army officers were among the few who could write. They may have had literacy classes along with their military training, but no, an army is not a school.

I am going to catch some sleep and then start my day. I will be back.

Cynda wrote: "Just to chime in on the power of thinking/power of words. . . . In Buddhism there is this saying: What you resist, persists.

So if let's say Benjamin Franklin had really really feared that monarch..."

I guess it is in the way you read it. There are more governments besides monarchy. I read it that a republic is not a sure thing. That the enemy is "security".

And this because what he says in Poor Richard's Almanack

Cynda wrote: "No. Army officers were among the few who could write. They may have had literacy classes along with their military training, but no, an army is not a school."

Well how is school like an army?
1. They tell you when to get up.
2. They dictate what you will do.
3. There are drills
4. You don't get to decided what you want to do in school (and because of homework after school)
5 School is a way of life. It is a culture just like the army.

Stand Up And Cheer has Shirley Temple doing a routine in a class room with a uniform on singing about how they are just like the Roman army.

If you study Montessori school you will find that they helped create Hitler's army.

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

Got it. A rhetorical question. Sorry. Thought you were asking.

I will start commenting again tonight.

Cool.

Cynda wrote: "Got it. A rhetorical question. Sorry. Thought you were asking.

I will start commenting again tonight."

I don't really think her question was rhetorical. I just think his answer was loaded. I imagine Ben was a wise guy sometimes.

Yes Benjamin Franklin was a wise guy, and yes that shows in Poor Richard's Almanck.

Cynda wrote: "Yes Benjamin Franklin was a wise guy, and yes that shows in Poor Richard's Almanck."

I am going back and making notes and came across this in chapter 3:
"We can now give voice to Benjamin Franklin’s famous worry that the new American republic might suffer the same fate as the Roman one. While historians have variously blamed the fall of the Roman Republic on the formation of the First Triumvirate of Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus in 60 BC; Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BC; his assassination in 44 BC; or the accession as emperor of his grand-nephew (and adopted son) Augustus in 27 BC, the roots of the Republic’s demise, in fact, lay more than two centuries before those occurrences. No one captured its essence better than Montesquieu, who in 1753 intuited that Rome had simply gotten too large to be governed effectively: “The unbounded extent of the Roman Empire proved the ruin of the Republic.”38 More recently, historians have confirmed and built upon Montesquieu’s incisive thesis."

"Before exploring this new history of the Republic’s collapse, it helps to recap one of the key lessons of Chapter 1: the relationship among group size, political structure, and literacy. Recall “Dunbar’s number,” the maximum number of human beings who can maintain a stable governing relationship through direct contact, generally felt to be approximately 150. When everyone in a small group has direct face-to-face access to every other member, its structure tends to be relatively democratic, as is seen in most hunter-gatherer tribes, small farming settlements, and pirate ships. Literacy, especially when limited to a small elite, allows command-and-control down through multiple levels of authority, and thus over exponentially larger numbers of subjects, and so encourages despotism."

"As populations grow beyond Dunbar’s number, face-to-face contact no longer suffices to maintain political control. At this point, writing supplies the best mechanism for communicating among large numbers of people, and power naturally accrues to the literate. Consequently, societies with high rates of literacy, such as Athens, tend to have more smoothly running republics than those with low rates, such as the late Roman one. Distance also enters into the political calculation. "

I wonder how this will change? How important will literacy be over expert in technology?

Because in this chapter reading and writing seem to be the technology. In chapter 4 it becomes what people write on that is the new technology.

I know that i am reading this pretty slow. I didn't get any world history in school (I graduated early). So I maybe taking this rather slow but I am learning a lot!! Glad that i decided to start a reading journal.

Do you take notes? Are they hand written?

I used to high light. Maybe add something in kindle as a note.

This time I am highlighting. Then going back and making a mind map in a cheap composition notebook. After that i write it in a journal.

I think it is helping me a lot to get a mental picture.

I am starting chapter 5. Really looking forward to this as I studied some about fonts when reading The Hound of the Baskervilles.

I think this book came up for sale while I was reading that book and inspired my purchase.

Cosmic, I have something of a rhetorical background and a historical background. I taught basic writers for about 5 years, wrote a basic writing booklet for my writing students and published some historical articles. What particularly interests me here is how easily Bernstein blends the politics, business, and psychology of language. Powerful stuff. No wonder we are both reading so slow.

Reading Chapter 6.

Newspapers look cheap with their less expensive paper and lack of covers. Yet they are important records. What is not spoken of here is that there are newspapers considered to be "newspapers of record."

https://pressbooks.pub/webliteracy/ch...

These papers are fallible as the journalists that file the articles. Yet when a newspaper reader consults various papers, a larger picture develops. I remember a time--just a very few years ago--5?--when one could go to the local libraries to read either a single newspaper or a variety of newspapers.

Cynda Reads Mighty Slow these days wrote: "Reading Chapter 6.

Newspapers look cheap with their less expensive paper and lack of covers. Yet they are important records. What is not spoken of here is that there are newspapers considered to b..."

Do they not have a microfish record of them?

When we lived in Philadelphia we could check out 16 mm full length movies. This was 1989. The stopped this about 6 months later. But it was amazing while it lasted. We had a 16 mm projector.

I haven't been to a library in years.

Yes at least libraries had microfish records. Reading a microfish is nit the same as spreading out a newspaper, reading and comparing stories on a recebt situation. . . . .No more daily newspapers. Some of the eservices of the library--such as Hoopla--has some magazines and maybe newspapers. But not a half a dozen or more daily.papers are easily and readily available.

"In Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (better-known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Claude Frollo, the church’s archdeacon, gazes alternately at the massive cathedral and the book on his desk and intones sadly, “Alas! The one will kill the other!”1 Hugo set the novel in 1482, barely a generation after the Gutenberg revolution, and he could not have been clearer: mass-produced books would undermine and ultimately destroy the Roman Catholic Church—the most powerful religious and political force in Europe. "

I am really glad that he started this chapter with this quote! I read The Hunchback of Notre-Dame the year that it had a fire. I made it a study. Reading The Canterbury Tales.

This quote and the context adds a lot to my understanding of the book. Makes me want to revisit

I appreciate the history of American colonies through the view of how news was gathered, what newspapers were publishing, what pamphlets were being published.

Sure I knew of Benjamin Franklin had been an apprenticed at a Boston newspaper and then ran away to begin another newspaper in Philadelphia where he would gain social savvy and clout.

At the same time, newspapers were starting up throughout the northern colonies-:the Franklin brothers moving as need and want required.

Memory is the canon or principle/aspect of rhetoric I am weakest in. So I am I floored by the capabilities of William "Memory" Woodfall. Pre-literate people have to hold information in their memories with specific types of information assigned to specific people within a group--a type of specialization.

I so so want to reread the Canterbury Tales. It will have to be a study for a year. I have some other books on my physical bookshelves that will help me enjoy the tales more. One sich:Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England by Liza Picard. If only reading time could expand. . . .

How to keep costs down while sharing ideas and making arguments.

rinted books and printed newspapers could get very expensive for even wealthier people. So to forward and circulate information and argument, letters were written, letters intended to be shared among friends, colleagues, and people of influence.

Here mention is made of William Wilberforce who wrote boxes of letters, one particularly famous A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Addressed to the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of Yorkshire..

Those who had larger ideas or ideas they wanted to share with a larger reading population, publishing pamphlets would be an options. With fewer pages than a few-sized book and with a softer cover, the costs of publication could be lowered.

Thomas Paine chose this option when he wrote Common Sense. He was living in England when he published this pamphlet for the American colonists. Now that does sound treasonous!

I read The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage. It was worth reading to learn about technologies and how they limited and enhanced our long-distance communications. Tom Standage--as I remember it--makes an argument that the telegraph was the first good option for long distance communication.

Scandal sure does sell. Kinda funny yet how perfect that the professional scandal monger provided the endowment that help establish a professional school of journalism and a professional journalism prize. Kinda perfect because the prize goes.to journalists who effectively draw attention to situations that need to be addressed.

In addition to the scandal mongering and the yellow journalism, I wish some time might have been spent on exposé writing, although that may be what Pulitizer was doing to some degree. . . . .In particular I am thinking of Nellie Bly whose articles sometimes were gathered and became books, such as Ten Days in a Mad-House written for Pultizer's New York World.

I would have liked to have seen examples of women-owned, women-operated publishing endeavors--if there were such women.

https://oxfordre.com/communication/di...

I will come back to talk about the Nazis tomorrow.

Cynda Reads Mighty Slow these days wrote: "I so so want to reread the Canterbury Tales. It will have to be a study for a year. I have some other books on my physical bookshelves that will help me enjoy the tales more. One "


If you have a booklist for this study I would be interested.

I am also interested in The Divine Comedy

I know that Chaucer was influenced to write in English because Dante Alighieri wrotebin the people's Italian.

Cosmic, I could definitely use help in reading my Chaucer study. I already have set my reading plans for 2024. For me to do justice to Chaucer, I will have to push back study to 2025.

On my list:
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury by Paul Strohm
Chaucer's People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England by Liza Picard
Perhaps The Life & Times of Chaucer by John Gardner
Everyman and Other Miracle and Morality Plays by Unknown



I have read and enjoyed Walking to Canterbury: A Modern Journey Through Chaucer's Medieval England by Jerry Ellis

We can read The Divine Comedy also in 2025.

I want to read all three parts.

In a current buddy read at our nonfiction group, we are reading Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner. The pernnial question is, "How did it happen?" Well, here is one piece of the puzzle: https://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases...

Hitler used newspapers for his Nazi propaganda. Goebbles used radio.

The next great communications advance, radio, proved even easier to dominate: because the transmitters were so expensive, it was almost exclusively a one-way medium. That ease of control, along with radio's emotive power, further contributes to the rise of totalitarianism in the early twentieth century, leaving repression, suffering, and mounds of corpses.

How a Gutenberg printing press works

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DLctAw4...

Steam Powered Antique Letterpress Printer
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vXPkDHB...

Steam powered printing press #2
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcGWYKg...


History of Early Printing Presses | The Henry Ford's Innovation Nation
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_6Pn4h6...

Linotype - A visual Demonstration
https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_cont...

International Printing Museum Tour: The Linotype & the Typesetting Race
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5n5JQrN...


International Printing Museum
https://m.youtube.com/@InternationalP...