Pour these wordjams over your consciousness and see whether anything is altered.

It's about time for another wordjam.
You may or may not go to church. If you are Catholic, the correct rendering of that sentence is, "You must go to Mass." If not, the correct recasting is, "You should enroll in RCIA ASAP."
But we're going to be easy on you and just wordjam for now. You are in your church. There may be an altar. If someone has Dissociative Identity Disorder, there may also be some alters, and if someone has bought clothes that didn't fit, there may be alterations as well. But there is probably an altar.
Altar comes from the Latin altare, meaning a place for burning sacrificial offerings. Alter comes from Latin as well, from alter, meaning "other".
It's hard to learn words by sight without poring over them, but pouring over them won't help, because they'll just get soggy from whatever you're pouring. Pore is a noun and verb. Pore (n.) means a tiny opening or orifice, and one obvious example is where you sweat. That makes a nice memory trick: To pore over something is to look steadily at it or read it carefully. You could sweat over your studies if you really pore over them.
To pour something is to cause it to flow down, as the sky pours rain, but don't get confused by the idea of sweat pouring out of your brow during Dead Week. Imagine the U in pour as the raincatcher at the end of the roof drain line. It spills over the top and pours rain to the ground.
If this is taxing your consciousness, don't go unconscious, but don't be excessively conscientious about it either; it's a matter of grammar, not of conscience.
Conscious, conscientious and conscience are pronounced similarly and spelled similarly and come from the same place. It's tricky, but worthwhile, to remember the difference.
Conscious means aware, having sensory impressions, thinking, noticing and perceiving things. The opposite is unconscious. Consciousness is the opposite of unconsciousness.
Conscience is the moral sensibility, the sense of right and wrong, that which hurts after one does wrong; it is what psychopaths lack and the rest of us struggle with all day and night.
Conscientiousness is the quality of paying a great attention to detail, to every issue, and worrying endlessly about what is right. Someone with too little conscientiousness is a burden on others, annoying, careless, and mean, while someone with too much conscientiousness is slow to get things done, obsessive, fretful, as likely as not to annoy people with unnecessary apologies and efforts to smooth what isn't ruffled -- too much worry. The key is to develop the right amount of conscientiousness.
Some draftees are conscientious objectors, whose consciences will not allow them to kill. A draftee who tries to get out of combat as a conscious objector will make little headway.
Whether or not this serves as a wether for you, it won't help you predict the weather.
Whether is from Old English hwether and means either, in either case, and is used to introduce a clause about unknown facts: "She is a good singer, whether because she practices or because she inherited it." "Whether it rains or not I'm going now." "Go find out whether the show is on." "I wasn't sure whether he was here." "I don't care whether he's here or not, I'm going."
Weather is from the Old English weder and means the meteorological conditions anywhere or everywhere, to wait out a rough period, to wear down as by wind, rain, sun and sleet, and a kind of slope.
Wether is from weder, also Old English, and means what it meant many a century ago: a gelded male sheep. Flocks of sheep are often guided by bellwethers, wethers with bells on their collars.

Oh, the Irony of It All.

Sarcasm is America's first language.
Sitcom writers have studied sarcasm and irony so closely that if you don't understand every detail of the life experiences of fictional characters, you can't keep track of what the live studio audience is laughing about.
Phoebe says, "Don't get all testosteroney", and Chandler looks perplexed and a little didactic as he often does, and says, "The real San Francisco treat, by the way." What does that mean? It's not just a play on words. To get it requires sharing the writers' ideas of the intended main viewership's attitudes toward everything they are expected to associate with testosterone, San Francisco, 1970's TV commercials for convenience foods, convenience foods themselves, spacey semi-alternative people such as we are to think Phoebe represents, the attempt to invent words, and fairly straight but perfectly open-minded people such as Chandler is supposed to represent, and possibly other culture mileposts. And most viewers do. But it depends on sarcasm. Chandler is saying, "It would be ridiculous to use the word testosteroney, it would be ridiculous to be very serious and professorial about TV commercials or convenience foods, especially from our childhoods, and it would be ridiculous to try to understand Phoebe."
All sarcasm and irony can express are infinite grades of , "it would be ridiculous...." In the wash of absurdity we choke under daily, that is an indispensable statement.
But it states the problem. We know there is a problem with absurdity. We seek solutions, as people with a problem always do.
Sarcasm can never offer a solution.
So don't abandon irony.
But never depend on it. Every time someone says, "It would be ridiculous," ask what would be true. Help the sarcasts (real word) finish their sentences.
Until next time, think clearly.

Why you need a foreign language or twelve

Is it going to be English? Not if the English-speaking countries don't start remembering what words mean long enough to communicate. Will it be Spanish? Maybe. Arabic? Could be. Mandarin Chinese? Perhaps, but Westerners would have a hard time learning it. Or will some dark horse run out and take the blue ribbon? Everyone wants to know what the last language alive will be.
But why should we let any of them die? Four hundred languages lived side-by-side in the Americas five hundred years ago. A thousand years ago, Europe and Western Asia were equally polyglot. Africa, too, has many tongues, each unique, irreplaceable. Eastern Asia and the Pacific have their hundreds and the Southern Sea has its own indigenous languages as well. Listen to one next time you watch a travel show. Listen beyond the voice-over, to the beat, the thrums and trills of another way of making sense, and tell me if you're hooked. I dance to language. I slip it through my fingers like a harp string when I go to sleep and feel it vibrate against my hand like a drum skin when I wake. Never throw away a language. If you don't have room for the whole thing, cut a piece and stitch it into a quilt with your old one; use it as a patch. Take at least a hundred words. Take a way of ordering words, it doesn't take up any room. Learn the African language Shona or Xosa, Luganda or that big crazy-quilt, Swahili. Learn the European tongues: Magyar, Euskari, Italian, Finnish, Polish, Irish, Welsh, Catalan. Pick up something from Asia: Why not Vietnamese or Thai, Hmong or Tibetan or any bit of the patchwork that is India. How about some Hindi? Keep a bit of real early America alive in your head -- study Hopi, Apache, Inuit, Cherokee, which has an alphabet of its own, or Creek. Maybe you'll fall in love with something else: Maori or Tagalog, Incan or Samoan or Hawaiian....There are three thousand languages officially living, but they die for lack of a home.
Learning new ways of doing things and remembering words are two of the ways neuroscientists say you can prevent Alzheimer's before it starts, and slow it or even reverse it once it sets in. Learning a language fills both those needs.
Additionally, a language is a way of perceiving the world. In French, there are two ways of saying, "I love you." One means something like "I like you." The other means "I adore you." Neither would mean the same thing with the formal/plural "you".
If you want to say you like someone and want it to be clear you aren't in love, you say, "I like you plenty." Spanish is similar. The meaning of liking and loving people thus has specific degrees and kinds, each with a name. In Spanish, animals' legs aren't legs. The parts of animals have animal words to describe them, unlike human appendages. In English, we accept animals as part of the family, with the same names and the same limbs; they are almost our relatives. But in Spanish, animals are little like us. One doesn't even use the same hand position to indicate the height of a human, of an animal and of an inanimate object. The language reflects, affects and maintains the unique cultural attitude to other creatures.
In Hmong, there are no plurals nor verb tenses. Context tells the hearer whether the speaker sees a house now, saw one at another time, expects to see one under other conditions, sees the house, rather than a house, or a few houses. In that language, to leave the context out is to leave the hearer out of the picture. When a language dies, a way of thinking dies, and with it, a whole world.
Pick one up today. Keep it alive. It just might do the same for your brain -- and your heart.

Wordjam II

I've heard it one time too many and can't listen another time without saying something.
Please don't confuse "flaunt" with "flout". To flaunt something is to show it off. If you flaunt my advice you are proud of it. If you flout it, I can't do anything for you.
It's easy. "Flaunt" puts a thing "on" and wears it proudly. "Flout" throws it "out" in disdain, and ignores it.
I know languages change and grow. But they also change and die. If English dies, we have no replacement. Most Americans don't speak Spanish today. Business Spanish doesn't count. It can't translate Dante. It can only do business. Arabic is the tongue of a very different way of thinking. To learn it would challenge almost all of us. Mandarin, even more so. I would love to switch America to a Celtic language, but since it's this hard just to hold onto a scrap of memory of what English sounded like when words all meant different things, I have little hope of getting gum-snapping strangers across counters to want to learn the declensions of Gaelic nouns and their exceptions.
So we must cling to this life raft we have, battered as it may be, this raft of words tied together by straggling strands of grammar in this storm.
Strand One: Parts of speech are different. The noun (name) is a person, place or, broadly defined, thing. I will tell you all the words I know. Here the nouns are bold.
The verb (word) tells of a deed or action. Don't go out in the street where the cars speed and you can't see where they come from.
The adjective (attributive) describes. Long hours and monotonous work are terrible for one's mental state.
The adverb (added word) describes a verb or adjective. it's a kind of second-generation adjective. It doesn't have to end in -ly and not every word ending in -ly is one. Finally, we meet again.
The article (thing) is what tells people which one you mean. That man said to the cashier that he wanted a bag for these socks.
The particle (little bit) fills in where words no longer change forms. the verb to do has become an interrogative particle and an auxiliary (helping) negative particle. Do you know what an interrogative particle is? It's just a little word that helps make a question. Does that help? Don't hesitate to say something if you still don't understand. Do is also an emphatic particle. You may not think you know what emphatic means, but I think you do.
Will, which really means "want", has become our future particle. Would is the past tense of will. Verbs have tenses. That means we hold them in different positions, toward the past, present, future and beyond. Nouns go in cases. Shall is the real future particle but we hardly ever use it anymore because it preserved a distinction between what we intended and what we just expected, and that was depressing. Should is the past tense of shall. Pull it back into the present and it becomes shall again.
Shall we discuss grammar further someday?
I think I would like that.