reading

The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

Niall O'Donnell 8 Comments

I mentioned this effect a while back, when writing about our tendency to find patterns and meaning in randomness. The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is when we learn some new information, often a new word, and seem to see it everywhere afterwards. I was thinking about this recently when I wrote about words I don’t know. I knew that I’d start to see some of the words I was reading for the first time, and sure enough, a few weeks ago, I came across the word ithyphallic while reading Foucault’s Pendelum. Given the specificy of its meaning, I hadn’t expected to see it often, though it did make sense in the context of the book.

The term, Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, is a somewhat unusual one.

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Space: The Final Frontier

Niall O'Donnell 9 Comments

Space may produce new worlds; whereof so rife,

There went a fame in Heaven that he ere long,

Intended to create, and therein plant,

A generation, whom his choice regard,

Should favor equal to the sons of Heaven:

John Milton, Paradise Lost

 

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I suppose, after talking about Earth and earth yesterday, there’s a certain logic to today having a look at the word space. Like earth, it’s got two very different levels of meaning, which are still quite similar.

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Curating Content for Digital Influencers: the New Online Jargon

Niall O'Donnell 19 Comments

What do you do?

That used to be an easy question: a simple icebreaker when meeting new people. Now though, it’s more complicated.

First of all, since the economic crisis, people are understandably wary about asking the question, as we’re more aware of the fact that the answer might be nothing.

Second, for a lot of people who do have something that they do, it can be a hard to specify exactly what it is.

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How to Use Commas

Niall O'Donnell 40 Comments

This is something lots of people wonder. This is something I wonder sometimes, because commas can be quite complicated, and the rules about using them very specific. So if you’re not too concerned about how to use them, let me just say this:

If you use them in writing where you’d pause when speaking, you’ll probably be fine. In a very basic way, they provide a pause for a reader, just as we give ourselves regular pauses when we speak.

But if you want to know a little more, read on…

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Just How Bad is Donald Trump’s English? (Putting him to the Test)

Niall O'Donnell 34 Comments

 

It’s easy to say that Donald Trump has poor English. It’s easy to say that the level of English that he uses, in terms accuracy and tone, is far below the minimum expected of any public speaker. And of course the reason it’s so easy to say these things is that Donald Trump actually has really bad English. So inspired by a colleague’s idea, I’m going to test him, to see exactly what level of English he has. Specifically, I’m going to assess Trump’s spoken English using the assessment criteria of the spoken section of the IELTS exam.

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The Versatile Blogger Award

Niall O'Donnell 12 Comments

Thank you Lise for nominating me for the Versatile Blogger Award! You should head to her blog Lushtivity to read her great variety of posts on books, beauty, games, and lifestyle. With all those different topics, she’s a worth winner of this award! I’m not sure how versatile I am, except perhaps in the sense that I might sometimes write about different words, or different grammar points.

Regardless, here I am, so, per the rules of the award, I’ll endeavour to think of seven interesting facts about myself:

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Holding out for a Hero

Niall O'Donnell 11 Comments

When writing about James Joyce last month, I got to thinking about the word hero. Two things made me think about it: the fact that an early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was known as Stephen Hero, and how often I referred to Leopold Bloom as the hero of the novel Ulysses.

On the surface, it seems like a fairly straightforward word. You can think of its meaning pretty easily, I’m sure: someone brave, with exceptional abilities. Someone we can look up to. And this has always been the meaning of the word. It comes from the Greek ἥρως (hērōs), meaning protector or defender, and was often specifically used in Ancient Greek myths to refer to heroes of divine ancestry such as Heracles. So, not so different from how we use it today. Except, as I alluded to in the first paragraph, when we use it as a literary term.

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