/lit/ - Literature

Oh forgot to mention this is from 1879.

Heres a link http://ingenweb.org/injennings/pages/newsarticles/brewersvillenewsgiant.html

>>21738108
That's actually really quaint and cool. Thanks for the link anon, fascinating stuff. I often wonder about how much of the reason that so many were illiterate back before the modern era is because being "literate" meant being able to read at what today would be "college" level.

>>21738108
This is extremely tiring to read. Thank god we drifted away from this needlessly flowery style of writing and towards more practical use of language.

I posted about this half jokingly the other day, not sure if the link will still work as the thread is dead
>>21724832

Last century's average to below average is our high to very high intelligence. Why are so few people writing about this? It's not something nebulous like different eras having different kinds of artistic genius. It's obvious and terrifying that some random newspaper article, like you say, is better written than a PhD thesis today.

I have been training myself more and more lately to see dysgenics as a fact of daily life. What about those theories that everybody is also uglier than people were a century ago? Doughier, flabbier, less distinct. You can factor fitness and nutrition into it too. Watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvKdYUCUca8
What other things like this are we NOT seeing? And what hidden effects of it are we not seeing? How much would it really take to lower the average IQ by 5-10 points through nutrition? Television? Internet? Dysgenics? Mass education and lack of rigor/discipline? Lack of high-powered cultural elites to "anchor" mid-level intellects and give motivation and structure to their cultivation?

>>21738372
I've long thought our entire education system is beyond bad and actually seems designed to make people stupid.

If we actually wanted to teach children in a way that produced logical intelligent adults we could. The Greeks basically perfected it with the Trivium thousands of years ago. You start with logic and philosophy and only when they understand how to think do you teach them facts to think about.

It seems quite obvious that there is a concerted effort to NOT teach people to be able to think. So we are left with just looking up at our forefathers never being able to reach the heights they did as a whole, only a fewer and fewer number of individuals.

>>21738362
bullshit this is more tiring to read. If you can't see how much more superior the flowery writing from the 19th and early 20th century is you're a fuckin pleb. There is no reason to read books which don't have a focus on artistry in their word choice. If they don't do that you may as well just be reading a glorified outline/summary of a plot not an actual artistic work. Which is exactly how it feels to me trying to read modern fiction (besides actual modern lit which understands this). What is the point of reading works that don't have artistry in their words? It's extremely boring reading a supposed work of art that actively tries to make sure it use absolutely nothing besides simple words and short concise sentences.

>>21738372
It's all true isn't it? The world is collapsing. The golem is out of control now. Every single fucking time I bring up the fact that people are reading DRAMATICALLY worse than they used to I get called crazy and they always say "people read more now than ever before with the internet, you're just being pretentious!". The world will begin to decline as more and more skills are lost and we completely lose the ability to maintain the literal water coming out of our taps and electricity coming out of our sockets.

and it's all because everyone stopped caring about books. fuck this cruel world.

>>21738453
It goes beyond just reading, read the first chapter of this (on Rome):
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44908/44908-h/44908-h.htm#p_1
This is happening to us now.

>>21738561
What a horrifyingly relevant passage.

I’ve been avoiding sharing this resource on this board because, admittedly, it’s one of the secrets behind my writing’s quality, but it’s so relevant to this discussion that it would be a terrible crime not to share it here. There are few things that irrevocably alter, let alone completely reshape my understanding of the world, but this short read and the exploration of Webster’s original reformed my entire fundamental understanding of language.

This basically explains everything:
http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary
https://www.websters1913.com/

You’re welcome.

>>21738612
thank you anon this is really useful and interesting. I will treasure your links

>>21738612
you would not believe how relevant to my interests these links are. thank you very much. I will share in return my favorite work of culture critique/criticism that goes very deep into the cultural neurosis of our times. "The Use and Abuse of Art" by Jacques Barzun (1974). If everyone supposed thinker of our times read this book before spewing their thoughts into our discourse then I'd like to imagine we would be living in a better world than we are today. He doesn't just discuss art but every aspect of culture even perfectly predicting the cult of Science/expert worship and how it would be used to ruin everything. Thanks again

>>21738612
I kind of figured this out on my own as a teen since I've always had a natural autistic interest in etymology: there is (virtually) no such thing as a true synonym: being able to identify the gradient of "hue" between words, as the first link suggests, is all the difference between truly understanding a word and merely knowing roughly when to employ it.
>>21738641
I'm fairly sure I actually got this book because of you. I haven't read it yet, but, assuming it was you, thanks for introducing me to Barzun.

>>21738651
I have been posting it on occasion because I'd love to have it become a bit of a meme on this board. Nice to see some people are picking it up.

I always find it to be hilarious when people say how stupid humans were centuries ago for believing in god, miracles, witchcraft etc. yet they spend hours a day watching mindnumbingly stupid shit on tiktok or jewtube while barly being able to think for themselves or creating anything worthwhile.

>>21738660
I recently found a new hatred for gen x because of this shit. I've been listening to a couple podcasts with gen-x hosts that purport to be woke and based or whatever, they talk about the illuminati and how they control us with media and all that. But they constantly make references to massive, hit movies from their generation...and nothing else. It's incredibly jarring to hear someone talk about how everything is part a media narrative by making it a metaphor about like Robocop or Star Wars. Like no wonder everyone you know is all braindead along with yourself. Your morals and etiquette are based on Hollywood movies. I didn't think I could dislike a generation more than boomers but gen-x really takes the cake for creating and furthering the movie/TV media obsessed culture we have today. And they cant even accept they did anything wrong.

>>21738852
Like, would it kill you to reference some literature for once ever? I'd even be happy with a 1984 mention at this point but no apparently they're the generation that first embraced the anti-book thinking of today with gusto.

>>21738108
Too many run-on sentences, I would dock a student if they wrote like that.

>>21738660
They criticize people of the past for having spirituality, but believe in transsexuals (the idea that a man can be spiritually a woman and become one), pop psychology (that you can sort people's personality based on questionnaires) and other bizarre things that look odd to outside cultures.
But unlike medieval people, they don't have the tech to build a cathedral

>>21738870
We wouldn't be in a decline without people like you. Keep up the good work.

>>21738870
Like most today you seem to think a run-on sentence is any sentence that seems lengthy but this is incorrect. Run-on sentences are sentences that improperly join two disparate ideas which have no business being conjoined. It's weird how many English teachers, especially in grade school, improperly teach that run-ons are the former and not the latter.

>>21738362
/thread

>>21738898
This; writing a lengthy sentence that does not lose its idea is also a skill

>>21738108
What makes me the most sad about this is that nothing like this would happen today. It would be marred by something. People just aren't the same. All experiences are wrapped in a layer of neuroticism.
>>21738852
What defeats me the most is that all these people are infinitely more well inserted and successful than I'll ever be, including in the creative fields. It doesn't make me feel inferior but it certainly feels like I"m not meant to be here.

>>21738852
Curtis Yarvin in a nutshell

>>21738898
>After we returned to the outer world, we passed a short time in wandering on the banks of the beautiful Muscatatuck, reassembled and listened to a chort speech on the designs and beauties of nature from J. B. Riggs, after which we all returned home, happy, merry-hearted, tired, and older if not wiser that when we started, and all expressed themselves well paid for the trouble and expense of the visit.
This should 100% be rewritten as at least two sentences. Using after twice like this is poor form.

I agree with you OP. I think this is very good writing. I'm surprised at people who would call it flowery or filled with run-ons. To me its the opposite, what strikes me about this passage is that its extremely dense with detail as if nothing is wasted.

>>21738902
I'm struggling to understand how someone could be interested in literature but not flowery prose. That passage is positively simple compared to the sort of writing in basically all my favorite books. The author is an uneducated farmer, can you really not even aim above that?

>>21738919
Exactly! I get very mad at unnecessary detail and exposition in a book to the point where I think any book over 250 pages about the human condition is too long. But this doesn't seem wordy or overwrought to me in the slightest.

>>21738904
Not only is it a skill, but being able to parse (and create) long sentences is one of the trademark abilities of healthy and sharp cognitive function.

>>21738612
thanks for the 1913 link anon, very nice
I write in Vim and I've baked a couple commands in it that use "synonym-cli" and "dict" to fetch thesaurus and dictionary entries. What I did was something similar to what is described in the article. I'd write a phrase, then I'd try to replace a word that didn't work so well with another that feels easier on the ears. I'd use synonyms-cli to fetch a thesaurus list and checked whatever word felt the nicest with dict. Dict aggregates a bunch of data from different dictionaries, some of which old, so it did bring up a few more lyical uses of the word. It's served me well so far although I"m extremely pessimistic about everything and writing has become joyless.

>>21738612
>I’ve been avoiding sharing this resource on this board
This is like the fourth time I've seen you post this.

>>21738927
This, if you can understand a long sentence as well as a short one you have a mastery of language

>>21738929
Non-cooder windowspleb here. How can I learn to do this?

>>21738372
It isn't that people have lost the ability to write like this, it's far more depressing. Most of the writing in academia is standardized and formulaic, and most of those published in the mainstream are graduates. It's safer and more profitable. The trade-off for accessibility and saturation is less originality and far more safe writing. You see the same thing happen in the music industry, where fewer studios are willing to take the risk on something new that strays from the familiar when the familiar is tried and true. It's also the case that attention spans have shrank due to the bombardment of automatic entertainment. Abandoned in the Wasteland by Newton Minow is a great exploration of how children's television traded decent educational programming for massive amounts of mind-numbing cartoons to sell lines of toys. It's no accident that the advent of television coincided with a dampening of written flourish.

>>21738920
It's pointless meandering. It's like wading through anime filler. These days we just read the manga, and that's a good thing.

>>21738940
I'm not a coder either, I'm just a casual linux fag and I love using terminal applications because I can use my whole writing rig on potato computers that are 15 years old.
You can also use this stuff on Android by installing the app Termux.
But you need to be able to use a terminal at least a little bit, so you'd probably get diminishing returns.
If you want to try it, just install Termux and then use these commands
pkg install python pip dict
pip install synonyms-cli
this installs the programs
then you can just use
dict WORD
syn WORD
I do not recommend using Vim as a text editor because it's complicated.

>>21738927
This reminds me of a hilariously sad thing I recently saw. I was reading some piece from a journalist that Tim Pool hired to write for him for a laugh, Shane Cassem I think his name was. He writes stuff that tries to be like Capote/Hunter S Thompson so it reads like a book. And all the comments were hating on him for what he said in the article and his positions but more than anything else virtually every comment was going on and on about how they couldn't stand people who write such long flowery sentences. I'll never forget what one of these plebs said.
>"Tim you should let me write for you since you clearly need better writers. At least I know more than this guy does like how good writing means short concise sentences".

it really makes you laugh through the pain to see such sentiments so overwhelmingly supported.

>>21738951
this is fucking good bait, excellent

>>21738950
>is a great exploration of how children's television traded decent educational programming for massive amounts of mind-numbing cartoons to sell lines of toys. It's no accident that the advent of television coincided with a dampening of written flourish.
What's sad is that there's a good chance that if you added good writing into kids media they would not only benefit but really appreciate it. Kids are open-minded and will accept unusual ideas and higher vocabulary since they are learning words all the time already. We could bread an entire generation of chads like the guy in OP if the commercial studios and children's book publishers actually liked people and not just profits
Just, look at how gorgeous children's novels used to look and compare it to the simplistic cartoon style of modern day child's books

>>21738929
>"Put down the thesaurus if you want people to ever enjoy your writing"
>Actual feedback I've gotten.
That's an awesome technique anon

>>21738362
Actual nigger

>>21738950
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vfqkvwW2fs

>>21738955
>pkg install python pip dict
whoops that would be
pkg install python python-pip dict
using the programs standalone is rather accessible, you can do it even if you know nothing about terminals

>>21738935
No. I literally posted it once in a tiny thread like a year ago, so someone else must have shared it. This might come as a shocker to you, but people post anonymously here.

>>21738641
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll add it to the List™.

>>21738957
I think people today look at things exclusively from a brutalist, utilitarian perspective and they only allow mockery and vandalism to exist as the only forms of artistry simply because mockery and vandalism are needed to take down actual genuine attempts at making something artful, human or poetic.

>>21738957
The deliberate miseducation of one fool is a good laugh, sure, but when it's everybody then you're the butt of the joke.

>>21739056
You're certainly right. This is a city I visited last year.

>>21739056
And here it is in the 19th century. Some of those buildings are still around mind you, but any recent construction is nothing like that.

>>21738612
To expand on this a bit more, the original 1913 definitions are all in the second link, however if you have the cash for it, I’d pick up a physical copy of the second edition unabridged. The only downside to the 1913 first edition is that it only contains 70,000 definitions, while the second edition contains a whopping 200,000. It’s also great because there are some words in my copy that are ONLY in these old dictionaries—I’ve literally found words / definitions in this dictionary that aren’t *anywhere* online, and when I google them I get no relevant results. It’s insane realizing how much of our language and culture has been stolen from us, but it’s true. Later when I get the chance I’ll try to find some examples of words that I’m talking about.

Obviously if you don’t have the luxury of being able to casually drop a Benjamin on an antique copy then just stick with the online link for the first edition. I like looking up words to study their definitions in both the Webster1913 and the modern “Webster” dictionary just to see how different they are / how much the definition has been modified or watered down over time; the results are usually drastic.

The third edition is also good as it’s basically identical to the second edition, but without the illustrations and some of the older words were removed. The second edition usually goes for around 100 - 150 bucks but I’ve seen the third edition go for as cheap as 30 if you want a cheaper alternative.

>>21738362
this is the actual final redpill of writing and the sooner you guys realize this, we can transcend

>>21739077
I particularly love it when the kikes who are hired to turn the environment into demoralising eye rape erect one of their abortions right next to something nice to look at. It was when I saw one of those shapeless blobs next to some old church that I understood everything. They're enemies of humanty. They're the closest thing to actual demons.

Why do you expect non-Brits to perfectly speak English like their Saxon ancesters? Language isn't something that is learned, rather, it is cautiously derived from roots inside your brain over long periods of time. People that had to learn English can't comprehend it from within themselves.

>>21739086
“Writing should be simple, straightforward, and soulless.” That’s your “final redpill?” I’m disinclined to speculate about what constitutes a redpill to you if that post-modern garbage is profound to you.

>>21739096
You’d probably enjoy this https://youtu.be/iAh_W9hZ1C4

>>21739099
Don't reply to him, he's a plebbitor trogodlyte without thinking abilities.

>>21739096
Royal Ontario museum

>>21739083
>In the early 1960s, Webster's Third came under attack for its "permissiveness" and its failure to tell people what proper English was. It was an early conflict in the culture wars, as conservatives detected yet another symbol of the permissiveness of society as a whole, and the decline of authority represented by the Second Edition.[9] As historian Herbert Morton explained, "Webster's Second was more than respected. It was accepted as the ultimate authority on meaning and usage and its preeminence was virtually unchallenged in the United States. It did not provoke controversies, it settled them." Critics charged that Webster's Third was reluctant to defend standard English, for example entirely eliminating the labels "colloquial", "correct", "incorrect", "proper", "improper", "erroneous", "humorous", "jocular", "poetic", and "contemptuous", among others
Hmmm are you sure about the third? I found a cheap copy but I don't know anon.

>>21739113
It was that picture. Thank you anon I fucking hate it.

>>21738967
Watched the first one and I agree massively but that part at the end where he talks about how (I assume) anal sex is safest since "you don't even need a condom" is pretty damn funny. If only he knew about the coming AIDS

>>21739083
>I’ve literally found words / definitions in this dictionary that aren’t *anywhere* online
Which ones?
>third edition is also good as it’s basically identical to the second edition
3rd edition is made on significantly different principles.

>>21739118
The third *Unabridged*, I should have specified. The third unabridged is the same as the second, except for some super old words were removed, some new words were added, and the illustrations were removed. The majority of the definitions in it are Noah’s, but the new ones were written to be consistent with him. The second unabridged is still the best though. I don’t own a copy of the first edition, but I have the second unabridged picrel and third unabridged. What’s nice is that they at least segregate the new definitions from Noah’s; they have a section at the beginning where they put all the definitions pertaining to modern things, such as WW1 and WW2 aircraft and tech that didn’t exist in the time of Webster, and then the rest of the dictionary after that section is his unabridged. I’m not sure if every copy of the third edition unabridged does that, though. I’ve seen like 10 different versions of it.

>>21738964
This is something I think about a lot. How children's books were written at what would be called college level now. Just look at the hobbit and yea even freaking picture books use words today that would elicit calls to put down the thesaurus

>>21739096
This is getting dangerously close to stuff about Tartaria.

>>21738372
>Last century's average to below average is our high to very high intelligence. Why are so few people writing about this?
Because it's completely false.

>>21739213
They include the illiterate peasant class in the historical averages to skew the results. If you look at the average educated individual from the turn of the 20th century to the turn of the 21st it's impossible to not note the dramatic drop off in critical thinking ability

>>21738362
Based, it should be shortened to "X, X, X and X visited the Hinchman Cave."

>>21738964
Kids stop drawing and reading around age 5. This idea only works if you do not also offer them brain-frying YTP and you're not forced to outsource your parenting to the government. The government wants children to be semi-retarded cattle and the only intellect it needs is IQ so there can be supply of engineers, scientists, and so on. We're the servants of a machine and machines have no use for anything pretty or pleasant.

What first made me notice this is All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. You have this humble man in a completely rural town in Arkansas reading Homer, Shakespeare, learning Latin and Greek, studying theology, etc. all so he can become a politician and lawyer. Meanwhile the townspeople are pretty high IQ, they can debate and understand politics at a pretty good level. Maybe this is semi-idealistic, but given how big theological debates were in the old United States, it kinda tracks.

Something about brain drain people tend not to realize is that it's not just an international phenomenon: Cities brain-drain the country side first. When you drain the rural regions of all the Willy Loman types, obviously it's gonna get dumber within a few generations.

>>21738108
is this supposed to be impressive? it's adequately written I guess but certainly nothing special. Also
>tfw no cave exploring orgy gf

>>21739232
>They include the illiterate peasant class in the historical averages to skew the results
Wow, what a nerafious action - when calculating average whatever of a population, to count the whole population! Next you'll also tell us that the average monthly wage in USA is $10k, just substract the poor people.

>>21739287
Only the educated populations of the present and the past are relevant here.

>>21739304
>fire half the population
>double the wages of the remaining workers while the fired ones starve to death
>statistically we're a prosperous country because everyone who works has a big pay
>no of course the starving half is not relevant
Have you considered a career in politics or business and marketing? You have some talent.
Maybe next time you could state clearly what you think is relevant for your "statistics" right in the first post, so others can immediately notice you're excluding some potentially relevant data, instead of bullshitting so much.

>>21739129
ugh, this is frustrating to no end because I've found like three or four words flipping through my copy that weren't anywhere online, but I didn't think to write them down and there's no way I'm gonna spend hours sifting through thousands of definitions hoping to find one. But I can give a recent example of the primary definition of a word being removed; if you compare the Webster1913 definition of "foliation" to the online result when you google the definition, the original meaning is usually completely omitted, and in some online dictionaries it's only included at the very bottom. If you saw the word in an old book, you'd have to google "define foliation in architecture" in order to get its meaning--but if you didn't realize it was an architectural term, you wouldn't know to google that, so instead you'd leave thinking it had something to do with sheets of metal since that's all google tells you.

>>21738108
Speaking of America, I attribute this to the prevalence of the KJV with its ornate language being a common entry for the English language for the masses. The 19th century also placed more emphasis on eloquence and class, and the common rural folk wanted to emulate the refined speech of the more sophisticated urbanites. Now the tables have somewhat reversed, and we tend to elect marble-mouthed semi-invalids like George Bush II , Trump or Biden, who strive instead to speak more like the lowest common denominator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpRxj0QwgjY

>>21739287
Do you really not see how including people that never had a need to be formally educated in their entire lives into a study of how different the education quality of the times was compared to now is misleading and wrong? Really?? If we're only smarter when compared to an average that included people who could never read what does that say about us?

>>21739348
KJV was actually notable at the time for having less ornate prose than other translations

>>21738641
Thanks anon, reading now.

>>21739343
It's included just fine in Wiktionary (6th definition) and the online Merriam-Webster (4th definition). In the 1913 Webster the architectual term is only the 5th definition, it's not the primary one at all.
"Google" tells you nothing, you have to actually find reliable dictionaries that you check.

>>21739335
There's no bullshit. You're just angry at it being pointed out how retarded people are nowadays.

>>21739233
Yes and then a link to a Hinchman’s Cave Wikipedia entry for the nerds

>>21739359
Perhaps "ornate" was a malapropism . It stands out for having a distinctly elevated prose style and was by far the most common bibble of the period. It's widely considered to stand on its own as a pinnacle of English literature and perhaps the most culturally influential book of the English speaking world, similar in its sway over the language as the Luther bible had over German.

>>21739425
Yeah, I agree. KJV might still be one of the most beautiful books in the English language, it has something to it the other versions simply don't

>>21738108
How can anyone consider this flowery or meandering? It's a complete and fulfilling description of their day, and it gives me the sense that I was a part of their group. I can picture everything as if it were my own memory. That's the purpose of writing - to communicate both effectively and artfully. Has tiktok fried your brains?

>>21739372
Bold of you to assume the average person doesn't just google words they don't know. That's being generous, because most people don't read at all let alone investigate words that they don't know, but the few that do are just going to google it. You're really only splitting the difference for 1% of the population; but going back to my original point, just flip through any unabridged Webster dictionary pre-1945 and you'll see what I'm talking about.

>>21739429
Apparently it introduced some 274 idioms into the English language, such as "reap the whirlwind" , "pearls before swine" etc.

Compare this

>I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

To this horrendous slurry

>I realized another thing, that in this world fast runners do not always win the races, and the brave do not always win the battles. The wise do not always earn a living, intelligent people do not always get rich, and capable people do not always rise to high positions. Bad luck happens to everyone.

Most translations of the bible post-KJV simply adopted its phrasing as canonical . Others tried to simplify the language to be more accessible to the linguistically challenged. Note that in 19th century America striving to speak and write eloquently was a widely embraced cultural value. The less educated and well-read felt that it was worth it to them to better their verbal game. It was on them to learn better rhetoric. It was aspirational. Rather than as it is today, where the more educated and literate conspire to try to communicate in simplified and cruder language to cater to the masses.

Now the common advice for how to write a "medium post" is to write like you're trying to speak to a de facto retard. It's a race to the bottom, a deplorable turn of events.

I partly blame the dominance of marketing as a driving force in American culture. Marketing seeks to speak to the people's comfort zone and not challenge them to seduce them into making a purchase . It's all about the lowest common denominator and accommodating laziness and convenience.

>>21739474
Ecclesiastes 9... I've never read it in any version other than NKJV and KJV, so I wasn't aware of how badly butchered it was in "accessible" versions. Holy crap that's a disgusting degradation.

>>21739471
>Bold of you to assume the average person doesn't just google words they don't know
Those two are probably the most frequently consulted and recommended online English dictionaries. They turn up among the first results when googling. For what it's worth, when I just google "foliation" I get articles on its geological meaning. It's just a different meaning that's - probably? - more relevant today.
What I'm questioning is the claim that language is being no less than stolen. No, I'd say it is being ignored. A part of the process is definitely natural, word meanings shift and change within shorter time spans than the century separating us from Webster's 1913, some meanings just go out of use. (I just remembered a meaning of "foliation" that's not covered by Webster at all, and which would probably be more relevant on the literature board - it's the manner of pagination of manuscripts.) The other part of the process is people being complacently dumbed down by tech such as Google which now basically hides the wealth of knowledge available online, rather than guiding you towards it.
So, I've shown that these definitions aren't stolen, or hidden, or ignored by serious lexicography. They are being ignored by tech that's made for (making more) ignorant people.
I don't have any physical Webster dictionaries nearby. I'm not from an English-speaking country.

>>21739551
>me: "Most people don't use dictionaries, they don't look up words at all and if they do they just google them."

>(you): "Well these are probably the most popular dictionaries online."

I noticed this too, even as late as the 1950s the general public had literary graces which not even professional authors now possess. Then came the boomers.

>>21739471
When I feel extremely plebeian while browsing I just use DuckDuckGo's bangs
!wr word

>>21739651
Oh hey, DDG has bangs for all the Webster's dictionaries
!websters
!owd (Webster's Dictionary 1828 - Online Edition)
!mw (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
!say (Merriam-Webster Pronunciation)
!mwl (Merriam-Webster's Learner's Dictionary)
!web1913 (Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary 1913)
It also has
!ahd (American Heritage)
!od (Oxford)
and others
I love the bangs function and I use it a lot. If you don't know what it is, if you have DuckDuckGo as your default search engine you can just type the bang and your search and DDG will search on that engine instead of itself. So if you want to use Google you just type !g whatever in the navigation bar, and there are tons of functions for example to search in Github and other sites.

>>21738625
You should archive them.

>>21738960
Obviously not considering only (you) replied

>>21739592
if you google a word you're using the google dictionary or whatever pops up first which is usually one of just a couple massive ones like dictionary dot com or Merriam Webster. What else would you call what comes up on google when searching a definition besides a dictionary??

>>21739277
Im glad someone noticed that wtf was going on with that sentence? Did he really write up a report that included an admission that multiple couples "made love" while out in the countryside on a day hike? What did he mean by love making? I just cant believe he actually meant sex but I have no idea what else he would be referring to.

>>21738852
I'm starting to understand why Bradbury insisted on saying that Fahrenheit 451 was not a metaphor for general censorship but a direct attack on television as an evil device that will destroy civilization. It really is the much more important lesson to draw from that book and classrooms everywhere do a disservice by not teaching the authors interpretation.

>>21740053
>What did he mean by love making?
If it's anything like other languages, "making love" here just means courtship.

>>21740064
oh wow that's actually real cute and just adorable. Our degenerate society had really sullied and ruined our minds hasn't it?

>>21740057
Interestingly, television is not the first time it happened.
Once the telegraph came out, the Penny Press rapidly destroyed the journalistic culture that came before it. Until then, papers existed for economic news, or political news and discussion. People wrote super long pamphlets like Ben Franklin and Thomas Paine did for over 50 years, and that was mainstream politics.

Only a few people complained that the telegraph filled our minds with lots of garbage information, but this debate skyrocketed into the mainstream when TV came out. Sadly it changed nothing

>>21738660
>I always find it to be hilarious when people say how stupid humans were centuries ago for believing in god, miracles, witchcraft etc.

People typically only say this because they were not taught about the actual works that men of those times produced or engaged with, and so only encounter the extent of their thoughts third hand and filtered. To anyone who actually bothers reading what was actually written centuries ago, it becomes perfectly clear that people (or, at least, the educated people) of those times were in no way less intelligent or perceptive than modern people, and anyone claiming otherwise is basically lying, either directly or though omission.

>>21740096
Ehh, there's another good reason
Modern people only know that e.g. fairies, changelings, witches don't exist because we have some heuristic to know what kind of stuff actually CAN exist
Take zebras for instance. Imagine you're an Anglo peasant and someone tells you about black and white striped horses. Do you believe him? Maybe. You have no idea what kinds of animals even exist, you live in a tiny little pocket of the world.

Same goes for magic. Science is LITERALLY magic, but it's only different from our conception of "magic" because it actually works and we understand it. Even the power of flight isn't magical to us since we understand it. This is how people in ancient times saw the world. Science didn't exist, they couldn't explain stuff, so to them tons of stuff was literally magic. Volcano erupting? No idea why, must be magic. Etc.
They weren't retarded, they just couldn't explain stuff

>>21738108
Yion too much text, not bussin fr fr, no cap it's kinda mid but drop some low-key kino a bit smaller and I finna read it
Sheeeeeesh

>>21738402
>The Greeks basically perfected it with the Trivium thousands of years ago.
The trivium was a medieval education system, nothing to do with the GREEKS directly

>You start with logic and philosophy and only when they understand how to think do you teach them facts to think about.
Logic and philosophy were the least things a person studied. They started with literature and moral education, then political discussions
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/291959216/#291984908

>>21738561
Don't think for a moment you're not part of this. Some people actually tried to warn y'all even here on 4chan and all we listened to in response was "fuck off moralfaggot" or some variation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_Culture

Now reap what you sow

>What happened to literacy in this world?
Television happened.

>>21740193
>Logic and philosophy were the least things a person studied.
Yeah philosophy is very evidently something that should wait until adulthood. Until then you're really not ready

>>21738612
The most lucid people I know seem to always recommend old dictionaries
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_7rtki6htw

This man has the Webster of 1953 though the first edition was of 1904.

>>21738372
>What about those theories that everybody is also uglier than people were a century ago?
You wouldn't believe what I heard from a rabbi about older generations (I'm talking at least 1000 years before us), it would sound too fantastic. I will just mention what I heard about Joseph (the son of Jacob, the one who was enslaved). His beauty was so exceptional that his skin shinned. There is a story where Potifar's wife is with her friends. She calls Joseph to show the man she was in love with but was depressed she couldn't seduce. Her friends were cutting lemons. As Joseph heard the call and walked by, her friends stared at him while continuing cutting. As Joseph went through the room, the women realized they had cut their fingers off.

If I told you about the intelligence about the people just from the roman period, as the rabbis described it even of non jews like Julius Caesar, you would think AI is a joke and we are baboons.

>>21738372
>What about those theories that everybody is also uglier than people were a century ago?
You wouldn't believe what I heard from a rabbi about older generations (I'm talking at least 1000 years before us), it would sound too fantastic, but I will tell anyway. I will mention what I heard about Joseph (the son of Jacob, the one who was enslaved). His beauty was so exceptional that his skin shinned. There is a story where Potifar's wife is with her friends. She calls Joseph to show the man she was in love with but was depressed she couldn't seduce. Her friends were cutting lemons. As Joseph heard the call and walked by, her friends stared at him while continuing cutting. As Joseph went through the room, the women realized they had cut their fingers off.

If I told you about the intelligence about the people just from the roman period, as the rabbis described it even of non jews like Julius Caesar, you would think AI is a joke and we are baboons. There was a rabbi in particular that I heard of who I calculated his memory to hold at least 100 zettabytes of information (the story goes that the Torah he knew was so large that even if you took all the water in the ocean and turned it into ink, all the trees and turned them into pens, and all the land and turned into paper, you wouldn't be able to write even 1% of what that rabbi know of Torah, and according to that rabbi himself I believe, the Torah he knew was not even a lick of a dog compared to what his rabbis of the previous generation knew. This rabbi whose Torah wasn't even a lick of a dog is the one I mentioned I did the zettabyte calculation). To out things into perspective, the entire internet is said to occupy a memory of 1 zettabyte if you could store it in a hard drive.

>>21738612
>There are few things that irrevocably alter, let alone completely reshape my understanding of the world
What are the others?

>>21738651
Ignoring etymology has spawned entire fields of misconception like Artificial Intelligence
https://archived.moe/lit/thread/16639317/

>>21738108
>people who read for entertainment are better writers than people who huff glue and watch video games for entertainment

>>21738301
If Neil Postman is to be believed, early America was one of the most literate societies that ever existed. Excepting the fact that slaves didn't count in literacy rates.

>>21738362
The state of /lit/. Why are you even here?

>>21739242
>Kids stop drawing and reading around age 5.
Is this a recent phenomenon, because i definitely did not stop at 5.

>>21740322
Slaves weren't a big part of the population though, very few people owned one

>>21739071
i mean great it looks like they're cleaning it, but why not clean something that people can be proud of y'know?

>>21738372
The Oversoul is stretched thin. The world population in 1890 was around 1.4 billion. The world population is now 8 billion. Thus each modern person has only ~1/5th of the vitality and essence of a man from the 1800s.

>>21739118
And today you correct a blackamoor’s language and a group of liberals come out of the woodwork to tell you that speaking like a retard is valid because “language evolves” or some vague regurgitated shit.

>>21740387
partly true but also keep in mind that they are absolutely inflating the world population statistics

>>21740387
Read Reign of Quantity. It's more than just human multiplication. The "Oversoul" idea is not quite correct but angling towards the correct perspective.

>>21739287
>>21739213
take this guy out of the count and today's average IQ is 200

>>21738612
where can i get a physical copy of this shit? no reprints of this?

>>21738108
>What happened to literacy in this world?
Phones and internet, mostly. People were trained to condense their writing so it fits an sms, and later a twitter post. Journalists had to become quicker in delivering news to beat competition from other news portals. News are lately hacked into several articles, so they could make more money on ads. But it wouldn't even matter, because quick pace of modern life has influenced people to read quickly, and often not much further than the title.

>>21740485
It really is weird how many get hung up on how we must be smarter today than ever before because our leaders can read now! The truth is we haven't really been on a gradual rise in intelligence, only knowledge. I would think our intelligence has varied quite a lot the last 2000 years. There's a lot of interesting discussion to be had about this subject but every other time I've seen it mentioned most people just sperg out about how peasants can read now and we have computers so old people must all be retards compared to today.

>>21740861
Because our peasants can read now.*

>>21740193
Start with moral education...or...in other words...philosophy. Obviously not saying give them Nietzsche in 1st grade, but teach them what logic is, how to critically think properly. you cant learn morals without learning the fundamentals of philosophy. Well you cant learn true morality without it at least, you can learn how to obey rules without it obviously but that's no good to a truly well educated population.

>>21740337
Nobody stopped at 5 because nobody grew up with a tablet and elsa spiderman finger family shit
people are feeding garbage to children in their most sensitive phase of developmnt. It's straight up criminal

>>21740083
In my language if you walk around with a girl you may still find an old lady who'll ask you if you're making love with her. It happened to me when I was with my girlfriend and I was embarrassed, but it just meant to ask if we were together.

>catalog is 90% "what are some books abput poop????" and other literal spam
>my post about modern architecture gets deleted because I said the word "kikes"
amazing

>>21740744
if you go to a used bookstore or online used bookstore, ebay is one of the best places I have found. You can find an old dictionary like that. The older dictionaries are way better, the description of words is way better, and they include many more definitions. Also available for many dictionaries is an online scan, I know places like project gutenberg have quite a few direct scans of books from 1700s and 1800s

What happened to literacy in this world?
Middle-class people used to write letters and diaries back before the telegraph, telephone, radio, and TV, because they didn't have fuck all else to do
You cherry-picking shit doesn't say anything about anything, least of all literacy

>>21741233
>Too stoopid to learn the rules of the game
>Get culled
>Cry about it
Epic

>>21741281
The stats are undeniable. The downfall in reading ability coincides near perfectly with the collapse in our society. I know you probably think "waaa I can go buy a big Mac right now and get a cup of clean water from the tap in my well lit apartment so what do you mean collapse??" But you will learn soon enough what happens when you see a falloff in education this great

>>21741297
>The downfall in reading ability
Most people in the 1800s were semi-literate at best, there is no difference except that instead of bar brawls and nigger lynchings you can watch Peenerson vids and go cry on /pol/, thinking that because you can spell and heard of Jung you're somehow "lit"

>>21738108
Right wingers have destroyed the education system all around the world. It's no surprise that now everyone is illiterate, just as the elite wants us. Reading is a revolutionary act.

>>21741284
Because spamming endless shit on the catalog isn't against the rules, right? Why are you redditors so disgustingly dishonest?

>>21741329
Cry harder and make a strawman to yell at, sure gonna help you deal with your issues

>>21741320
>Reading is a revolutionary act
Novels where the original Bourgeois propaganda. Before that you got the Iliad, written down by sponsorship of a Tyrant, the Bible, made Canonical by a newly conquering emperor. You think reading makes you smart you're as dumb as they cum

>>21738108
it is very colonial inspired and there is no meantion of a black person. Binary language code too. We should cancel it

>>21741320
if you're stupid enough to bring the pro wrestling level bullshit of red vs blue politics into this thread then you clearly arent reading enough thats for sure. Go read the chapter of On Rome that was linked above in >>21738561 and at least learn something useful instead of whatever BS you're putting in your head. At least you may have one useful bit of information and thinking in your head if you do that.

>>21740193
morals are one of the most fundamental things in philosophy though?
>>21741305
the point is comparing the educated to each other why would you compare a group of people that never read nor had any need to read with a group that reads everyday of their lives? Thats skewing the stats and its detrimental if you want to actually see which education system worked better. The people who couldn't read weren't running society and participating in public discourse on a national level. That burden fell to the educated that could read, however small a % that may have been. Just like today we don't have the mentally handicapped in administrative roles.
And it's truly insane to see that somehow it's become a right wing political position to think society is collapsing. Holy shit that doesn't bode well.

>>21741305
You don’t need to be literate to be intelligent, read “The Bugbear of Literacy.” Most people wrote letters in the 1800s that the most educated of today could not even if they tried. Prof. Ed Dutton estimates that Western IQ peaked in the 1870s and is falling at a catastrophic rate.
>>21741320
Someone post the pedo books that got banned. I don’t save these images.

>>21741477
What does Dutton propose to do about it?

It's weird I used to have all these mixed feelings about fascism because it removes political liberties and I am partly a classical liberal, but now I think we need fascism just to take care of basic problems like this for a while before we can even think of more complex political issues. How can you have anything at all if your population is a bunch of inbred Arabs and Somalis?

>>21738372
With respect to the linked post, do you have a way of judging questions? The whole topic of judging speech in this way is very interesting to me because I've had similar thoughts, but instead I leaned into attempting to measure generality and universality vs here-and-now specificity, though it was just an idea and was never worked into anything more rigorous.

>>21741496
We've been recognizing that a direct democracy is ripe with charlatans and scammers misleading the votes for thousands of years. Thats what the Founding Fathers tried to fix with America. It was working pretty well before the scam politicians that came later did their best to ruin with gerrymandering and all that bs

>>21741568
there's an entire book about this, Jefferson and/or Mussolini by ezra pound

>Jefferson thought the formal features of the American system would work, and they did work till the time of general Grant but the condition of their working was that inside them there should be a de facto government composed of sincere men willing the national good. When the men of their understanding, and when the nucleus of the national mind hasn’t the moral force to translate knowledge into action I don’t believe it matters a damn what legal forms or what administrative forms there are in a government. The nation will get the staggers.

>A capacity for being hoodwinked is not in itself a qualification for ruling. It is, let us admit, often a means of getting office in countries where office is elective
>Jefferson thought the live men would beat out the cat’s-paws. The fascist hate of demi-liberal governments is based on the empiric observation that in many cases, they don’t and have not.

>How does the Jeffersonian answer the fascist in a.d. 1933, 157 of American independence, 144 of the republic, XI of the era fascista?
>This is not to say I “advocate” fascism in and for America, or that I think fascism is possible in America without Mussolini
>I think the American system de jure is probably quite good enough, if there were only 500 men with guts and the sense to USE it, or even with the capacity for answering letters, or printing a paper.
>And ANY means are the right means which will remagnetize the will and the knowledge.

>JEFFERSON didn’t believe any nation had the right to contract debts that it couldn’t pay off with reasonable effort within nineteen years.

>>21741603
also if you read this in tandem with christopher lasch (where he is basically promoting jeffersonianism + an aristocratic middle class republican yeomanry, as the only basis for a functioning democracy) and victor davis hansen's The Other Greeks (about greek yeomen really being behind the creation of classical democracy) then a lot starts to make sense

if you throw Bernard Bailyin's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and anything by Gordon Wood on top of this, even better

and Pocock's Machiavellian Moment

the founding fathers were elitist classical republicans who hated mass commercial societies

>>21741610
>>21741603
you've given me a lot to read, thank you very much. I've been wanting to read something by Pound for a long time.

>>21738108
Children who will be raised by zoomers and gen alpha a few decades from now, will say the same when they will read Tumblr blog posts of Millennials from the early 2010's.
>Ay yo fr dis nigga's word post be bussin'.

>>21738362
shieeeeeeeeeeeeet

>>21738372
mentally retarded people can't overthrow the crown

>>21738660
>how stupid humans were centuries ago for believing in god, miracles, witchcraft etc

Literally all of which are real btw

This is a great threads. My question is what can we do about it, even an individual level? Is it simply to read and write daily while avoiding television and social media?

>>21739251
That's a novel, anon.

>>21738372
Your girlfriend is retarded and so are you.

First of all, you're making a category mistake, and overfitting one method to multiple domains. Social communication is its own domain. Philosophical communication is its own domain. What counts as good social conversation (with implicit goals like pleasure, domination) doesn't count as good philosophical conversation.

Second, but minor point, you're assuming implicit value in certain communication styles and grammatical structures.

Thirdly, and most importantly, you're discounting how much of intelligence is simply non-verbal. Related to the first point, using simple verbiage is often a pointer to employ non-verbal intelligence, like word problems in math.

>>21738612
>I kept looking words up, first there, then in whatever modern dictionary was closest to hand, and seeing this awful difference, evidence of a crime that kept piling up in my mind, the guilt building: so many people were getting this wrong impression about words, every day, so many times a day.
Oy vey!

>>21741320
>right wingers

THE GOVERNMENT IN 1984 WAS INGSOC, ENGLISH SOCIALISM, WHAT PART OF "ENGLISH SOCIALISM" IS RIGHT WING, YOU FUCKING IDIOT

>>21742038
meds

>>21741851
Real answer, and only real answer: mandatory education in Latin, Greek, and the classics of one's own ethnic, national, cultural and linguistic traditions. Gradated European-style system in which everybody is guaranteed an education but you can opt out and go into trades if you finally decide it's not for you, but only after receiving a mandatory minimum of cultural, linguistic, and probably mathematical education. Resurrect the German gymnasium / French lycee system, enforce them (they used to be optional because the citizenry wasn't actively and dangerously retarded, now they can't be optional at least for a few generations). The Chinese do this with their education but fuck it up because the human material is too broken down and abused, the people there are traumatized peasants who just want to be left alone by the government which is hamfistedly forcing them to recite a few empty references to Chinese classical poetry. But the human material in select places in European countries is still good enough that you could get a new aristocracy going, basically a Hitler Youth (sorry but it's true), in less than one generation if you just went full throttle. Then they would be pillars and bulwarks of normalcy for the rest of the population. It doesn't have to remain that intense forever, only for that initial generation or two to boost the national IQ back up 20+ points. Once one European nation does this, others will follow as it will essentially be a cognitive arms race, everybody else will see the benefits for political stability, and in an increasingly declining and dying world these will not be seen as optional.

You can't fix it within a broken system. Think of it like this: You are an individual piece of iron filing on a tabletop, surrounded by others. There is a magnetic field that is normally switched on, in which all the individual iron filings can travel if they choose to move around while retaining the invisible structure and integrity and not just regressing into brownian motion or careening off the table altogether. The magnetic field was shut off three generations or so ago. Everybody sensed on some subtle inner level that something was wrong, something was missing, but most iron filings remembered their habitual paths and trajectories, and carried on with the appearance of normalcy.

>>21742065
But slowly errors in reproducing normal behavior crept in, and spread, and each generation passed on more and more "mutations" (let's say) to their children, leading to a net brownianization of all movement. Brownian motion is now reaching the point where all original pathways are effaced, only extremely attentive observers with uncommon distance and perspective even notice their absence, and nobody remembers what the inner calm and certainty of being attuned to the magnetic field feels like anymore, having never experienced it, so nobody notices that they are sick and in pain.

Your job can't simply be to correct your own movements according to dead models followed by nobody else (all you will do is enter into fatal collisions with others on the new, random trajectories), or even to affect the net movement of the filings around you by colliding with them strategically. Your only goal should be to reactivate the magnetic field. There will be initial chaos, as a lot of things currently out of place are forced back into their proper places. But the only alternative is the continued descent into pure chaos, until not even chance remembers of the old structures and patterns remain.

>>21742048
HELLENES HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS

>>21741899
That's why I said >what first made me notice
But I wouldn't mention it if it had no basis in reality
From all I understand, even 100 years ago America was a society pretty much founded on the classics

>>21741090
>or...in other words...philosophy.
No you dumb nigga, moral education like don't rob other people and put your toys back in the place they were after you use them. This is the education your parents should give children.

>>21741983
>Second, but minor point, you're assuming implicit value in certain communication styles and grammatical structures.

One of the greatest failures of modern linguistics and many anthropological conclusions about culture is the misguided and extremist view that there can be no objectivity when it comes to culture. English is the best language, there is nothing that communicates information more efficiently in History.

>>21741450
>the educated
The top 1% of the West right now are creating AI that is far smarter than anyone posting on 4chan and perfecting world-spanning financial systems that are actualizing the Platonic realm, assigning objectivity to every single atom.
>b-b-but zoomers in highschool don't write like a professional author from the 1800s!
95% of negroes are braindead and 50% of Whites have an IQ below 100.

This isn't even touching on the fact that half of the complaints in this thread just come down to language changing, and that's not something that you can stop. In fact, if you REALLY wanted to go RETVRN to synthetic language paradigms, you should be encouraging zoomers to be even more monosyllabic because it'll just hasten the inevitable reintroduction of noun-case and poly-personal verbal agreement.

>>21741983
On the one hand this post is facile in that there is an obvious rebuke already implicit in the very post it's rebuking, making it tediously one-sided and lazy and more of a programmatic statement of ideology or worldview than an actual attempt at critical dialogue (which mediates between ideologies and worldviews to reveal a third position higher than both partial positions, rather than each party just asserting their own position autistically, in the original sense of autism).

On the other hand, this:
>Second, but minor point, you're assuming implicit value in certain communication styles and grammatical structures.
is a particularly stupid worldview that nobody really holds anymore unless they're being paid by the government to hold it or they're a useful idiot on Twitter doing unpaid labor for the government.

>>21742164
Alright, your glibness and partial concession to based racism have convinced me, I'm ready to join your death cult. What do I do? Just be nihilistic and fatalistic and be a cynical contrarian whenever someone critiques existing trends? Do I have to get a Twitter and put things in my ass like you, or can I leave that part out and just be a dead-souled worshiper of decline?

>>21742178
>What do I do?
Firstly, we're going to have to introduce poly-personal verbal agreement. You already do this, see >>21742169
>...unless they're being paid...
>...they're...
This is the introduction of a pro-drop copular form (due to the collapse of the system of person on the English copula). So, all that you need to do is preposit every verb with a subject pronoun, properly inflected of course, and postposit every transitive verb with a (properly inflected) object pronoun. To demonstrate what this looks like:
>George he hit him Jeff
In quick speech, you already say this as "George hehitim Jeff" (I'll spare you the IPA), so we're already halfway there. If you read high-level technical literature (you don't) then you'll see that people already do this for clarity (the entire point of agreement after all).

As for the infinitive, well, you already pronounce "to hold" as "t'hold", so you're good there. We're just going to elide over the interesting grammar that transitive modal-infinitive sentences will display because it's obvious.

Secondly, nouns, which are a bit more complicated. As the example of the infinitive demonstrates, you already have merged the dative preposition ("to") into a clitic ("t'based racism", notice that it's still a clitic though, we're not going to get full prefixes or suffixes for a few centuries at least). You as an American already do this with all of the reducible-prepositions (from, with, etc, go read CGEL if you want to see the rest), so we're halfway there. In Spoken English we're already there as far as articles are concerned, you just need to start removing the gap in writing. So, to demonstrate what this looks like:
>Iwent tothestore and Iboughtme somecheese, then Ileft.

I don't see any way for a nota-accusativi to appear in English unless we just import Spanish's, but I HIGHLY doubt that this will happen. We'll probably see some kind of proximate-obviate construction appear in the future (I'll give you a fun exercise: what's the point of pronouns declining for subject/object if word-order is fixed on the verb?), or maybe active-stative alignment. Either way, the subject-object word order is going to stick around (but, as I'm sure you noticed, poly-personal agreement means that the verb can move freely, so VSO, SVO, and SOV are all totally valid).

>>21742224
>trying to impress me by having an MA in Linguistics
I already knew that from your correctthink training in pro-declinism, dumbass!

>>21742306
It took you 20 minutes to read a 4chan post, anon.

>>21742164
>This isn't even touching on the fact that half of the complaints in this thread just come down to language changing,
language is objectively changing for the worse. It has DECLINED. "How could you measure that??" you say though, like an idiot.
You can measure the decline by looking at the amount of ideas in circulation. We have not replaced all the words which fell out of fashion, the vast majority of words which are today thought of as archaic have no substitutes in common parlance today. We are losing ideas in the public discourse and the more we lose the more we decline in our ability to find new solutions.

>>21742336
>language is objectively changing for the worse.
This can't happen unless the language is no longer Turing Complete. What you mean is that specific grammatic or syntactic constructions that you prefer, possibly because they are indeed more efficient, are not used with as high of an intensity as you would like.
>b-b-but zoomers!
That has nothing to do with the language.

>We have not replaced all the words which fell out of fashion
Like?

>the vast majority of words which are today thought of as archaic have no substitutes in common parlance today
Like?

>We are losing ideas in the public discourse and the more we lose the more we decline in our ability to find new solutions.
Like?

>>21742164
>The top 1% of the West right now are creating AI that is far smarter than anyone posting on 4chan and perfecting world-spanning financial systems that are actualizing the Platonic realm, assigning objectivity to every single atom.
What?
>>21742150
>English is the best language, there is nothing that communicates information more efficiently in History.
How many languages do you know, anon?
English has enough flaws in terms of communication. Take for instance "The French book". In what way is the book French? There's several possible ways. In other languages (like even French I believe) this ambiguity of adjectives doesn't exist to such a degree.
>>21741090
>Start with moral education...or...in other words...philosophy
>teach them what logic is, how to critically think properly. you cant learn morals without learning the fundamentals of philosophy
I agree inculcating Skepticism is a necessary goal of education
But whether or not Skepticism can be genuinely taught to another person is an open question
I'm not sure most people are even capable of philosophical debate. Most of them just desire some ideology that makes life simple.

>>21742336
This is pure racism. Who are you to say that "sheeeit dat be sad and scurry" isn't just as semantically and conceptually diverse as
>each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
>Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
>From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
>For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
>Nameless here for evermore.
>And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
>Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before.

>>21742344
>Private Twitter, reporting for duty, sir!
>At ease. We need you to go on a suicide mission, into 4chan. You will obstinately and obtusely represent the most basic bitch politically charged "descriptivist" approach to language, in a thread full of people who disagree. You are NOT to engage in productive dialogue in any way, private! Do you understand me?
>Yes sir! But, sir, why is this is a suicide mission? Will the chuds kill me for trespassing in their realm?
>No. We just assume you'll commit suicide before the mission is through, what with the pastel flag and cluster B personality disorder and all.

>>21742362
You didn't answer the question. Which concepts do we no longer have words for?

>>21742121
what would you call the study of WHY it's not ok to steal? in fact it's actually ok to rob others sometime. If you're starving and swipe some food from Wal-Mart you're robbing but most wouldn't think that is wrong. The train of thought/discussion about why it's ok to rob/steal when starving unlike other times is an example of Philosophy. As I already said if you don't teach why it's not ok to steal sometimes and not others then you're just trying to instill blind obedience. The philosophy of morals is the entire basis of trust in society. duh

>>21742164
Platonism is satire.

>>21742366
please give me an example of a sentence where you replace the word teleology with a different word which a random person on the street would understand without looking up anything.
It's actually crazy that you can't admit there are words which represent ideas that the average man today does not understand anymore. It's such a basic admission of the state of the world today so it's sad to see such pushback.

>>21738108
Too many fucking commas.

>>21742164
>The top 1% of the West right now are creating AI that is far smarter than anyone posting on 4chan
>doesn't even know what intelligence is
>felt for the AI meme
you dunning kruger fags are hilarious

>>21742389
So we haven't lost the words for the concepts, you're just upset... I actually don't know what you're upset, given that if you search "teleology" or "telos" into Twitter you'll get plenty of normies talking about teleology. The synonyms which would, arguably better convey the concept to a layman, would be "end", "goal", "point", or "purpose", by the way.

>>21742407
That was a test and you failed it.

>>21742407
>three are monosyllables
see? decline

>>21738612
Thanks for the share. I personally am a fan of Dr Johnson's dictionary.

>>21742415
>>21742414
What's wrong with monosyllabicy? As I already said, it's a requirement for you to get what you want (English morphing into a synthetic language). Ancient Greeks's noun-incorporation was a direct result of slowly coming out of monosyllabicy. It's more empirically more efficient, which you seem to be upset about English no longer being (but you want more "big words" because... Well you haven't explained that part yet).

>>21742432
>I use my specialist knowledge of something to do special pleading for positions that are obviously weak or indefensible in a larger context, by making sure I always shift around to remain in a smaller context which I can control with my otherwise valueless mastery of jargon
They should use to advertise not just Linguistics MAs, but MAs in general.

>>21742448
>use you*
I know this MA is fucking salivating at the prospect of typos

>Is that a polyclitic sememe I see? Let me explain to you how Kendrick Lamar's rap lyrics are more complex than this dead white male's poems. You see....
Nobody wants to read your thesis, disease apologist

>>21742448
So, which is it? Are we supposed to SVBMIT to authority, or not?

>>21742460
careful man if you keep bullying him he's gonna cry and say that you have a college degree

again

>>21742448
I'm not sure what you're upset about here. If you don't understand the topic at hand, why not spend some time looking into it?

>>21742407
>The synonyms which would, arguably better convey the concept to a layman, would be "end", "goal", "point", or "purpose", by the way.
that isn't what teleological means. They are related to it's meaning but they don't even come close to what the actual word means. No other words do which is why the fact that it went from relatively common parlance to less than 1% of the population knowing what it means. Which is why its a great example of how we have lost ideas in the public discourse.

>>21738108
>and as fun, frollic, merry-making, and some love-making was the order of the day, the company broke up into small squads, and for a half an hour the hills was made to resound with shouts of joyous laughter and songs.
so they had little orgies in the woods and wrote about it in the newspaper?

extremely based and comfy

>>21738372
>>What other things like this are we NOT seeing? And what hidden effects of it are we not seeing? How much would it really take to lower the average IQ by 5-10 points through nutrition? Television? Internet? Dysgenics? Mass education and lack of rigor/discipline? Lack of high-powered cultural elites to "anchor" mid-level intellects and give motivation and structure to their cultivation?
Why don't you name race as an issue? American culture is intentionally designed around blacks. It celebrates stupidity.

>>21742515
It actually meant they were doing cute stuff like rolling in the grass, handing each other flowers and comparing each other to the fine summer day. Very wholesome

>>21742528
gay

>>21742528
interesting, just had a search:

http://www.kristinholt.com/archives/4625

i guess it's one of those innocent things that later get appropriated as a euphemism.

>>21738108
I hate 19th century fetishists. Trench coat wearing virgins spending so much of their time coping with social rejection by pretending to be refined. I could show you any series of lapidary pieces of writing or music and you would not be able to distinguish the quality of one from the other.

>>21739071
It's really sad that they still haven't yet rebuilt after the bombing, judging by your picture.

>>21739128
I think he means masturbation, not anal sex. He even starts "m...."
Weird assumption anon

>>21739474
I prefer Orwell's version.
>Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

>>21742460
>>21742472
You are laboring under the false dichotomy "directionless change" / "rigid control," which is itself a product of the modern collapse of conceptual categories for intellection into a single vague category. Prior to the 19th century we not only had the classic and very important distinction between intellectus and ratio, or what the Germans in the 18th century called Verstand and Vernunft (confusingly usually translated "understanding" and "reason," confusing because the English translations for intellectus and ratio usually invert the relation; what is important is that Vernunft=intellectus and Verstand=ratio, and the category we have lost is the former), but also many fine grades and distinctions (usually made tentatively and as it were phenomenologically) for the description of consciousness, going back to the Neoplatonists and ultimately to the phenomenological inquiries of the post-Platonic and post-Peripatetic Hellenistic schools, especially the Stoics and Eclectics. A modern attempt at reviving the kind of subtlety allowed by such fine distinctions can be seen in Coleridge's Biografia Literaria, with its distinction between two types of creativity: mere combinatoric "fancy" and truly creative "imagination," the latter interpreted along the lines of a Platonic idea (εἶδος) in the sense given to Platonic ideas especially by the Neoplatonists, but also (due to the influence of the romantic Schelling, who was of course also a great reader of Plato) less "static" and "atemporal" in its conception of immanent form capturing, containing, mirroring, or manifesting something of the transcendent: the work of art that serves as a vehicle for the εἶδος does not do so merely along the lines of classical conceptions of mimesis or methexis, that is to say, with the complete determination of the manifestation by that which is to be made manifest, but the conception of the εἶδος is (as it were) reciprocally tinged by the modern conception of art which Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor concur in calling "expressivistic," that is, expressive of an irreducibly individual, almost personalistic essence, a conception that underlies both the modern feeling for human individuality (and thus human rights) AND the modern feeling for art and artistic genius as similarly un-mimetic, because active (like a subject) and not merely passive (like an object). This leads to a dynamic, developmental ontology of "form," best represented by Goethe's famous Urpflanze, which is simultaneously a Platonic idea and its living, dynamic, developmental, "evolving" instantiation, and reducible to neither the immanent nor the transcendent term. This is the modern form of intellectus, the modern culmination of the phenomenological discourse of conceptuality, captured even in Hegel's supposedly arid "logicism" as an irreducibly dynamic triadic relation that has to be seen IN its dynamism als Vernünftiges.

>>21742649
It will be noted that Hegel only describes the concepts of the UNDERSTANDING as "dead," in the sense no longer moving, no longer living, no longer expressing an individual dynamism, because simply schematic and utilitarian, and thus capable of being "finished," closed, completed, perfected. This is your conception of rigidity, the determination of the dead concept and not the living Idea in its harmony with ever-living ever-manifesting nature. You juxtapose this rigidity with a conception of change that is equally impoverished: change as merely "fanciful," as the de- and re-coupling of indifferently assembled assemblages subject only to the blind and random forces of a meaningless dead system on a flat plane subject to no transcendent governance or inspiration. In your attempt to understand how change (γένεσις, φθορά, κίνησις in identity) could relate to form (identity in difference, stability in flux, "of a kind-ness despite its accidental divergences," i.e., εἶδος), you merely unravel this tautology and you are thus forced to choose between formless chaos or changeless form; and, being a child of modernity, you are instinctively and unconsciously "expressionist," and, being unable to resolve the conceptual antinomy at a philosophical (i.e. purely abstract) level (which, it will be recalled, it was the entire purpose of Hegel's Vernunft to do) you "bottom out" into a more concrete, less abstract level, where merely ethico-concrete priorities and directives can force the decision that could not be decided by you philosophically. This is experienced by you as an indistinct and mostly subconscious fusion of affects, images, and associations which takes utilitarian conceptual thinking -- comfortable and familiar from your technical training in rigid schematic distinctions between different bits of jargon -- as its vehicle.

>>21742653
Now you are on terra firma again, now you are in your element: "When in doubt at the abstract level, prefer the solution that won't harm a precious human being (or fetishized victim-clade of human beings)'s ability to EXPRESS itself! Given the choice between repressing the Poor, Benighted Negro's self-expression with the Stodgy White Man's dead and rigid concepts, I choose to FREE THE RAPPING NEGRO from this fusty otiosity! Be free, gentle negro! Conjugate no more, lest ye be willing!" The world is torn thus asunder: the abstraction, once a bridge that spanned the gulf between concept and idea, and thus the gulf between immanence and transcendence, is now a mere tool of immanence, and a despised one at that. Thought serves Being; Being, of course, is a collection of delightful negros. No matter that Being would hardly choose to spend ten years studying Linguistics, that strange relic of the white man's bygone rule of abstractions; cold and dead, beautiful in its austerity in the sight of a chosen and dwindling few, it now sinks into deserved neglect and oblivion in a world of rightly concrete negros, dancing their dances, rapping their raps, the ultimate and final rhizome, the entelechy of Heraclitus' and Nietzsche's dream: "Free the negro that he may fluctuate indistinctly; that, in his jazz-making, he may create new words on ever new tablets, meet for the description of the utter and always newness of Being." Form must daily kill form so that change might live. There is no third option known. Not anymore at least.

>>21742495
goal-theory

>>21738362
I have bad ADHD that makes me speed by what I read and consequently books are difficult to read if they're not well written but I could speed through this and feel all the emotions and the text flowed very well

>>21742660
>it now sinks into deserved neglect and oblivion in a world of rightly concrete negros, dancing their dances, rapping their raps, the ultimate and final rhizome, the entelechy of Heraclitus' and Nietzsche's dream: "Free the negro that he may fluctuate indistinctly; that, in his jazz-making, he may create new words on ever new tablets, meet for the description of the utter and always newness of Being."
kek!

>>21738108
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NMdVh-pxbc
sleeping in the midday sun

>>21742495
>that isn't what teleological means.
The Second Edition of the Webster's New International Dictionary that you were gushing about disagrees.

>it went from relatively common parlance to less than 1% of the population knowing what it means
People use it all the time, I already showed you that.

>>21742660
>>21742653
>>21742649
Languages change, you're just going to have to accept this. I mean, come the fuck on man, you're stranding prepositions. It's going to happen whether you like it or not. The fact that Ancient Greeks pronounced είδος as /êː.dos/ and Modern Greeks pronounce it /ˈi.ðos/ is a demonstration of that. The fact that the definition has changed (from a shape to classification) is also a demonstration of this. Even if you want to make an appeal to ideal transcendent realms, you still have to deal with the material just being a shifting sea of change that only ever temporarily and arbitrarily reflects some form (maybe, you can't confirm this).

Time marches on.

>>21742900
oh yea goal-theory thats a super common term that the average man on the street understands. Yup
>>21742677
no people don't use it all the time. The average man on the street has no idea what it means and there is no replacement for the idea. Goal/purpose does not encompass the full meaning of the word. Is it really that hard to acknowledge that some words have no substitute? I don't think thats a very controversial claim

>>21743054
You're talking to retards.

>>21738108
What do they mean by "signally"?

>>21738362
are you a literal retard, the passage is pure flow

>>21741320
retard

>>21740293
I'm going to only answer things that completely changed the way I see the world in a good way.
The JP Bible lectures:
https://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
Tennyson's Idylls of the King
Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter
Mark Twain's Joan of Arc
This analysis of a game called SOMA:
https://youtu.be/J5fpTvdExsY
Dark Souls 1
EmpLemon's best video:
https://youtu.be/eRhHokffvBU

There are certainly more things, but these are the first that come immediately to mind.

>>21743900
>Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter
Elaborate on this one, please.

>>21743054
No one is saying that "teleology" doesn't have some degree of specification over "goal-theory", they're just pointing out that your claim that we've somehow lost the concept of teleology is wrong. We haven't. People talk about it all the time.

>>21743965
There are several reasons why it was a profound read to me; one of them being that Undset's command of language is breathtaking. The second is that no book I've ever read, fiction or non-fiction, has felt as "real" as this one. At times, it felt more real to me than reality itself. This is largely due to how incredibly realistic and complex the characters are; Kristin's relationship with her parents, her estrangement from the father she adored growing up, her innocence of youth being peeled away as she ages and realizes what it was that made her parents fall out of love, her reckless love for the fiance she rejected, Simon's painful dignity reminding her of her worst impulses, the ebbing and flowing feud and comradery between Simon and Erlend caused by the strife of their wives, Kristin's resignation to God as the world falls apart--it's so beautiful and deep beyond belief.

>>21738612
can anyone recommend something similar for other languages? mainly spanish, my mother tongue

>>21738362
Good lord, people really are getting dumber on average.

>>21743991
Goal-theory is not a term the average person knows. It's not even a term the average academic knows. You really missed the point of that comment. That being that there is no term the average person uses today which is equivalent to teleology. Which again isn't a controversial statement. It would be a lot more weird if every single word ever had a perfect synonym.

I had a similar realization while reading about the Carrington Event, and how some random gold miner in the middle of bumfuck Australia wrote something more detailed and evocative than some of the best writers of today:
>I was gold-digging at Rokewood, about four miles [6.4 km] from Rokewood township (Victoria). Myself and two mates looking out of the tent saw a great reflection in the southern heavens at about 7 o'clock p.m., and in about half an hour, a scene of almost unspeakable beauty presented itself:

>Lights of every imaginable color were issuing from the southern heavens, one color fading away only to give place to another if possible more beautiful than the last, the streams mounting to the zenith, but always becoming a rich purple when reaching there, and always curling round, leaving a clear strip of sky, which may be described as four fingers held at arm's length.

>The northern side from the zenith was also illuminated with beautiful colors, always curling round at the zenith, but were considered to be merely a reproduction of the southern display, as all colors south and north always corresponded.

>It was a sight never to be forgotten, and was considered at the time to be the greatest aurora recorded [...]. The rationalist and pantheist saw nature in her most exquisite robes, recognising, the divine immanence, immutable law, cause, and effect. The superstitious and the fanatical had dire forebodings, and thought it a foreshadowing of Armageddon and final dissolution.

>>21744007
En español la verba es "diccionario". Googlealo.

>>21744180
creo que el quiera un diccionario especial como en el pic

>>21738362
you have to go back

>>21744191
No hay nadie especial en ese diccionario, es juste viejo y lleno de neolengua y desperdicio de progresismo de una era anterior.

>>21738372
Could it just be that education, arts, academia, etc. are now open to a larger population? The average quality has decreased, but the highest echelon of each of these fields has maintained or even surpassed the quality of their forebears.

>>21744204
>Could it just be that education, arts, academia, etc. are now open to a larger population
Yes. You can go run regression analyses on it, hell go google it and you'll find people who've already done this for you. The two biggest factors in the matter are 1) 99.99% of the White population now goes to school and 50% of Whites have an IQ below 100, and 2) Negroes and Mestinksos are attending school at the highest rate ever. 80% of the former are mentally retarded, and literally uncountable swathes of the latter cannot speak English.

As people have been pointing out all thread, survivorship bias means that you only ever see the essay by a high-schooler that got the mayor's attention for how eloquent and verbose it was and not the other 29 essays in the class that would look identical to those written by a student today, except with arbitrarily higher adherence to standards like no dangling-prepositions, never beginning a sentence with a conjunction, and never using contractions.

>>21743900
Anons you should note that Jordam Peterson's Bible lectures contain certain theological and philosophical beliefs that are NOT Christian in any orthodox or traditional sense of the term.
For example, in his lecture on Genesis, he supports certain gnostic theories that Adam was a hermaphrodite before God created Eve from his rib. This is blasphemous and heretical and not the Christian belief. Some talmudic rabbinicals believe in this, but not Christians.
He also claims that men and women are equal and that there should be no hierarchical difference between the two, which also is not Christian because the Bible shows clearly that women are supposed to submit to man's authority.
My point here is simply to let you know that JP is presenting his own interpretation of things and not the Christian understanding.

>>21744243
You would think his assertion that the tasting of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil after the temptation by the serpent is a reference to human eyes ridding themselves of reptilian scales was sufficiently demonic.

>>21744370
Yes that's gnostic and it connects to his belief in evolution (a Masonic lie).

great thread

Oh my god I can't believe this disingenuous faggot in this thread talking about the nature of change. Do I even have to say it? GO BACK TO REDDlT. Language hasn't just "changed". It's objectively DEVOLVED. There's a HUGE distinction. Some people really just can't fucking come to terms with the fact that we live in the shittiest time ever to be a human being. Nothing makes my blood boil more than coping assholes denying reality. The sooner we accept things are the way they are, the sooner real change can happen.

>>21745036
I honestly thought I'd written a comment and forgot or something down to the capitals for emphasis. But yea god damn is it worrying to see such constant pushback from normies at the mere mention of a decline in intelligence. Why aren't they worried about all their creature comforts turning to dust when we run out of electrical capabilities and running water

>>21745036
based man. i like you

>>21744084
Holy shit. You could have told me those last two sentences were taken right out of Moby-Dick and I would have believed you.

>>21739233
every decade we are getting closer to newspeak

>>21745036
Language itself hasn't devolved. People's use of language, on average, has devolved, which really means that people's use of thought has devolved. The purpose of language is to express and communicate thought (which includes both emotion and reasoning). A devolution in the use of language is really a symptom in the unwillingness or incapability of people to engage with their own thoughts seriously. I think it's important to be precise in pinpointing the root cause.
Language itself, on the other hand, has merely changed, and even evolved, insofar as the corpus of written literature in our language, dating back centuries, is preserved in archives, and is as accessible as it has ever been. All the tools, lexical and grammatical, are still there; it's just up to us to employ them.

>>21745036
>we live in the shittiest time ever to be a human being
KWAB

>>21744007
mismo anon. he encontrado esta página que recomienda algunos diccionarios con enfoque a escribir y encontrar "le mot juste".
https://universoescritura.com/2020/04/29/10-diccionarios-que-todo-escritor-deberia-tener/

>>21739233
https://web.stanford.edu/class/archive/cs/cs221/cs221.1196/assignments/logic/index.html

>>21738108
Thomas Mann talks a bit about this in Dr. Faustus and it being related to a change in how we teach language. No longer is the written word its own thing, but it has become speech written down.

>>21745318
>It's literally 1984 (the only book I've read), bro!

I find that a lot of writing from the 19th century to be amateurish. They had a more eloquent way of speaking but their technical and grammatical abilities were lacking; I would say that the professional writers of today are better than those of the 19th century.

>>21745979
This but unironically. I used to think 1984 was a bit hamfisted and unrealistic. How I wish to be that naive still.

>>21745752
>but it has become speech written down.
i thought that was classically a virtue

>>21745752
>>21746030
>but it has become speech written down.
classically speaking well was a virtue. If we still had a culture where carefully chosen words and calculated thoughts were the norm in speech then we wouldn't be having these issues. But yea that is probably the most succinct description of what I hate about modern books today I've ever read. It's what I was trying to get across earlier when describing how books today feel like reading outlines/summaries.

>>21738852
>hatred for gen x
boomers, genx, millenials, zoomers are all carbon-copies of each other. Same horrible, modern consumer-brain cores, rendered only cosmetically distinct by their varied material contexts.

>>21738108
its not that good

>>21738940
install gentoo

>>21746030
I oversimplified it to the point of being wrong, it seems. I looked for the part and found it:

The pedagogue, for example, knew that even today the tendency in elementary education was to move away from the initial learning of letters by sounding them out and to turn instead to the whole-word method, to link writing to the concrete look of things. This meant, so to speak, a retreat from an abstractly universal alphabet bound to no particular language, and a return, as it were, to the ideographs of primitives. And I secretly thought: Why words at all, why writing, why language? Radical objectivity had to embrace things, nothing else. And I recalled a satire by Swift, where reform-minded professors, in order to spare the lungs and encourage brevity, abolish words and speech entirely and converse solely by displaying the things themselves

>>21746110
>If we still had a culture where carefully chosen words and calculated thoughts were the norm in speech then we wouldn't be having these issues.
I don't know what you're talking about.

>>21739348
>Biden, who strive instead to speak more like the lowest common denominator
once you realize Biden is doing a Jimmy Stewart impress you'll never be able to listen to that insufferable kid-sniffer again

>>21744398
evolution is indeed false, aryans are astronauts and joan donovan is obese

>>21746134
>like like like like like like
Holy fuck this woman is being listened to by actual people what the hell

>>21741233
>I said the word "kikes"
just call them globalists or internationalists or usurers or rootless cosmopolitan pedophiles like everybody else

>>21746134
Stupid trad larping whore

>>21742698
>I'm special and could read it well, therefore it is good.
Do you qualify every assessment you make based on your "illness"?

>>21745036
Language hasn't "devolved", idiots like you are just allowed to be literate.

>>21746158
Thank you anon, I'll keep that in mind
So my deleted post >>21739096 would say
I particularly love it when the ((((((((((rootless cosmopolitan global-internationalist usurer pedophiles)))))))))) who are hired to turn the environment into demoralising eye rape erect one of their abortions right next to something nice to look at. It was when I saw one of those shapeless blobs next to some old church that I understood everything. They're enemies of humanity. They are the closest thing to actual demons.

>>21742150
one of the greatest failures of your post is being unable to understand what i said, followed by a generalization to some irrelevant and common moral pandering.

Value about language comes from a higher level understanding of the concepts behind the language. For instance, you don't see much value in my post, but that's because you're too retarded to understand what i'm talking about.

>>21742169
see my reply above, but also pay attention to the fact that i'm discussing a specific fact about language use and not some irrelevant worldview that you have projected out, you absolute nigger. the only one being programmatic here is you

>>21746265
Seriously I look around at everything just getting progressively worse and I have to wonder... why would actual humans push for this? Why would people who lived in this country be working so hard to make everything so much worse?

It doesn't really make as much sense if they're humans, them being demons would make a lot more sense

>>21746417
If you strip the idea of demon from the supernatural it's really easy to understand that demons exist: destroying is much easier than creating. Ugliness is much more achievable than beauty, and so on. There are people who look upon others who achieve these things and feel envy and hatred instead of feeling drawn to the same achievements. Like men who see beauty and grace in a woman but they know they're beneath achieving it so they pay for representation of this beauty destroyed and degraded. People who look upon the great works made by people who had faith in a God and feel hatred for these people who had ideals instead of feeling sorry for themselves for being so hollow. These people have prevailed upon the world and all they needed to do was to turn destruction, degradation, vandalism and hatred into something praiseworthy and condemning beauty and sincerity. Religion might have been built on abstractions but demons are very real, there are many of them, they think like this, and they have finally achieved what humans have always attempted to push back against.

>>21743740
>what do they mean by signally

when used as an adverb like this it means "in a way that is serious and very easy to notice"

they never had a chance of removing the "giants cap" I imagine its some large stone or part of stone that was obviously never going to be moved by the 3 adventurers

>>21746484
I mean yes greed is the devil and people are evil and can act like demons yes. But idk it just seems way too obvious that a lot of what is being done now is just awful for our daily life. I really have trouble believing human beings would be this motivated to ruin the place the live no matter how much they hate and envy others. idk I'm not out here saying demons are really real but more and more the religious peoples calls to fight the demons in our world are ringing true at least for me.

>>21746562
>>21746417
Read The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P Hall

>>21746562
>I really have trouble believing human beings would be this motivated to ruin the place the live no matter how much they hate and envy others.
Yeah man it's called taking the black pill.

>>21742164
>The top 1% of the West right now are creating AI that is far smarter than anyone posting on 4chan
You have no idea what you're talking about.

>>21746593
>The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P Hall

looks really cool I think I will read it thanks!

>>21747052
Yeah bro I'm sure the guy ranting on 4chan about how he broke up with his GF because she's "devolved" for not using the word "teleology" enough is in the top 1% of Western minds.

>>21746562
There are about 400 dog breeds and people keep buying pitbulls

>>21747164
you are the entelechy of a newfag, enjoy your brief stay

>>21747052
I'm pretty sure he's trying to say that /lit/ poster auteurs are dumber than chatbots.

>>21744243
This isn't exactly accurate. Peterson was not claiming that Adam was literally a hermaphrodite; he was speaking about the symbolism of the masculine and the feminine in their relationship with order and chaos.

Everyone needs some order, because order gives you structure; but too much order becomes tyranny.

Everyone needs some chaos, because that's where creativity and discovery dwell, but too much chaos becomes anarchy.

In Jungian philosophy, the masculine is order while the feminine is chaos, and like the yin and yang, there is some chaos in men and some order in women.

God, being the creator of all things, is the ultimate embodiment of both order and chaos, of all the noble traits both masculine and feminine, and man--being created in His image--was likely created with both qualities balanced, but when Eve was created and taken from him, she also severed that half of the equation from him. Peterson's point was that Adam likely was both masculine and feminine, order and chaos, but was incredibly lonely, and so God took half of his qualities and made them into a separate entity, the woman, who was created FROM man. God didn't create Eve and the feminine out of thin air, rather Eve was *of* Adam.

And now, with this divergence in masculine and feminine, with order and chaos, came harmony between the sexes, as men and women are made to complement each other in holy matrimony.

I feel like you didn't really listen to his lectures, and just kind of skimmed through the first two half-attentively. His point about Eve's creation isn't anti-Christian or anti-Biblical in any way.

I know this thread has reached the end of its life-cycle, but I feel I have something to contribute to the discussion about the degeneration of language skills.

I taught elementary school and I can testify to a consistent decline in basic reading skill in a way that was also ridiculously easily solved.

My students, between age 9 and 11, would read at a terrible level. The books they chose to read had large fonts, lacking vocab, simple sentences and no plot to speak of. This reflected in everything. After I got my hands on some books from the 90's for this same age bracket, I was genuinely appalled to find the difference. Small font, "adult" vocabulary, complex sentences, rich storylines. I exchanged the books my students were reading with their equivalents from previous decades and enforced their reading these books.

Within months, more kids read for pleasure than before, their scores rose drastically, and the benefit was visible in other subjects too.

Just my two cent's worth.

>>21747217
wholesome post

>>21745388
While those old lexical and grammatical tools still exist they take on a new context when no one else employs them. If you wrote or spoke in the style of the posted newspaper article people would think you're trying way too hard. Rather than just being the way people wrote, it becomes a deliberate stylistic choice that comes across as bombastic. Most people would probably not take it seriously. In that way there is a sort of socially enforced devolution.

>>21747217
based

>>21747217
wow. Its crazy to hear just how effective simply giving books from before the 21st century is. I mean it should be obvious yet literally every time I've ever tried to discuss how horrible the effects of books getting dumbed down is for the intelligence of the general population people on reddit and even my STEM degreed friends all say "nothing has changed since then, you're just assuming wrongly because you're pretentious"

we need a whole other discussion to look at the complete denial of modern issues by Western society. Why can't we even admit anything is wrong if its not about "bigotry". It's like not fixing the foundation of your building because you're arguing about the right kind of flooring to replace your carpet with and all the while the building continues to topple over.

>>21746134
what iq level is this?

>>21741276
thanks. which later years are most similar to 1913? the 1913 ones are way too expensive.

>>21747665
>the 1913 ones are way too expensive.
You should support the author anon.

>>21738902
And yet the thread went on. Faggot.

>>21747217
So then it's not the language, it's the teaching methods.

>>21739176
Literature aimed at children used to be beautiful; from Tolkien to Hans Christian Anderson and the Wind in the Willows. Children's developing psychology was still treated with respect and not feed shit, and as a result the people that grew from them were not stupid
>>21747217
Good for you anon, I have had teacher administrators push the most boring, low vocabulary and uninteresting books on to kids saying that it would promote equality if everyone had simple books that everyone can understand. Retards will do anything to dumb down our kids

>>21747691
Partially it; I know a lot of (mainly homosexual teachers) who try to talk down to children essentially.

>>21747695
I made it a point to use "big" words for my students. Instead of "part", I'd say "paragraph" for a section of a book, that kind of stuff.

The way we, as a society, assume Kids are dumb astounds me. One school I worked at gave me exclusively problematic classes to teach with great deficits. By just treating kids like they have triple digit iq scores, I basically managed to work away several years worth of deficit in a single year each time.

Still makes me mad desu

>>21747692
Reflecting on what you said, it actually strikes me that the schools I worked at never used literature as a formative tool for children. Reading as a skill was always the end, not the means. So the stupidest, most vapid tripe was sufficient because it contained enough black squiggles on white paper for kids to decode.

>>21747524
I've wondered; in the old days boys used to read a lot more, it was not a shameful or nerdy hobby. What changed? I think it is the lack of good books aimed at boys. Things like Haggard and Dumas were the companions of the last good generation of writers when they were kids. Now we have just a lot of shit like Percy Jackson and Harry Potter and it just doesn't hit the same way
>>21747731
>I made it a point to use "big" words for my students. Instead of "part", I'd say "paragraph" for a section of a book, that kind of stuff.
Good for you, I hated adults who talked down to me when I was a little boy; kids can tell these things even though adults think they are too naive.
Calling things by their real names instead of a simplified name will aid them a lot in the future.
>The way we, as a society, assume Kids are dumb astounds me. One school I worked at gave me exclusively problematic classes to teach with great deficits. By just treating kids like they have triple digit iq scores, I basically managed to work away several years worth of deficit in a single year each time.
This is sad to hear and good to hear at the same time. Good for you teaheranon. I am currently a student teacher and the gay liberal creatures that are training the new gen of teachers makes me seethe like nothing else. They actually told me (a White passing minority) that I am being uninclusive and not progressive if I am picking texts that have a high level of vocabulary for a class of thirteen to fourteen year olds. "They are babies! And the black students wouldn't understand!"
My seethe might power a nuclear factory

>>21747741
>Reflecting on what you said, it actually strikes me that the schools I worked at never used literature as a formative tool for children. Reading as a skill was always the end, not the means. So the stupidest, most vapid tripe was sufficient because it contained enough black squiggles on white paper for kids to decode.

Very good points. They tried to peddle "relatable" stories about a kid playing a video game on to my students once, lmao. Formative stories are very important to kids (look at the Harry Potter generation making references to the only YA book they ever read when they make political commentary) but the most formative stories I ever read where typically read to me by my grandparents.
They only think of formative literature in the context of politics, because politicians pay them. Currently the school in my region (liberal politician) is picking texts based on how woke they are; painfully poor writing on the level of an eighth grader is excused if there is also lip service to the politicians social causes. These books will never teach kids morality higher than aping what an authority says

>>21747754
>And the black students wouldn't understand!"
Lmao I would read the hobbit to my students during their lunch break. The first week, they all complained they didn't understand a thing. Tolkien uses some pretty powerful vocab, after all. 2 weeks in, they all listen with bated breath. 3 weeks in, I see several kids had gotten the book from the library themselves because "they didn't want to wait until the lunch breaks to see what happens next."

Go for these victories, teacherbro. If the administration claims the kids don't understand, tell them that the state of the art in educational theory shows that student performance is directly linked to teacher's expectation of them. See John Hattie's visible learning. You can also hit them with "your low expectation of our students comes across as problematic due to the potential connection with our student's race and socio-economic background."

That should make them back off.

>>21747775
>Lmao I would read the hobbit to my students during their lunch break. The first week, they all complained they didn't understand a thing. Tolkien uses some pretty powerful vocab, after all. 2 weeks in, they all listen with bated breath. 3 weeks in, I see several kids had gotten the book from the library themselves because "they didn't want to wait until the lunch breaks to see what happens next."
That is very heartening, Professor Tolkien is one of my favorite writers and part of his value is that he knew how to help children grow psychologically. He hated the fact that people "write down" to kids and wondered if people are giving them a chance to learn if they are dumbing down children's /lit/. Ideally children should be given books a couple of levels higher from the one that they are in; they adopt and absorb the vocabulary they are exposed to
>"your low expectation of our students comes across as problematic due to the potential connection with our student's race and socio-economic background."
A good one I am borrowing. You would not believe my level of seethe. I've had admin try to browbeat me and insinuate I'm racist for not treating kids differently based on race

>>21747754
>What changed?
Those texts are problematic, chud. They reinforce harmful essentialist cultural norms rooted in western male biases and if we want to prevent another holocaust they must be ELIMINATED from our curricula

>>21747823
That's what I've heard them say too many times to even seethe anymore. They want to destroy the Western canon, not because it is flawed but because it is Western. In the process they will destroy other people's heritage too, Three Musketeers is literally by a nigger but because the nigger wrote about White guys they don't recommend him to kids anymore
One bit of good news is that the White kids of this generation openly hate Jews

>>21746265
This. The devolution of language in common discourse is due to these freaks who have introduced divorce, promiscuity, filthy ways of speaking, and of course abortion into life. They employ a gross and grotesque way of carrying oneself, and they try to give that an image of "success" by ruthlessly promoting it in media and giving awards to it, and also making fun of people who actually think and act carefully - and honestly, in God-honoring ways as well. I would only differ with you and qualify myself in one respect, which is that these people, as well, are pawns of a darker spiritual force which is behind it. Pic related.

>>21747887
the jews are pawns they are themselves innocent

>>21747912
Not him, but I can understand the bitterness towards Jews, even if I don't personally hate them as a race. The attitudes of Jewish cultural influences (professors, producers etc) have been damaging

>>21747921
Same, love Jews, but hate how their narcissism (always their most obnoxious aspect, even at the best of times) has made them such useful idiots for the destruction of everything good in the world. Their inferiority complex toward goyim caused them to take a devil's bargain: you get to lord it over the goyim in their own
house for a couple centuries, in exchange for destroying the house's foundations and bringing it down on your own head.

>>21747953
>Their inferiority complex toward goyim caused them to take a devil's bargain: you get to lord it over the goyim in their own
>house for a couple centuries, in exchange for destroying the house's foundations and bringing it down on your own head.
This is something I've noticed. They don't ever realize that they are doing something that will hurt not only other people but themselves in the end. I'm reminded of an insufferable upper middle class Jewish professor who told White working class men they have White privilege, while he is a minority and is oppressed by them
I was surprised he was not beaten; but I'm sure someone went away a little more "red-pilled" then they were the other day.
I am fond of individual Jews, my best friend growing up was Jewish, but the arrogance of Jews who hate Europeans out of envy is constantly straining racial relations in a painfully avoidable way

>>21747754
What changed to make men not read probably has a lot to do with the fact that the publishing industry is over 80% women. Mostly white. Even as a kid in the early 2000s I was reading mostly women for the simple reason that they dominated the shelves.

>>21747971
I've known a lot of Jews up close and it's not a minority that "hates" Europeans, they all kinda do. They have that kind of niggerish insecurity where they think all non-thems are looking at them at all times. But while with blacks it's a cope when they think "whitey just jealous," Jews have this dualistic obsession with the fact that Europeans worship and despise them. That's really hard-coded into them in a way you can't fix. I guarantee you, even the best ones feel this way once you press them enough. You can go ten years of friendship with a Jew you think is fully self-aware enough that he is basically honorary non-Jewish, and then one day some of that worldview will slip through and you'll realize it's at a deeper level than all the years of friendship and self-awareness could ever penetrate. They fundamentally feel entitled to live in your nation's biggest financial and political centers and have you talk about them for another thousand years while they talk about themselves to each other and you watch.

The only thing that will help them is a time-out. They need to learn to fucking exist without being "watched" by the goyim. It's a neurosis and it's too deep to be fixed through conscious effort or dialogue.

That said I don't think that every other race including my own doesn't have its own equivalent neuroses. Jews aren't uniquely bad or weird. It's very similar how blacks just need some time alone to reflect on how fucking annoying they are. No amount of dialogue and "integration" is going to help blacks realize how many of their problems are due to their own resentment and their own culture.

>>21747988
That's partially it, I think more men in the publishing industry and the teaching industry would get boys to read again
>>21747992
>The only thing that will help them is a time-out. They need to learn to fucking exist without being "watched" by the goyim. It's a neurosis and it's too deep to be fixed through conscious effort or dialogue.
Good analysis. I think that's why Israel was a good idea at first; the Jews who were aware of this neurosis wanted to exist without another race's eyes on them and see how they would develop. Sadly they couldn't gather all of the diaspora

>>21747775
Fun fact I was with my nephew and I was painting and I explained to him how shadows work. I tried to simplify the concept but I found myself realizing that it was way too technical, light fills everything and bounces everywhere, so shadow is what is not getting hit by the light source blah blah. I thought I'd been just rambling uselessly and the kid obviously didn't understand everything, but then sometime later I saw him draw a tree and he was putting shadows correctly on it. Kids are absurdly receptive and frying their brain with finger family garbage instead of giving them the absolute best that humanity had to offer is straight up child abuse. It's criminal. I can't think of another word.

>>21748129
> I can't think of another word

That's because the adults in your life growing up didn't use proper vocab with you. :^)

>>21748129
Based and uncle-pilled. Yeah, its time to do away with things like Barney and really shitty CALARTs illustrated picture books. Read the kind of stories that they would be reading in Victorian times to them, teach them things that are of good difficulty

>>21748416
We need stories written in language that are of Victorian-era difficulty and beauty, but don't sound Victorian (I'll be careful not to say "do sound modern") and relate to contemporary realities.

>>21748480
I like that idea. Also throw out the "its okay if its bad its a kids' book" excuse that millennials use for shit like Harry Potter. No, children's books are an art form, and good children's media is a human right

>>21738612
>http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary
Actually pretty cool. I added it

>>21748416
Why though? If this doesn't happen at a societal level it's only damaging them even worse. The other kids will call them gay and they'll be ostracized. As things are right now I'd definitely have the (not mine) kids talk about tablet games and other shit so they can insert themselves into society instead of being weirdo losers. I liked to read and I was highly imaginative and the chav kids I went to school with bullied me to shit for it. I wouldn't talk like a nigger and I got made fun of. When I said it's criminal to fry the kids' brains I was talking on a collective level.

>>21748506
>Why though? If this doesn't happen at a societal level it's only damaging them even worse. The other kids will call them gay and they'll be ostracized. As things are right now I'd definitely have the (not mine) kids talk about tablet games and other shit so they can insert themselves into society instead of being weirdo losers. I liked to read and I was highly imaginative and the chav kids I went to school with bullied me to shit for it. I wouldn't talk like a nigger and I got made fun of. When I said it's criminal to fry the kids' brains I was talking on a collective level.
That's sad and I was talking in a general level, but if I could not effect all of society I would still want my kids to develop intellectually. Intellect often brings isolation even in a highly educated society, but that does mean we shouldn't be smart if we can

>>21738612
Thank you.

>>21748520
All the kids who bullied me when I transfered to this shithole and took my sheltered upbringing and my love for reading with me went on to have a normal life and they're now probably well educated and have wife and kids and a good job and they forgot about me completely. On the other hand I grew up with massive self-esteem problems which drew me to more abuse and failures and now I'm here talking to strangers on 4chan and thinking of suicide every day. Would you want your kids to be the bullies or the bullied? It takes nothing for it to happen and it's pretty much what school is for, enforcing conformity. You need your children to be as well inserted as possible because society will destroy them if they're not.

>>21748561
I'm sorry bro. I guess the other thing that you need to ensure is to teach your kids self-defense. The conformity police also went after my sister with Assbergers in till my older black belt brother kicked their arses.
I wish someone like that was there for you too, everyone deserves that. But Idk if its worthwhile being well-inserted nowadays; I've been so very disillusioned with most people, and I am glad I am not like them.
I hope it gets better for you

>>21747988
Read PDFs of stuff from the 1500s and you won't suffer that problem.

>>21747992
The sad thing about these people is that they are in almost all cases not related to the Jews of the Bible. Your random Levantine person is closer related than some guy from Brooklyn who immigrated from Lithuania who had ancestors that practiced talmudism for a few hundred years.

>>21748598
>Self-defense
Self-defense is for neutralising a purse-snatcher or a drunk moron in a bar, not a remedy for social ostracism. You're better off investing your time in the study of social dynamics and frame control.

>>21748416
>Read the kind of stories that they would be reading in Victorian times to them, teach them things that are of good difficulty
The worst that's going to happen is maybe some of it goes over their heads. But maybe that is exactly what challenges them to excel and pull themselves up to a level of competency, which I suppose is what pedagogy is supposed to all be about, and not childcare for cattle.

>>21748610
They've been genetically tested and it seems like many of them are related to the Jews of the Bible, if only thanks to no one wanting to marry into a Jewish family in medieval Europe. But they paid for it with inbreeding and every horrific genetic disease known to man. Seriously, look at the illnesses Jews tend to suffer if you wanna have nightmares

>>21748620
>Self-defense is for neutralising a purse-snatcher or a drunk moron in a bar, not a remedy for social ostracism. You're better off investing your time in the study of social dynamics and frame control.
Maybe, but my experience meatheads need you to beat them or otherwise show them up in some way and they start wagging their tail like a hurt dog
>>21748622
>which I suppose is what pedagogy is supposed to all be about, and not childcare for cattle.
That's the impression I got from North American schools; they thought we were cattle, they wanted us to be cattle, and they tried their darnest to raise us to be cattle. It's like being in a battle with your teachers to get an eduction

>>21748520
>Intellect often brings isolation even in a highly educated society
This doesn't always have to be the case, only in a place where a certain negative influence exists that always tries to reward a sort of ghettoish anti-intellectual attitude and idolizes idiotic people (who are called celebrities currently) precisely for being idiots. Historically, society hasn't been like this. It has been at least to some extent more rewarding to people who have real accomplishments and deserve recognition, not ridicule for such things. It's because of a certain "negative influence" in our countries, who runs the media and decides who is awarded prestige (although I consider this prestige very cheap), that it isn't like this currently.

>>21748641
Yeah, a 100 years ago children would idolize heroes from myth, and now they idolize celebrities
I also think that the anti-intellectual attitude is socially constructed; nerds are portrayed a certain way on tv, ghetto black music et

>>21748623
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some Edomite in some of them, based on the fact that it was around the 5th century in Babylon that the Talmud was written. But there is more Israelite heritage in a random person in the Middle East than these people, generally speaking. This makes it all the more ironic when you realize the whole racial narrative didn't exist until zionism was invented by Moses Hess in the 1800s, and then some of them suddenly thought they were a race and that this was somehow important. It turns out that's pseudoscience. But again, I do think tangientally it's possible that there could be a limited Edomite lineage due to the history of the talmudists. Not that this alters my judgment of this group in the slightest. It would be ironic if true if anything.

Pic is possibly related to that.

>>21748663
>nerds are portrayed a certain way on tv, ghetto black music et
Yes, it's always drummed into people's heads that certain types of behavior is always going to be "rewarded" and others is always a "failure," and in some sense (to those that it's exposed to) it then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's taught that certain actions are going to work out for good in the implicit programming, but when life turns out that way most people are left struggling to understand because they don't realize they've been programmed. A lot of people still act the way they've learned to from media (like children's programming) and social influences in high school and never get past that and into some semblance of reality - and this hurts the rest of us every time we have to deal with this.

>>21748673
>but when life turns out that way
does not* turn out that way

>>21748667
The Cohens are the only ones that seem to be directly descended from the ancient priesthood and are treated like royalty in israel because of it
>>21748673
I'm glad I went to a good school, people there wanted to be smart and if you were failing your classes you were a loser. It made a lot of people depressed and socially anxious for not getting high enough marks but at least it didn't encourage bullying the kids who were doing well

>>21748687
>I'm glad I went to a good school, people there wanted to be smart and if you were failing your classes you were a loser.
Yeah, and basically what I'm saying is the reason it isn't like this in many places in America for example, is because the people who made the media landscape, people largely who practice Judaism, have painted a picture of reality where divorce is normal, where adultery is normal, where feminism and abortions and now sodomy is normal. This stuff didn't come from nowhere, it's because that's them imposing their (grotesque, hideous) ideals on us. And they are influencing subconsciously millions of people. I'm telling you that's what I'm tired of. And that's where the anti-intellectualism since around the 1960s especially is coming from.

It's not natural or some kind of a thing caused by the advances of technology or whatever, at least not implicitly. It's only been caused by technology insofar as these deviant pawns of an evil entity have tried to use television and films in order to influence people to self-destruct through teaching them to behave in this manner and normalizing it and making them think that it's all going to be alright in the end when it's not. They're going to die of AIDS or of some other plague twenty years (or more) earlier than they would have because of their practices. Their children are going to be maladjusted sociopaths who grew up in a broken home, and this is all because some unscrupulous lawyer wanted to profit, and so his culture tried to normalize this behavior to give him a place in society as an attorney so that people can turn a handsome profit from handling the legal matters of divorcing people (which shouldn't exist in the first place). The "culture" of these people has tried to take away the justice of God's law in society as we had previously where sodomites were hanged upon being found guilty, and where adultery was a prosecutable crime, and it didn't take 10+ years (due to a highly talmudic legal structure that's been thrust upon us) to execute somebody who had committed capital crimes.

>but at least it didn't encourage bullying the kids who were doing well
Yeah, I'm glad you didn't see that. I think things are far from being decided, but a lot of damage has been done where this influence has been given undue place to run rampant. I'm hoping that we're seeing it being counteracted recently.

>>21748754
It is largely media that pushes anti-intellectualism and normalizes things I believe. I have a theory that if we didn't have movies about nerds being losers and women seeking divorces we would see a decrease in both phenomenon. People are clearly very easy to influence

>>21748907
>People are clearly very easy to influence
Enough are that it does a lot of damage. Especially those who, I think you know who I'm referring to.