explicações e um site pra quem tem que decorar coisas

Sumi, mas por boas razões. Pelo menos, eu acho.

Voltei pra Chicago e tive que encarar uma prova de história (música até o século XVI). Isso me manteve ocupada por uma semana inteira. Não fui tão bem quanto precisa, mas também não foi um vexame. Não sabia a resposta para a pergunta sobre manifestações populares e vernaculares no século XVI. O querido que elaborou a prova, disse que servia qualquer assunto, menos madrigal e chanson. Agora, adivinha quais eram as únicas formas que eu sabia? Enfim, enrolei lá. Mas é possível que me chamem de volta – quando eles não têm certeza se devem te passar, chamam você pra uma prova oral a respeito das perguntas que você respondeu.

Depois da prova, me ocupei de outra coisa: eu trouxe um violão maravilhoso comigo, então comecei a fazer aula de clássico. Que é uma coisa que eu sempre quis, mas que nunca tive chance. Meu professor é um peruano formado no Canadá com mestrado aqui nos EUA. Muito querido e muito competente também.

Agora estou estudando pra prova de alemão do programa. Estou usando esse site aqui, que está me poupando um tempo enorme. Eu sei, flashcard é a coisa mais nerd do mundo. Mas não tem jeito. A prova é a tradução de um texto sobre música em alemão. Eu tenho duas horas e meia pra verter a coisa toda pro inglês.

Também estou escrevendo e cuidando de papers pendentes. Outra hora eu falo sobre isso. Prometo ser mais freqüente [a nova reforma idiota derrubou a trema também?] nas postagens a partir de agora.

mostre, em seu texto, quem você é de verdade

Olha que interessante esse texto de Kurt Vonnegut sobre estilo. Ele diz coisas que você, provavelmente, já sabe, mas o início tem uma grande sacada.

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful– ? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

etymology

Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself: “Mankind”. Basically, it’s made up of two separate words – “mank” and “ind”. What do these words mean ? It’s a mystery, and that’s why so is mankind.

Jack Handey

sobre traduzir… “just do the best you can”

“An indispensable part of the translator’s craft is the ability to make decisions.”  (Elborg Forster)

Um artigo delicioso e pé-no-chão sobre tradução, escrito por quem sabe o que diz porque fala do que faz.

Trechos…

I suppose most people have no more than a vague idea of what is involved in transferring a text from a “source” to a “target” language. They think that as long as the translator knows both languages, he/she can “just do it,” as if it were a matter of drawing a map. But the fact is that the transferral can only be done by means of rewriting, for no two languages are totally congruent in their structure. And rewriting is a form of writing, which is why different authors will translate the same text in sometimes amazingly different, yet equally “accurate” ways. Translations, I often think, are like musical or theatrical performances: the conductor and the soloist follow a precise score, the actor follows a text, and yet the symphony sounds very different when conducted by Furtwèngler or by Bernstein; Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh gave us very different Henry Vs.

Ou eu muito me engano ou o que ele descreve abaixo é uma abordagem de esquerda neste ofício tão importante? Vade retro! Nesse aspecto estou com Forster.

 In recent years a whole school of Translation Studies scholars has begun to insist that fluency and transparency in a translation are hallmarks of cultural imperialism, particularly if the target language is dominant, as English is in our own time. These theoreticians, people like Douglas Robinson and Laurence Venuti, start with the useful concept of systems-theory. By this they mean that the translator must be familiar with the “representational” and psychological systems in which both languages are embedded. So far so good. But then our theoreticians object to the kind of re-writing that makes the source-text fit into the mental, social, even political patterns of the target culture. (Putting it rather more simply, I keep reminding myself that any expression I use in a translation must “ring a bell” with the reader.) But the modern theorists feel that this would be a “hegemonic” proceeding, and in order to avoid it, they advocate “foreignizing” the translation. This, they claim, will make it sound strange and thereby “enrich” the target language. This may actually be legitimate in high literature, where even the source text often uses techniques of strangeness (Verfremdung) to focus attention, but in the kind of work I do, I believe that “foreignization” only creates awkwardness and confusion.

E, finalmente, uma visão humilde do que é traduzir:

“Just do the best you can.”

This just might be the motto for all translators.

Begley, Nabokov, and the break in one’s own destiny

Louis Begley, no livro The Genius of Language: Fifteen writers reflect on their mother tongues):

Even though I am told that my writing does not show signs of rigor mortis, it is a fact that I write slowly and laboriously, pausing after every word I set down. I change it countless times and repeat the process with each sentence and paragraph before I can move forward. The vision of Trollope composing the Barchester novels in a railroad car, traveling desk balanced on his knees, with hardly an erasure or addition needed before the manuscript went off to the publisher, fills me with admiration, envy, and dull despair. I too can perform on the high wire when I write a legal text or an essay; writing fiction I need to keep my feet on the ground. Perfectionism and perennial dissatisfaction with everything I do are not alone to blame: it seems to me that when I write in English I lack normal spontaneity, let alone the unbeatable self-assurance a writer needs to soar or to be outrageous. I know that I do manage from time to time to be outrageous in my fiction, but the stress falls on the verb “manage.” Nothing about those effects is instant. The truth is that even today, after an immersion of more than fifty-five years in the English language, I am never completely confident that I have gotten right whatever it is that I write down, certainly not on the first try. Knowing objectively that often—perhaps most often—in fact I do, is not a consolation. In that respect only, I am not unlike my great countryman, Joseph Conrad. But Conrad had more of an excuse: he began to learn English only at the age of twenty-one; he was thirty-eight when his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, was published, and he had spent most of the intervening years on the high seas. Vladimir Nabokov’s command of the English language is a different case altogether. English was in effect Nabokov’s first language: he learned to read it before he could read Russian. Becoming thoroughly proficient in a “civilized” tongue, usually the French, and leaving the vernacular for latter, to be absorbed as a part of growing up, was usual in the nineteenth century among Slavic upper-class families. There was a series of English and French governesses who took care of the Nabokov children, and it wasn’t until Vladimir was seven that his father, alarmed by his sons’ backwardness in their native language, engaged the schoolmaster from the village adjoining the family estate to teach them to read and write in Russian.To go back to the torment I experienced revising the manuscript of my most recent novel, its immediate cause was the number of times my editor was in essence questioning my diction, the correctedness of the way I expressed myself in English. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t always right. What hurt was the contrast between his instinctive grasp of how one would normally say whatever it was that I wanted to express and my doubts: my need to grope to find the way, to test each sentence by reading it aloud. He had kept his birthright—the ability to use his mother tongue in his calling—and I had lost mine.

(…)

The Polish language has been a source of undiluted joy for me, and it pains me to make an admission that may make me seem unfaithful to my first love. But the plain truth is that I consider myself also supremely lucky to be an American novelist, using a language of incomparable beauty and access to readers, a language that for all the difficulties I have described is totally my own. In this respect as well, my case is very different from Nabokov’s, as he described it in an afterword to Lolita:

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses—the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions—which the native illusionist, frac-tails, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

Tragedy, surely, but one that was embedded in triumph. (…) I follow Nabokov’s advice, and take the tragedy seriously only because Nabokov’s intimate wound was surely very real, as is the wound inflicted by every exile, whatever its circumstances and aftermath. The wound is one that never heals, even if one can say with Nabokov, as I do, quite heartlessly: “The break in my own destiny affords me in retrospect a syncopal kick that I would not have missed for worlds.”

o inglês e o italiano

M. J. Fitzgerald fala do inglês e do italiano (The Genius of Language: Fifteen writers reflect on their mother tongues).

Returning to Italian writing after gorging on this diet of English—Leopardi’s L’Infinito was restrained in comparison to Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill—was like returning to milk toast after scones with clotted cream. I loved the accumulation of adjectives that a language so rich in words could indulge in, instead of the nuances in the repetition of the same adjective that gives Italian its power. I loved the exaggeration of English, the curlicues of language, its baroque quality. Many of the churches, much of the painting, and people’s gesturing in Italy are baroque. But the language itself is severe: its beauty lies in elegant simplicity and the hypnotic power of its sound. And when it is distorted by the wrong rhetoric in an attempt to “enrich it,” it becomes impenetrable without gaining in power. English has to work to be elegant and simple, because its sounds are rarely if ever as spellbinding as Italian, and so much of its nature is tortuous. But how fabulous the honed expression of that tortuousness can be for a girl who sees so clearly reflected in this language her fervent and histrionic self: not one word to describe her feelings, but half a dozen variations. At sixteen, there was no contest. English was the language of my sensibility, the language with which I would write poems as full of words as Dylan Thomas’s, novels as rich with emotion as Villette, dramas as powerful as Christopher Fry’s The Boy with a Cart.

circus biped

Bert Keizer comparando o holandês e o inglês no livro “The Genius of Language: Fifteen writers reflect on their mother tongues”.

Sobre holandeses escrevendo em inglês:

In Holland, and in many other parts of the world, the type of idolatry I was talking about earlier is one of the most repulsive effects of the fact that English is now lording it globally. (…)

I don’t think it really matters when you are dealing with atoms, bridges, teeth, arteries, or gamma rays, but when you are writing about people and ought to throw in a little of your own personality in order to infuse some life into the thing, the handicap of having to do this in English is severely debilitating. People rarely realize this and therefore tend to use English as if it were a dead language, like Esperanto, with an equally lifeless outcome.
(…)
There is a vast difference between showing someone the way to the railway station in English and showing him the way to Plato. This is often overlooked by city-map speakers.

E sobre a experiência de escrever em inglês, acho que ninguém conseguiu definir melhor. Achei esta analogia simplesmente fantástica:

Writing in English at first felt to me like trying to plough a stretch of marble an ungainly procedure, ruining some pretty nice material, and the result was nil. I feel reasonably comfortable now writing in English—though please note that is something I would never say about writing in Dutch. Why not? Well, it’s the difference between a natural biped (man) and a circus biped (dog). You wouldn’t ever say to a human that you admire the way he manages so well on two legs, while a dog is applauded for just this feat. The dream of a foreigner writer using English is that the natives will forget about his dogginess and say to each other: I just love the way he moves.

But, comfortable or not, I still have to shrug off a slight resentment at having to put on these funny clothes in order to be let in. I suppose that I could counter this by pitying you for missing out on certain Dutch authors whose virtues I couldn’t begin to try to expound to you—no more than I could give someone an idea of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar-playing by whistling a few notes. Though I wouldn’t argue absolutely against this possibility, the fact is that I cannot do it right here.

Sim, sim, também sinto o mesmo, Sr. Keizer. Mas fiquei pensando em Machado de Assis e de repente fiquei tão feliz de ter crescido falando português.

Škvorecký e suas duas línguas

Agora é a vez de Josef Škvorecký falar da experiência de escrever numa língua estrangeira. É dele o terceiro texto do livro “The Genius of Language: Fifteen writers reflect on their mother tongues”.

O primeiro trecho descreve uma experiência que eu também tive com o português, depois que saí do Brasil:

A strange thing and Henry Miller got it right. Surrounded by the sounds of the foreign language—speaking, on a daily basis, my very good English, as friends kindly assured me—my eyes, my ears, my inner receptive organs became attuned to Czech to a much higher degree of precision than back in Bohemia. I awakened to aspects of my mother tongue of which formerly I was unaware, having used them subconsciously, mechanically. The sex appeal of feminine endings, the lure of verbal aspects, the capricious scherzos of prefixes, such things.

A segunda passagem fala do poder da linguagem apesar dos problemas com textos mal-traduzidos. Škvorecký, como ele mesmo diz, também traduziu.

The reviewers never read my novels as I had written them in my “small”—for most American critics, even “obscure”—language. They read only translations. And I thought of my early days, of the Sinclairs and Dickenses, and Dreisers, not to speak of Curwoods and Setons and Edgar Rice Burroughses, all of them enjoyed in dubious—no: bad—no: horrible translations, translations really insulting to sensitive speakers of the obscure language of the westernmost Slavs. And I wondered. What made me enjoy Mr. Babbitt, who constantly used the second person plural in addressing his children, his wife, his closest friends? What made me ignore the shocking impoliteness of characters who addressed their physicians with the disrespectful “Doctor,” not “Mr. Doctor”? What made me so imperceptive of the twisted sentences that slavishly followed the word order of the originals? Did they sound alluringly exotic? Sweetly foreign? What made me not wonder about a military band in Thackeray whose bulky musician played very loudly on the dulcimer? All that?

Surely, there was nothing resembling genius in the language of those translations. Yet the novels spoke to me, with great intensity. So strongly that they decided my future. True, there was Eliot, whom I first read in English, then years later in a supposedly good Czech translation, who, after the true magic of “Because I do not hope. . . ,” was almost torture. Was it Josef Hora’s labor devoted to each word which the translator, paid by that word, obviously neglected? Something else?

For a decade of my life, when my own efforts were banned, I turned translator myself. The experience taught me to appreciate my excellent translators in Canada. I bitterly learned what it was to cleanse your text of the abundance of auxiliary verbs so foreign to Czech, of the prevalence of the passive voice, of possessive pronouns used with parts of the human body, all these and other translators’ errors which so uglified the American magic of Faulkner, the British acrimony of Waugh, the translucency of Hemingway’s diction. Would any American monolingual or even—in the major languages—bilingual or trilingual reviewer dare to say what the late Czech critic said about my sentences?

No, and it wouldn’t be their fault. Although they were unaware of my originals, their reviews were rarely scathing, often favorable. What about language, then? What is it that makes even books that present only a ragged shadow of their model enjoyable, even enthralling? What makes a teenager in a landlocked little country ruled and butchered by foreign invaders and mighty Big Daddies enter the skin of an illiterate boy from Missouri, of a nigger slave—enter a world as far away as the stars?

Yes, language can be of supreme beauty. But there is more to works of fiction than just language. Style in Chandler’s sense, the experience of Dickens but also that of Henry James, of life’s martyrdom or of life’s sweet mellowness, and many other things.

Let’s leave it to the horses, they have bigger heads.

Or perhaps to the elephants.

the way back

Bharati Mukherjee escreve  o primeiro ensaio do livro que trata do desafio de nascer num universo linguístico e terminar escrevendo profissionalmente em inglês. O livro é “The Genius of Language: Fifteen writers reflect on their mother tongues”.

Um trecho que me chamou a atenção:

As a novelist, I now melt down the cultural borders of my legacies. The fluid concept of time inherited through Bangla’s use of kal and the “magic realism” inherited from the Hindu epics inform my writing about immigrants in North American cities. Now I write in my third language, American, another “deviant dialect” of the E. M. Forsterian British I learned as authoritative, and in which, in fact, I wrote my first novel and earliest stories.

My mother tongue was a linguistic primer, a thin white-wash over all that is pre-conscious and pre-rational. It was in English that I began to apologize. Successive coats of French and English have faceted Bangla, but it still shines through. It is the odd fate of so many of us in the global community, not just those of us from India but from other homelands at ease in family-time and epic storytelling, that a second language, a school language, was necessary to liberate their minds from their bodies, their self from their community.

Two selves exist within the language-adoptee, as with any adoptee—what might have been, what was lost, and the good fortune, the delivery from want and frustration. For a writer, the melting of a mother tongue is the madeleine, the way back, and the way in, an early loss with the deepest memory, the mother of all plots.

how to avoid sexist language

De Robert W. Bly, dicas valiosas pra um antigo problema meu:

A few techniques for avoiding sexist language:

• Use plurals. Instead of “the doctor receives a report on his patients,” write, “the doctors receive reports on their patients.”
• Rewrite to avoid reference to gender. Instead of “the manager called a meeting of his staff,” write, “the manager called a staff meeting.”
• Alternate gender references. In the past, I used his and he throughout my copy. Now, I alternate he with she and his with her.
• Use “he and she” and “his and her.” This works in simple sentences. But it can become cumbersome in such sentences as, “When he or she punches his or her time-card, he or she is automatically switched to his or her overtime pay rate.” When you use he and she and his and her, alternate these with she and he and her and his.
  Do not use the awkward constructions he/she or his/her. Instead, write “he or she” or “his or her.”
• Create an imaginary person to establish gender. For example, “Let’s say Doris Franklin is working overtime. When she punches her time-card, she is automatically switched to her overtime pay rate.”

E uma listinha utilíssima (com várias novidades pra mim):

Sexist term
anchorman
advertising man
chairman
cleaning woman
Englishmen
fireman
foreman
a man who
man the exhibit
man of letters
mankind
manpower
man-made
man-hours
Miss, Mrs
newsman, newspaper man
postman
policeman
salesman
self-made man
stewardess
weatherman
workman

Nonsexist Substitute
anchor
advertising professional
chairperson
domestic
the English
firefighter
supervisor
someone who
run the exhibit
writer
humanity
personnel, staff
artificial, manufactured
work hours
Ms.
reporter
mail carrier
police officer
salesperson
self-made person
flight attendant
meteorologist
worker

(“The Copywriter’s Handbook “)

writerisms

Estas são informações preciosas que C.J. Cherryh coletou para aspirantes a escritores de ficção. Completamente adaptáveis ao português.
Trechos:

If a manuscript looks as if it’s sprouted leaves and branches, if every verb is “unusual,” if the vocabulary is more interesting than the story … fix it by going to more ordinary verbs. There are vocabulary-addicts who will praise your prose for this but not many who can simultaneously admire your verbs as verbs and follow your story, especially if it has content. The car is not a main actor and not one you necessarily need to make into a character. If its action should be more ordinary and transparent, don’t use an odd expression. This is prose.

(…)

With apologies to hard-working English teachers, school English is not fiction English.

Understand that the meticulous English style you labored over in school, including the use of complete sentences and the structure of classic theme-sentence paragraphs, was directed toward the production of non-fiction reports, resumes, and other non-fiction applications.

The first thing you have to do to write fiction? Suspect all the English style you learned in school and violate rules at need. Many of those rules will turn out to apply; many won’t.

(…)
As a general rule, use a major or stand-out vocabulary word only once a paragraph, maybe twice a page, and if truly outre, only once per book. Parallels are clear and proper exceptions to this, and don’t vary your word choice to the point of silliness.

Schwartz sobre tradução literária

Artigo do tradutor Ros Schwartz sobre tradução literária. Muita coisa que a gente já sabe: uma tradução é uma leitura do texto original e a idéia de transparéncia em tradução é utopia.

Literary translation is about endless choices, weighing up whether to privilege meaning over music, rhythm over rules of grammar, the spirit rather than the letter of the text. The translator is simultaneously reader and writer.

Ele enxerga o trabalho traduzido como uma criação em separado.

In my view, it is important to recognise that a translated work is a separate creation, and that to serve our authors well we must produce a translation that reflects the spirit and intentions of the original while having its own distinctive and coherent “voice.” It should evoke a similar response in the reader to that of the reader of the original work, although the means of achieving this may be different. Especially when it comes to poetry.

O que é uma boa tradução? Segundo ele, não dá pra avaliar se não se sabe a língua original. E como a maioria das discussões críticas não faz referência à qualidade da tradução, de repente a conversa pode estar toda centrada num livro completamente diferente do original.

E na tentativa de fazer uma tradução “redondinha”, o tradutor distorce o texto:

Often, what is termed a “good” translation is one that reads like a piece of seamless English. A “bad” translation is somehow bumpy, or difficult. There’s a fine line between making foreign authors accessible to English-speaking readers and making them sound like English writers. Their rhythms and patterns, their “foreignness” is what makes them interesting. Salman Rushdie wrote: “To unlock a culture you need to understand its untranslatable words,” and that is why he uses a lot of Urdu words in his novels. Publishers and copy-editors do not always agree, and sometimes try to pressure the translator into bowing to what they think readers can cope with and ironing out all the “foreignness.” But if we flatten the text to keep the copy-editor happy, we are, in a way, “colonising” the writer. And this is an ethical problem for translators which calls for vigilance.

I believe translators need to be more explicit about what they do, even writing a foreword or an afterword, to let the reader know how their intervention influences the text. This goes against the grain here in the UK, where one of the great publishing myths is that the public is reluctant to buy foreign authors so it is better not to draw their attention to the fact that a work is a translation.

Eu acho que isso está mudando um pouco. Principalmente com as novas traduções a clássicos como Don Quixote e Guerra e Paz.

E ele conclui com uma citação de Nicholas de Lange, fazendo outra comparação entre música e literatura:

People don’t say that there’s a right way or a wrong way to perform a Tchaikovsky symphony. There may be unsuccessful versions of it, but on the whole the good orchestras produce good but totally distinctive renderings. Every soloist performs in a particular, personal way, and that performance is signed by the performer. People will go to a record shop ask for a recording by a specific artist . . . I wonder if there’ll ever be a day when customers go into a bookshop and say they’d like something translated by a particular translator. That responsibility of the performing musician is analogous to the way I see the responsibility of the translator. The translator is giving a personal interpretation, a personal rendition. The text as it exists on the page in the original language is like a musical score, and it’s like the musical score also because it’s locked up, because the English readers don’t have access to it, just as only the few people that can actually read music and hear it in their heads can read the score. It needs to be performed. So it’s there in a potential, and the performance is going to be totally unique and distinctive.

Mas ainda vai levar algum tempo pra que virtuosos da tradução para o português sejam contratados para tais performances. E não é porque não há virtuosos. É que eles precisam comer.

reclamões

Paulo Leminski:
A última flor do Lácio é um desastre.
Embora sejamos 140 milhões a falá-la (Brasil, Portugal, Angola, Moçambique, Cabo Verde, Macau, Timor), o idioma de Camões continua sendo o túmulo do pensamento.
Em termos planetários, escrever em português e ficar calado é mais ou menos a mesma coisa.
Vejam só o que acontece com nosso maior prosador. Guimarães Rosa. Traduzidas para o francês, as obras de Rosa (“Grande Sertão”, inclusive) perdem toda a sua aspereza jagunça, suas irregularidades, suas invenções. Rosa parece apenas um bangue-bangue.
Agora quem quer aprender português?
Nem os intelectuais e escritores do “boom” literário latino-americano recente o conhecem.
A língua portuguesa é um desterro, um exílio, um confinamento.
Talvez não tenhamos valores literários suficientemente fortes para forçar nos estrangeiros o desejo ou a necessidade de aprender o português.
Que autores, daqui e além mar, teriam essa força?
Camões? Fernando Pessoa? Machado? Drumond? Oswald? Cabral? Rosa? A poesia concreta?
Não sei.
Sei que Pound aprendeu português nos anos 20 para ler Os Lusíadas, que ele considerava “full of sound of fury”.
E dizem que Erasmo de Rotterdam aprendeu português para ler Gil Vicente no original.
A palavra mais incrível criada na língua portuguesa em Portugal foi “saudade”.
A mais incrível palavra criada em português no Brasil foi “jeito”.
Nós, brasileiros, temos que dar um jeito de tornar a língua portuguesa mais forte, isto é, capaz de assimilar ataques de corsários ou invasões estrangeiras.
Embora a língua portuguesa seja o idioma dos nossos ex-dominadores e colonizadores, é dela que é feita a substância da nossa alma.

James Joyce:
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

Gustave Flaubert:
Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

William James:
Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.

Eddy Peters:
Not only does the English Language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets.

E. B. White:
English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education – sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.

Aldous Huxley:
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born – the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.