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Monday, July 14, 2014
Alisyn Jordan's invitation is awaiting your response
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Alisyn Jordan's invitation is awaiting your response
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Thursday, July 3, 2014
Please join me on LinkedIn
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Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Saturday, August 28, 2010
The Power of "Be"
A year and a few months before will.i.am. and the Black Eyed Peas brought consciousness of the verb “to be” into popular culture through the ever bumpin song “Imma be” I was sitting in a sketchily lit prayer house getting what I didn’t realize was the first in a set of discoveries regarding the complexity and life changing properties of this verb. But before going into all that, a brief explanation of the auxiliary, copula and main verb functions of “to be”.
It took me a while to get this so let me make sure you’re all trackin with me:
Be, being, been, am, is, were, was, are… these are all just different conjugations of the verb “be”.
Auxiliary: Auxiliary verbs are helping verbs. For example “The house is being cleaned”. The verb “be” is just helping the verb “clean”. It doesn’t have any meaning of its own.
Copula: Similarly, copula verbs don’t really have any meaning. They just give tense. “Imma be brilliant” is an example of “be” being used as a copula. You could say “Imma brilliant” and people would still understand what you were saying . The extra “be” is just inserted for grammatical reasons, not to change the meaning of the sentence. “Be” is used as a copula A LOT in English. For example, “I am a girl”, “I am angry”, “She is a teacher”, “They are stupid” etc…
Main: The verb “to be” is rarely used as a main verb in English. The only place it is used as a main verb is in sentences like “I am.” People rarely say this unless they are will.i.am. which is what makes him so cool. In these utterances the verb “to be” has actual meaning, as it denotes existence.
Okay… so back to the prayer house. Me and my friends Franck and Zachariah were praying and stuff (yup, that’s what ya do in a prayer house). And then my friend Franck started talking about bees. He talked about the way bees fly from flower to flower without meaning to pollinate. How they accomplish pollination just by doing what bees do, gathering nectar and pollen for the sake of making honey. In a similar way, he said that I was gonna be used by God, not through me trying really hard to do stuff, but just through me beeing. That is, through being I would achieve God’s purposes; not through being smart or being efficient, just through being.
It was deep stuff that kind of took me off guard, because I didn’t even begin to know what it means to be. Like I said earlier, in English, “to be” is rarely used as a main verb. It is most often used as a copula. When you use “to be” as a copula it puts the person in a category. “She is a girl.” You are putting her in the category “girl”. These categories are extremely helpful for us as human beings. And these categories are also a lot of the way that we find our worth or our identity. We find our identity and our worth in being a student, or being smart or being pretty. But Franck was talking about finding worth and identity in just being.
It wasn't till about a year later when I was sitting in my linguistics class actually learning all about the verb "be" that it hit me and I suddenly understood why it would make so much sense for God to want his people to "be". When Moses meets God in the form of the burning bush, God sends him off on a mission. Moses wants to know, "Who should I say sent me? Who are you?" God says "I AM WHO I AM. Tell them I AM has sent you". So when God is asked who he is, he didn't say, "I am the Creator, or I am really powerful". He just said, "I AM". God is and was so confident in his being that he felt no need to orient himself according to labels, according to category. He simply was. He simply be.
And I, I am created in his image. We all are actually. What that means is that we were modeled after him. If he defines himself by his being, then it makes sense for us to do the same. Not that God never explained in more detail who he was, and not that we are constrained from talking about the social categories we fit into. But something like by demonstrating how it is done, God has shown us what it means to be. To find worth in being, because we are who we were created to be.
So imma be.
- Lydia
It wasn't till about a year later when I was sitting in my linguistics class actually learning all about the verb "be" that it hit me and I suddenly understood why it would make so much sense for God to want his people to "be". When Moses meets God in the form of the burning bush, God sends him off on a mission. Moses wants to know, "Who should I say sent me? Who are you?" God says "I AM WHO I AM. Tell them I AM has sent you". So when God is asked who he is, he didn't say, "I am the Creator, or I am really powerful". He just said, "I AM". God is and was so confident in his being that he felt no need to orient himself according to labels, according to category. He simply was. He simply be.
And I, I am created in his image. We all are actually. What that means is that we were modeled after him. If he defines himself by his being, then it makes sense for us to do the same. Not that God never explained in more detail who he was, and not that we are constrained from talking about the social categories we fit into. But something like by demonstrating how it is done, God has shown us what it means to be. To find worth in being, because we are who we were created to be.
So imma be.
- Lydia
Monday, April 26, 2010
Just Dance
Last Thursday I went to see a friend's senior project. She is a dance major, so she talked some and then she danced some. She quoted some famous dancer who talked about how dance expresses what words cannot. When she danced at the end she invited other people in the audience to come dance with her. And watching it all was so beautiful, making words seem completely irrelevant and unnecessary.
I've been thinking that a lot lately. About the unnecessary quality words sometimes have. You watch something creative and wordless unfold before your eyes and you suddenly wonder if you don't sound like "blah blah blah blah blah" all the time. So all this hate for words was great making me hate my major, making me hate the lexical items that come pouring out of my mouth by the minute.
But then I started thinking that maybe, just maybe they're connected somehow. That maybe I could learn about the beauty of words from watching wordlessness. That just as words are used for evil, they can also be used for good. Just as words are used to demonstrate academic superiority, they can also be used for beauty. And sometimes, yes I should just shut up. But sometimes words should be used and their beauty reclaimed.
Maybe part of reclaiming the beauty of words for me is using them in ways I don't usually use them. For example, more than anything I use words to communicate concepts. And that is all good, but I think language has more use than just the communication of one abstract concept from one human brain to another. We get so caught up on meaning, on understanding, on grammar, on perfectionism that our words stop looking beautiful and start looking like rule driven blobs on a page. Could be that I only feel this way because I am writing paper after paper full of rules, arguments, facts and assertions.
One of these many papers is about the phonology of speaking in tongues. In doing the research for this paper I came across this master's thesis written by Marcos Donnelly at the State University of New York Empire State College titled, "Divine Methodology: Speaking in tongues and insights on second language acquisition." He writes about speaking in tongues and he says some really interesting stuff about it. like this (note: glossolalia is the linguistic term for speaking in tongues):
I've been thinking that a lot lately. About the unnecessary quality words sometimes have. You watch something creative and wordless unfold before your eyes and you suddenly wonder if you don't sound like "blah blah blah blah blah" all the time. So all this hate for words was great making me hate my major, making me hate the lexical items that come pouring out of my mouth by the minute.
But then I started thinking that maybe, just maybe they're connected somehow. That maybe I could learn about the beauty of words from watching wordlessness. That just as words are used for evil, they can also be used for good. Just as words are used to demonstrate academic superiority, they can also be used for beauty. And sometimes, yes I should just shut up. But sometimes words should be used and their beauty reclaimed.
Maybe part of reclaiming the beauty of words for me is using them in ways I don't usually use them. For example, more than anything I use words to communicate concepts. And that is all good, but I think language has more use than just the communication of one abstract concept from one human brain to another. We get so caught up on meaning, on understanding, on grammar, on perfectionism that our words stop looking beautiful and start looking like rule driven blobs on a page. Could be that I only feel this way because I am writing paper after paper full of rules, arguments, facts and assertions.
One of these many papers is about the phonology of speaking in tongues. In doing the research for this paper I came across this master's thesis written by Marcos Donnelly at the State University of New York Empire State College titled, "Divine Methodology: Speaking in tongues and insights on second language acquisition." He writes about speaking in tongues and he says some really interesting stuff about it. like this (note: glossolalia is the linguistic term for speaking in tongues):
"Goodman's idea is intriguing: is glossolalia an utterance of "words" without meaning—not stripped of meaning, but never having been assigned meanings? Recall Paul of Tarsus's assertion that when he prays in tongues, "my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is unfruitful" (I Cor. 14.14)—or even the popular adage attributed to Blaise Pascal, that "the heart hath reasons that reason knoweth not." Assuming that thought exists independent of words (argued thoroughly and persuasively by Pinker 44-73), and granting Chomsky his insight that human speech capacity is something altogether different from the lexicon of a particular language, we can hypothesize an alluring role for glossolalia on the spectrum of human linguistics: pure form without function, an expression of language that comes from the most basic level of human language production—signifiers stripped from the signified, to borrow terminology from Saussure's semiotics" (Donnelly 2008, p. 19).
So this is an example of words used in ways they are not usually. Words used without meaning to communicate things of the heart. This is just one example and I am guessing that there are a million other ways in which words are connected to beauty and not just to manipulation, ways in which wordless creativity and words are connected. And I don't really know what it looks like, but I'm hoping it looks like words dancing across a page and dancers speaking their dance. It's true, maybe this is all idealistic and it really looks like dancers high kicking linguists in the face and linguists writing nasty critiques of dance performers... but wishful thinking can't hurt.
- Lydia
- Lydia
Friday, April 16, 2010
How To: Escape the blame
Have you heard of passive and active sentences? I remember that, at first, it was kind of a hard concept to grasp… but the interesting thing is that passive sentences help the subject escape the blame.
If I say:
“John threw the ball”
You know that John was doing the action… so it’s an active sentence.
But, if I make it passive and say:
“The ball was thrown.”
It’s optional to say:
“The ball was thrown by John.”
So by making it passive we technically make “the ball” the new subject of our sentence and give John a break.
Why is this important? This could possibly help you be a little more critical when listening to politics and such. Where is the blame being put?
-Alisyn =)
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