Hi! First post.

I love the quotations almost as much as the words. They often are the beginning of my musings for the day.

Today's: You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts. -Khalil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931).

The Accidental Tourist completely undermines the credibility of this statement. The relationship with his wife made a great impression on me. She was drawn to him because he didn't talk much. This gave him an aura of mystery and profundity. He didn't speak because he was shy and uncertain.

"You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts."

that strikes me as pretentious and silly. i talk when I need to communicate with other people because i am not telepathic nor are any of the the people with whom I need to communicate.

Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, /And think they grow immortal as they quote. Edward Young (1683 - 1765)

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought. Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 - 1957)

A question about English usage - does posting quotes that mock the use of quotations count as irony?

I would say it does in the US. I can't speak for other dialects of English, the speakers of which think USns don't do irony because we call it something else.

Latishya, beautiful script for your icon. Are they two different scripts? What does it mean?

'A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.' Is true to an extent, but it also means that the quoter is making connections with previous thinkers. Our thought is based on a lifetime of absorbing, accepting or rejecting, the thoughts of others. However, to use a quotation to prove a point or end an argument is lazy.

Welcome. Most of the time quotations have made their way around because they prove a point in the shortest, most adaquate and often witty way. Gibran in this case may not deliver a universal thruth, but are there any of those? For mystics the quote may count.

It is the same phrase written twice. It says "qawwali Hamesha" or "Qawwali forever". The first reads left to right and is in devanagari, the script used for Hindi (also for Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit and others). The other reads from right to left and is Nastaliq, one of two variants of the Arabic alphabet used for Urdu. The other is Naksh. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the Nastaliq as I don't read or write Urdu. I am planning to correct this because I think that Nastaliq is beautiful.

cross-threading a bit,
The sayings of the wise are like goads; like fixed spikes are the topics given by one collector. Ecclessiaties 12:11

;-) Thanks for the new word 'goad'. To prodd a goat with a goad? The second part of the quote is well.. maybe I'll understand later.

maybe I'll understand later.

Like fixed spikes
Like nails driven firmly into wood

given by one collector
From one source/person

"I have gathered a posie of other men’s flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own." -- John Bartlett, if one believes Bartleby.com or Michel de Montaigne, otherwise.

Quotations can emphasize an idea or restate it pithily or to set the stage for a chapter. This sort of quote is often used in textbooks, as well as in popular books to introduce scholarly topics to the lay public. For example, I'm in my office at work now and the first book I pick up is "Principles of Artificial Intelligence" by Joscha Bach. I have not read this book yet, but it is here on the shelf waiting for me. I turn to the start of a random chapter somewhere in the middle, and I find a quote from John McCarthy (among the first AI researchers).

At other times they convey irony directly (or indirectly in the manner the quote is juxtaposed by quoter). I cannot recall a specific instance of seeing this sort of quote and only have the vaguest sense that I must have seen such a thing once or twice. Even if this fuzzy recollection is not a confabulation, this sort of quotation must be relatively rare in comparison to the other kinds.

Sometimes quotes are misused or misapplied. Quotes are termed "out of context" when, for example, they are cited in such a manner as to indicate a point other than that intended by the original author. One is led to believe that lawyers are fond of this. Often quotes out of context are used to make it appear that the person quoted has espoused something exactly contrary to what he attempts to convey. (Example: attempts to show that Darwin believed the eye could not possibly have evolved or that the fossil record disproved evolution.)

In other cases, quotes are used like slogans. We all agree that Mr. A is a wise man. Mr. A said X is true. Therefore, X is true, because he was a wise man. I will give no example of this, but I can think of several as I type this. In many cases, like this quotes can become slogans or "talking points." I suppose G. Lakoff would say that these quote /slogans are successful examples of "framing."

Scholarly works often use quotes rather than a mere citation or reference to another person's work. Maybe the wording seems so clear that the borrowing author doesn't want to spoil the original intent.

A critique or review, though, might quote every line or couplet of a poem to dissect it in the body of text.

Quotations can be used in lieu of thinking, or even to obviate thinking, or they can be used to focus or direct thinking.

I don't see how quoting can be a bad or a good thing any more than writing itself is a bad or a good thing. Rather, there are good an bad examples of each.

qawwali

I had not known the word qavvālī والي before(link) 'singing and playing (esp. for dancing dervishes)'. No doubt of Arabic origin as so much of the Persian vocabulary of Urdu. I looked it up in a most handy online Arabic etymological lexicon (link) 'qawwal : story-teller [qala] Hin kavval, Per qawwal borrowed from Ar.' Arabic qala 'say' from Proto-Semitic *KWL, cf. Hebrerw qol 'voice'. The Wikipedia article on qawwali (link) tracks the Semantic shift from Arabic قَوْل (qaul) 'utterance (of the Prophet)' to "Qawwāl is someone who often repeats (sings) a Qaul, Qawwāli is what a Qawwāl sings." My Pakistani friend Ferhiz has on more than one occasion enthused to me about Urdu language poetry. The Farsi word seems to be قوالی (ghavvalee, link) 'a minstrel, a singer'. I am reminded of the singer of tales, Homer. There was a time when poetry, song, and tales were all one. The entry on the nastaʿlīq script [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nastaliq]link[/url) was interesting also. (Some day I must learn Arabic and Perso-Arabic script systems.)

That was very interesting. I would only add that I am not a follower of Sufic Islam and the qawwalis I like come from films and are different from the devotional qawwalis.

And yet of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

My father collected books of quotations. He never wrote anything without some added sparkle, clarity, expertise, or humour from the past. Quotations illustrated and, in his eye, validated his opinion. He took great care with his selection. I think it's my fondest memory of him. At family or other gatherings he was often asked to speak. He took the task, no matter how small, very seriously. His delivery would be ponderous because of diffidence, but he was always able to get his audience to laugh, and, as toward the end funerals became more frequent, cry.

I kept many of his books of quotations. I couldn't keep them all because I live across an ocean. My sisters expected me to send the lot to Half Price Books, but I couldn't give them up.

I do love a well-placed quotation or allusion. A bad one is an abomination. Better never to have quoted at all. I prefer mine from the books I have read myself, but it's not a hard and fast rule.

How long is a ball of string? Like the Apprentice's broom, Frankenstein's enquiry or Phaedrus' hypotheses, the search for one quotation can lead you on an ever widening gyre. At first the flesh might be strong, but the soul will weary.

As my father often said, 'There's no substitute for common sense.'

Welcome, Christine. It sounds like your father was a man worth knowing.

Hi latishya. Just noticed you're online. Our time zones probably aren't that different. What does "qawwali Hamesha" or "Qawwali forever" mean to you? I'm off to work now. Have a great day everybody.

simply an expression of my love for the music. I spent all afternoon listening to a recently purchased compilation of filmi qawwalis. i love them and hope they are with me forever.

'There's no substitute for common sense.' That's what I always tell myself when I've made another goof.

"Formal grammatical rules may help a weak or stupid mind, but a vigorous intellect creates new and more accurate forms and less gifted thinkers intuitively accept without a thought these beautiful creations as they accept without a thought the countless creations of nature with which they are surrounded. Thus our language is growing richer from generation to generation."

G. Curme, Has English A Future Tense?, The Journal of English and German Philolog, 12(5):528-529

I have no idea who G. Cume is and Google was no help at all.


But I love the quote.

Thanks olly, for explaining me this. 'Collector' I'd never seen used in such way and half the wisdom was lost to me.

G. Curme

George Curme was an American linguist and grammarian (link). I have his grammar of the English language from the thirties of the last century. He was one of the first descriptive linguists who wrote a grammar. It's up there with those by Jespersen and Poutsma.

So what is everyone's opinion on 'whole nuther'? Or have you discussed this already on a whole nuther thread? I've never seen it written, but we hear it all the time.

Is it a 'beautiful creation'? Or something that should be vigorously discouraged, vehemently disallowed, officially indexed and banned? Do you use it unconsciously, tolerate it impotently, or celebrate its euphony?

Just wondering.

I've got to get me some of that stuff. I love music too but I've never heard of filmi qawwalis. I'll look it up. Many thanks for your reply.

---So what is everyone's opinion on 'whole nuther'? Or have you discussed this already on a whole nuther thread? I've never seen it written, but we hear it all the time.

Is it a 'beautiful creation'? Or something that should be vigorously discouraged, vehemently disallowed, officially indexed and banned? Do you use it unconsciously, tolerate it impotently, or celebrate its euphony?

Just wondering. ---

My opinion:

A) It's A whole nOther. With an O not a U

2) The word 'another' is one word. Note that there are no spaces in there. The 'whole' has been infixed into the word and you can't go throwing out letters just because you're afraid that Miss Thistlebottom will write some kind of nastygram on your essay.

Þ) I suppose you think that 'a napron' should be 'an apron'.

'whole nuther'

Perfectly wonderful in speech and informal settings (such as online forums), probably wouldn't use it in formal written texts, unless jocularly.

Or something that should be vigorously discouraged, vehemently disallowed, officially indexed and banned?

Ain't gonna happen in my lifetime. Sometime in the inchoate future it may go the way of other linguistic dodo birds.

...and that, in itself, is a whole nuther concept.