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Complain all you want, Musick. I'm not agreeing with Britannica either way. I'm just interested in how people here conceive of concrete and abstract thought.
Interesting that we haven't opened up any discussion of abstract art...
P.S. It could be argued that all thought is a form of abstraction, but that argument would be too diverting.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
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abstract: 2: expressing a quality apart from an object <the word poem is concrete, poetry is ~> 
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Interesting that we haven't opened up any discussion of abstract art...
Personally, I don't consider any visual art form to be abstract. Non-representational - sure; but visual art is a concrete expression of thoughts and feelings, as well as a different way of viewing concrete objects.
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Carpal Tunnel
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So, Rhubarb, what do you make of comments such as the one I paste from Britannica:
"FRANZ MARC: "(1880-1916) German painter.
His early works were academic, but exposure to Impressionism and Jugendstil lightened his style, and in 1911, with Vassily Kandinsky and other abstract painters, he became a founding member of the Blaue Reiter group. He believed that spiritual essence is best revealed through abstractionand was passionately interested in the art of primitive peoples, children, and the mentally ill. His own work consisted primarily of animal studies, since he believed nonhuman forms of life to be the most expressive manifestation of the vital force of nature. He was killed in action in World War I."
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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We don't use them much now not because people are more concrete (????) but because they aren't haven't heard of proverbs.
Zed, are you saying that nowadays people aren't familiar with proverbs [aka aphorisms] like "a rolling stone gathers no moss"?
If true, that's rather startling. How do you account for this? Is it all part of the general dilution of literacy in schools which began with the elimination of memorized passages, usually poetry?
If we are raising students with no awareness of the aphorisms which have been part of our common language, in some cases, for hundreds of years, and no awareness of poetry, who will write the speeches which future leaders will deliver to the generations to come? Will our leaders stir the masses with rap verses? [Perhaps, it has already come to that.]
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Carpal Tunnel
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raising students with no awareness of the aphorisms
They got plenty to learn about in school these days without learning pieces of nonsense about rolling stones. When's the last time you even saw a stone roll? Any school kid I've known these days leaves us old coots behind in so many things I'm not going to fret over red skies at night or selling unkilled bearskins.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jun 2002
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When's the last time you even saw a stone roll?
Lemme think. Ah yes, about the same time I last saw a kid leave school who wasn't IMHO semi-illiterate and completely functionally uneducated.
You can stuff kids chock full of facts using video clips and picures without ever educating them. I agree, the need for them to read real words or to understand anything about the past which isn't connected to the production of video games or violent movies is strictly for the birds. So let's just give the education away and save our government - and, indirectly, us taxpayers - a shitload of moolah.
Maybe isolated facts about irrelevancies are enough in this brave new world, anyway.
- Pfranz
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Carpal Tunnel
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wordmin and Cap: when's the last time you spent any time in a public school? have you volunteered your time? have you read to your children? are you helping?
formerly known as etaoin...
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Michigan has grants for poets and poetry in the schools, who knows for how much longer, but a friend of mine, Terry Wooten, has been a traveling school poet for at least 20 years and a friend of his, Max Ellison, was for years before him. I remember Max coming to my high school. My daughter and son remember Terry. When my daughter was in first grade, she was sooo excited to personally know the poetry man.... 
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