Links: cornucopia

[sonia]

Story! Maneki Neko by Bruce Sterling, via kestrell, who talks about asking people what gift could improve their pandemic experience. Goes a bit too hard-boiled detective genre for me at the end, but overall is a lovely story. Reminds me of "Catfishing on CatNet." I do so want to believe in overall benevolence.

25 Words That Are Their Own Opposites by Judith Herman. None of these were new to me, but I was surprised that one can pile up a whole 25 of them. Well, 24 and an unnecessary slur.

Plants can see, hear and smell – and respond by Josh Gabbatiss. "Plants, according to Jack C Schultz, "are just very slow animals"." Once I thought about it, of course plants can "hear" - they're impacted by vibrations just like the rest of us.

How to Ask Good Questions by Julia Evans. The examples are tech-heavy, but the overall principles are useful across disciplines.

ProPublica experiments with ultra-accessible plain language in stories about people with disabilities by Sarah Scire via Sumana Harihareswara. When I'm writing, I usually replace 20 cent words with 5 cent words. And occasionally I leave them in because they're just-right or I really want to. Those are good words! But being easily understood is more important.

Money Stories: Hadassah (Ride Free Fearless Money) by Billie Simmons, an interview with Hadassah Damien. "As a white cisgender lesbian, I haven’t experienced direct discrimination based on being queer, but for a long time I felt very alienated by status quo culture." Someone I know had an aha moment because of this quote, so I thought I'd share the article more widely.

And a couple of political ones:
How Indigenous voters swung the 2020 election by Anna V. Smith. And you can donate to Native American Rights Fund right here.

She Worked to Turn Georgia Blue and Got Arrested for It. Again. by Joel Anderson about Olivia Pearson's amazing work, via minoanmiss. I did a quick search and didn't find any ways to contribute to Olivia Pearson, but Fair Fight is Stacey Abrams' organization getting out the vote in Georgia.

Comments

[adrian_turtle]

I think that article is seriously stretching, to get 25 contranyms. "Fought" doesn't mean its own opposite, even though "X fought with Y" is ambiguous. (They were in the same fight, but it's not clear if they were on the same side.) The uncertainty isn't embedded in the word itself, it's in the context, like where "flipping a switch" is unclear about whether you turned it on or off.

[sonia]

I see what you mean, that some of the words have contradictory meanings in themselves, like sanction (approve/disapprove), and for some you have to go to the phrase level, like fight with (enemy/ally).

[jesse_the_k]

re the contronyms: clearly a U.S. audience. When I was stuck in bed for too long, listening to Radio Canada International helped maintain my sanity. Except it took me around 8 months to understand that to table a bill in the Canadian Parliament means to introduce it for discussion. (In my U.S. experience, to table a motion means to stop talking about it.)

Sue Burke creates a fascinating sf world in Semiosis/Interference. This pair of novels examines the interactions between really big and really controlling plants and the would-be colonizing humans. It's nifty!

Plain language is delightful, and really hard. It's the extreme case of if I had more time to write I would have made it shorter which, it turns out, is not Mark Twain, but Blaise Pascal. The Conscious Style Guide has some more resources. I'm reading Fading Scars, a great disability rights memoir/history by Corbett Joan O'Toole. Corbett attempts plain language in a field where academics have sown a thicket of 50 cent words. She advises:

• break your thesis into smaller chunks. Restate important points in each chunk, so they stand alone
• begin with an overview view; end with a highlight of key points with a Just the facts, ma'am
• refer only to online, not published, sources to increase accessibility.

[sonia]

Thanks for the links and info! I followed the Sue Burke link and found Do Your Neglected Houseplants Want Revenge? which says a lot about plants and relationships to deity.

[jesse_the_k]

Ahhhh, what a great essay re: houseplants and giant sloths!

[jesse_the_k]

Damn that was a great essay!

[sonia]

Yes! I have a quibble about the osage orange "failing" in its choice (not its fault!!), but when I looked back that was a tiny part of an otherwise very fine essay.