Derivitaves: tautological, tautologism, tautologist, tautologize, tautologous.
Examples: I am what I am, it is what it is. A tautological statement is, or was regarded by the Greeks, as being true merely because it is the same thing twice. "It was fun because it was fun." Interestingly enough, but I don't understand it (nor do I care to), is that there is a mathematical logic based on probability that is used when you do a boolean search on the internet. That's very postmodern, not understanding something that we are so intrinsically a part of. We use tautologies, or redunduncies, everyday. Here is a sentence comprised entirely of tautologies, 16 in all, see if you can spot them!
In my opinion, I think that the SAT test is no harder than using an ATM machine. It should never be a joint cooperation and done in close proximity with other people, but it is a necessary requirement that one should be adequate enough with today's modern technology that one should learn the test with DC-ROM disks and dot.com aids, irregardless (not acutally a word) of how stupid, smart, inept, and etc. they may be. I'll reiterate again, the SAT test is not hard, but if you do well on it you should win a free $100.00 dollars!
Our guest speaker on Friday talked about many interesting things. When she mentioned iconoclasm I thought of many things. Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe are iconoclasts. As are crucifixes and swastikas, and all of the little symbols on the althiometer that guide Lyra in the Golden Compass. Linda said that "reading doesn't hold still. There is no end to the ways of reading. If your gonna be a Baptist, they're three different kinds of Baptists." I find it interesting that the needles of the compass never hold still, there are always different ways to see the symbols, read between the lines and disect the different layers of literature and life. Nothing really, "is what it is", and nothing goes without saying. Thinking like a postmodernist, there is no origin, and we are skeptical of symbols but IMAGE IS EVERYTHING. Linda mentioned that children are not supposed to be skeptics. She had also mentioned an anxiety of influence in spreading literacy through america through early primers. Noah Webster sought to regularize language and give America its own language apart from England.
I would also like to explore the notion of whether or not there is a such thing as a child. Is a child a being in and of itself, a little alien we cannot understand inside of a miniature human's body, one particular body and mind that is distinct from what it will become, or does the term child just denote time, a life stage, something psychologically void until we provide it with the necessary tools for it to move on to another stage in life, and so on, until it dies? In class today it was mentioned that the child was invented, possibly as a result of adult nostalgia and yearning for one's past. We have explored how nothing is new, nothing is original, "Don't ask what's new, ask what's old". Postmodern theory suggests that nostalgia is a form of pastiche, which is empty parody. It is a way of recycling old images, a sort of bricolage, but it also suggests that there is no real depth, the images don't have a root or an origin from which to garner real meaning and, as such, like we've seen with Plato and the problem with poets and artists, is that there is an inherent mistrust in signs. A bricoleur is an artist, a poet, who may hodgepodge different symbols that are at hand. In a sense then, children may be a bricolage of the symbols we have exposed to and instilled in them. Children are what we want them to be (refer to an earlier blog of mine) and we don't allow their own individual mind time to flourish as God intended, but we teach as we see fit. We create a child, as Pygmalion sculpted Galetea, from a presence of our symbols from our own nostalgic past. That said, there would be nothing unique about the child, they are only recycled versions of ourselves. And isn't that really true. I am just like my father and my mother complains about it all the time!
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