Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- Fate

Please have a little sympathy for people who don’t like Regency romances – or romances of any kind, including fairy tales. They probably also don’t like Greek myth, and it all comes down to one thing.

They can’t get interested in a story where they can see it coming.

Oh, sure, Greek myth has been around for millennia and we all know how they come out. But it partly comes down to why you can’t sanewash evil characters in fairy tales or do more than poke fun at the bad guys in romances.

In fact, even the Greeks might have felt the same way by the time of Alexander, leading to the decline of Greek theater which, after all, acted out the lessons of Greek oral tradition on stage.

Fate. To this, Greeks ascribed the Oedipus cycle. Let’s look at it as if it was an oral tradition, its likely basis.

A king and queen get a prophecy that their newborn son will kill his father and marry his mother. If it hadn’t been Pytho, the seeress at Apollo’s shrine of Delphi, they might have blown it off as did Croesus when told that starting a war on Persia would ruin a great nation. Turned out his own nation was the one ruined.

At any rate, they had the option of killing the child outright, but they opted for a cultural feature, exposing the child where wild beasts could eat it. To make sure the prophecy came true, the gods sent a shepherd who rescued and raised the child.

Oedipus goes to the same oracle, which tells him the same prophecy. Fearing that it refers to his foster parents, he leaves. At a crossroads he disputes the right of passage with his birth father, whom he kills. He then proceeds to his birth town, which now has no king and, in a male-dominated culture, no lawful heir, a situation ripe for trouble.

Here he outwits an enemy which has closed the city off from foreign travel. Oedipus guesses the Sphinx’s riddle and she either commits suicide or he kills her. Hospitality to foreigners was a noted feature of ancient cultures; Jewish Aggadah says that Lot’s wife means hospitality when she says that he has brought a bad custom to S’dom.

Oedipus becomes king as a reward for restoring the city’s foreign trade and diplomacy, and marries the queen to provide an heir for peaceful transition to the next generation of rulers. However, once she has birthed their four children, a plague of infertility strikes the city, reminiscent of the plague that strikes Grar when Avimelekh takes Sarah from Avraham. It doesn’t mean the narratives have a relationship. It shows the importance to ancient cultures of having a clear line of inheritance. When the Bible calls Noach tamim, it points to his descent in the direct line from Shet, something that Qain’s “descendants” don't have.

Once again, Delphi comes into the picture (note that this is the third time), saying that the murderer of the old king must be brought to justice. Some other things happen, and Oedipus realizes that it’s him. His mother commits suicide and Oedipus takes a brooch off her gown and blinds himself. He could have used a knife – he probably had one hanging from his girdle that he would have used for eating, paring his nails and so on – so once there must have been a ritual significance to that brooch. I’d like to think she used it like a crystal ball, but Sophocles does not tell us.

Two of Oedipus’ children were boys, and they agreed to share the throne but one of them refused to give it up after his turn and they killed each other in the ensuing war. Jocasta’s brother, who was involved in all of this, then takes the throne. This brings up two issues. To initial appearances, Oedipus is a tyrant in the definition of Thucydides, not part of the old ruling clan but taking over the government. Returning the rule to Creon shows that even a tyrant whom the population accepts, or who benefits the polis, is not as good as the old ruling clan.

Which is a dangerous lesson to teach. It suggests that the Olympians were at fault for taking over from their parents, the Titans. And in fact the lesson of both the Olympians and the Titans is that it’s OK to marry your sister – indeed a play by Achilles Tattius states that in Greek law marrying your father’s daughter is fine but not your mother’s daughter. Avraham tells Avimelekh (chapter 20) the same thing about Sarah. This is a sign that real kinship was counted through the mother in ancient cultures.

It also suggests something the Greeks would never have admitted, that the right to rule runs through the queen, not the king. The story of the Sphinx may have been added somewhere along the way to justify Oedipus being chosen as king, instead of taking the right to rule from  marrying the queen. Once she died, Creon took over because he was her brother.

Now let’s get back to the fate thing. In a sense, Oedipus is thrust into this story as the embodiment of why you shouldn’t ask strangers to rule your polis. Thucydides says that when a polis ran into political difficulties, it would ask a stranger to resolve them. The Oedipus story is the ancient culture telling its people not to do that. Oedipus was fated to commit two horrible crimes to justify that teaching.

Once again, oral narratives have to come out the way they do in order to teach the lesson they are intended to teach. Get far enough from the oral roots of your culture, and you have to change your narratives to supply a new justification for how things turn out. You can involve the Erinyes, who do come into the Oedipus story and stemmed from the castration of Uranus, or Nemesis who punishes hubris, but no matter how the later culture disguises it, the old lesson is still there.

Until the culture changes. Fairy tales often portray a prince finding a bride, so as to have a legitimate heir. As Europe evolved into constitutional monarchies, fairy tales became nursery tales, not lessons about how the culture worked.

Regency romances have had a similar fate. The culture that turned over protection of young girls from father to an older man of reformed morals and reliable income, fell out of favor as women inherited fortunes and tied them up in settlements if they married, or kept control of the purse-strings themselves if they didn’t. Once England had a reigning queen, Parliament enacted things like the Married Women’s Property Act (1870 and 1882) which allowed women to own and dispose of property. It continued in the 20^th century with enabling women to get credit and loans without a masculine co-signer.

In the meantime, what do the Four Mothers of the English Novel teach their readers? Well, Maria Edgeworth had a close and continuing relationship with her father, and critics see his hand in much of the didactic material in her works. The same is true of Fanny Burney, who knew Dr. Johnson and partly wrote to earn his praise. When Edgeworth writes of an orphan, she consigns the girl to high society foster parents. Burney’s orphans are heiresses, but her last character lives a version of Burney’s own life.

Anne Radcliffe’s father was a haberdasher, not a scholar, and so was her husband. She places her girls in mortal peril but the villains are such as you will never see in England, “where roads and newspapers lay everything bare.”

Jane Austen is subversive. When her fathers die, they leave things in a mess, such as the Dashwoods. When they live, their foolishness – however momentary – affects their daughters for the worse. She does not teach that girls should set up their own desires in opposition to wise counsel, but Ann Elliott does not have uniformly wise counsel to draw on.

In between the opening and closing of your Regency novels, while your heroine is learning the lesson that qualifies her to marry her hero, think about the role of fate. You need to show one of at least two things. Either her lessons learned enable her to leap over the obstacles fate throws in her way, or the obstacles teach her that life doesn’t always turn out the way we want. But the obstacles of fate have to involve the lessons that Regency culture wanted girls to learn, like how to not fall for fortune-hunters or a slip on the shoulder. And remember, the girls of the Regency were the mothers of the Victorians. Any lesson your heroine learns that foreshadows Victorianism is all to the good of realism. 

Knitting -- a horrible truth

So I was wondering what was in these interchangeable needle kits that pretty much every yarn vendor carries them. I looked at two yarn vendors and what they carried, and an independent review.

And the horrible truth is that about half my projects use size 2 or 3 needles, like with linen or Shetland yarn.

The kits all start at size 4.

What's more, the smallest size tether they carry is 24 inches. For jumper necks and the tops of sleeves, I use a 16 inch tether.

The kits of double points, which I use at the bottom of sleeves, start at size 6.

If you know about any kits of either kind that have the right size needles for lace weight, fingering weight and sport yarn like Euroflax, let me know. Otherwise I'll just keep buying individual Addi needles in sizes I need. Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

I'm just saying -- devaluing "experts"

So here I go again, off on a tear after a skeet from an academic who is blinded by the light and tries to present all experts as equal, hoping to elevate liberal arts experts to the same level with STEM and trying to scare us into supporting them by scolding us for devaluing “experts”.

Well, if you’ve been reading my blog, you know what I’ve said about experts. This is a long post but it summarizes a couple dozen of other posts.

There is a Supreme Court definition of expertise.

a/ If you have published papers in periodicals for peer review, had your approved dissertation published as a book, if you do basic or advanced research, or teach or advise in an accredited university (some colleges and universities are not accredited), and have been involved in your field for some time post-doctorate, you can testify in court as an expert in your field.

b/ If you have worked for years in a field with a recognized professional structure, especially if it has things like CEU requirements, you can testify in court as an expert in your field.

All others who testify must have their testimony supported by data from, you guessed it, expert witnesses.

The problem is the path to expertise.

With b, there is a clear path. If you work continuously in the field you gain expertise. If you get all your CEUs as prescribed by your profession, you get exposed to the latest information. If you don’t get fired, you probably know what you’re doing on the job.

For a, it’s more of a problem.

STEM has a clear progression of training, publication, and involvement in the field that creates, maintains and increases expertise. This includes fields usually listed in the liberal arts department that draw heavily on STEM data, such as archaeology, psychology, and sociology.

The rest of you, I don’t want to hear any complaints about getting devalued.

Your professors and advisors have exposed you to things that detract from your expertise. They may not take you seriously if you don’t follow along with what they say, a clear authoritarian situation. This includes teaching you jargon and making you use it in your papers to prove that you run with the in crowd.

Another facet is pipelining. I’ve talked about this many times and identified papers that produced nonsense conclusions due to lack of a 360 degree perspective on the subject.

Pipelining has another problem. It steers academics into ignoring important issues and writing what I think one writer long ago called “the 350^th abridgement of English history”. I’ll give you a for-instance. One author in England in the 70s gained notice for writing about feminism. But before twenty years passed, she transitioned to writing about the same old white male power brokers everybody had been writing about for 200 years. It’s the same thing as people continuing to write about the Kennedys when every last thing that could be said has been said, and somebody had to defend against a plagiarism accusation because there are literally no more new phrases that a writer can use on this subject.

If you are in these liberal arts fields, when was the last time your advisor or peer review said rewrite your paper because you use Fallacy X? How do you know your paper doesn’t use Fallacy X? Or Y? or whatever? On my blog I blast a paper that uses four different fallacies, and then I give the punchline that the author has a university job teaching. If your peers let you get away with using fallacies, then you have no business claiming expertise because your peer reviews are worthless.

But I have other provocations, as Elizabeth Bennet told Mr Darcy, you know I do. Or at least you know if you’ve been reading this blog.

Academics who have no STEM content in their work may fail in epistemology. Not only are they supposed to use the correct jargon, they are supposed to use the correct sources. I mean academically correct, not necessarily factually correct. When was the last time your advisor told you to do a review of the literature with an eye to publishing about the debunking of past publications in your field?

Anything can be debunked at any time after publication. If you do not check into the debunking of books or their sources, you risk your reputation as an expert on using bad data.

If your advisor or department is pushing you to use AI, PUSH BACK. In the last couple of months two reports exposed that in both science and law, use of AI to write papers has put out false results. Tens of thousands of papers and legal documents published in the last two years have been retracted not just because of bad data, but also because of mythical sources. Lawyers have been disciplined by the American Bar for failing in their duty of care. Reputations have rightly been ruined.

You cannot follow the fashion without risking your reputation for expertise, and AI is one more fashion you cannot afford to follow.

And then there’s my own field, languages, especially ancient languages. As I wrote on my Greek thread, every grammar of Classical Greek is worthless. I won’t repeat the details.

It’s also true of Biblical Hebrew. The only existing text that uses Dr. Cook’s dissertation as a basis, is worthless because the authors made it “non-confessional”. That means they violated the First Law of Sapir-Whorf Linguistic Theory by stripping out every piece of information which ties the language to the culture. It’s bowdlerization, and so I told the author who posted on Researchgate.

And I’m finding the same thing for Arabic. In my Greek blog I used the term Grenglish for trying to force Classical Greek into the mold of English, the way Dionysius Thrax forced it into the mold of Latin 2000 years ago. Haywood and his admirer Price did the same thing and I call it Arglish in my draft write-up of what I’ve learned. William Wright from the 1800s is the only author to admit that Arabic is an aspectual language like all the ancient Semitic languages. But all of them are stuck on morphology and fail to use context to explain meaning. Which is what my write-up is trying to correct as far as I can tell what the meaning is.

But it’s not just the ancients. I tried to find decent grammars of Slavic languages like Polish and Czech, and they all falsely describe the languages in terms of tense, not aspect. Yet the grammar of Russian I used 50 years ago in my first class accurately explains aspect. The people writing about world languages do not know what they’re doing and have no claim to be called experts.

You cannot beatify somebody as an expert just because they are part of academe. Their work has to be re-evaluated against relevant new information. A philology (feh) paper on the Indo-European languages from a few decades back claimed that they originated in the Middle East. How many people in language departments rewrote their work on the history of the people who used specific languages when the Human Genome Project revealed the truth – that the Indic languages developed in and around northeast Anatolia, near but not in the Caucasus Mountains? How many historians have done it?

Your body of work stands only as long as new data, perhaps from outside your field, does not debunk it. If you say “I don’t understand that stuff”, I have two answers for you.

You are dooming yourself to being debunked. It’s like that movie The Perfect Storm when George Clooney turned off all the technical inputs about the danger he was in, because Michael Ironside hurt his masculine fee fees. By the end of the movie I had no respect for that character and you will not earn my respect by following suit.

You are rejecting life-long learning, a preventative of dementia. So not only will you wind up debunked, you will wind up senile.

And yet STEM has its own problems. The number of posts or skeets I’ve seen about how to rehabilitate science with the public all betray a total ignorance of reality. I’ve written about this too, but basically it has two factors.

a/ The Enlightenment Era myth that because you expose people to information, they will not only learn it but also remember it and shape their lives around it. There are people closely related to me who went to the same schools who prove that this is laughably incorrect.

b/ The fundamental blindness to the change of influences on youth after elementary school. Parents do affect their children’s schooling after elementary, discouraging them from taking STEM and also from pursuing lifelong learning. Even parents in STEM do the latter, as if their need to pursue CEUs has nothing to do with their children.

If you were taught, or are teaching your kids, that once you’re done with formal education you’re done, you are part of the problem, not the solution.

And it’s so easy with the Internet that it’s literally a shame how many people literally haven’t learned anything since they left formal schooling.

Where are the polymaths of yesteryear? Where are the polymaths of tomorrow? Shit, where are the polymaths of today who can tell AI to go fuck itself because it’s wrong or uses mythical sources?

They’re not in academe, not even in STEM. Otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing these mass retractions.

So don’t ask me to rely on academics as experts. They are mortals, they are subject to a thousand conflicting influences, and way too many of them aren’t capable of good epistemology.

I’m just saying….

Knitting -- Euroflax

Most of the linen tops I have now, I knitted from Knitpicks Cotlin, a blend. It's actually a fine tape and you knit normally.

But I splurged on some Euroflax #2/Sport yarn, which you can get in hanks or cones. And it's pure linen and works differently.

I started out knitting normally and realized that what I was making was see-through like fishnet stockings. Uh-uh. I didn't want to have to put a tank top under it.

Then I seemed to remember working with Euroflax before, using a pattern they sold or gave free with the yarn. And I thought they had you do KTBL.

So I tried that and it comes out much better.

So do your swatch to see if you need extra yarn. I bought three hanks and I think I'll need three more to finish this top.

Once you do your hem, which I did in seed stitch, do a round of KTBL. If you're knitting in the flat, do the first row as KTBL.

Working in the round, knit the second round plain. Working in the flat, purl the wrong side row.

Alternate KTBL with a knit or purl row, and bob's your uncle.

By the way, I also bought up some of the last Jaggerspun 2/8 yarn in existence. The company went under in 2024. I have a white sweater, what I call a creamsicle top, a jumper in color #480 which I call gentian with gentians worked on a white background under the neck, a purple top with white edelweiss worked under the neck, tops in pewter, graphite, slate, curry and navy, and sweaters in the last four colors. The gentian is spectacular, in some lights it looks rich blue and in others rich purple. But it's out of production now.

I'm just saying --- videos

Here are some pro tips for doing videos to post on the web, say on Youtube.

NO TTS. If you are too fing lazy to do the voiceover yourself, after learning how to say foreign names or phrases right, we don't owe you our time.

NO urban legends. If you are too fing lazy to do the homework and avoid the lies, we don't owe you our time.

Repetition is not detail. If you don't have enough facts to fill out two hours, tell them only once unless you need them to bolster other facts, or only do a one hour video. We don't owe it to you to sit through a repetition of the same info or phrases every ten minutes.

GRAPHICS. If you can't find enough relevant graphics to match your text, draw them yourself. Also, I don't want to see somebody wearing a Jacobean collar when you're talking about some period before the death of Elizabeth I. That means you think we're too stupid to tell the difference. We don't owe it to you to let you insult our intelligence.

The same thing goes for repeatedly showing the same graphics as for repeating the same phrase in your text.

AI. Read the terms and conditions of your AI app carefully. I've heard announcements that when you take advantage of the AI in your app, the company that made the app claims copyrights. 

Besides, AI is an idiot child. It doesn't know a valid source from something that has been debunked. It lies sometimes. It contradicts itself. AI does not make you smarter. 

And finally, pick your subject properly. The only people watching your Kennedy videos are stans or people who literally never heard the name before. But the videos on the Bantu expansion are few, and have the faults I list above, and yet this was one of the major population movements in the world, which played out for thousands of years of world history.

I am no hypocrite. Every post on my blog, I wrote myself, after years of research. One string of 50 posts was 40 years in the making, because I wanted a solid string of facts, not just he said/he said, and some of the best facts I used only showed up on Internet Archive in 2014. If you're not even going to try to do some percentage of the work I did, * shrug * you're wasting my time.

I'm just saying...

21st Century Classical Greek -- it's not accusative

I was working on my Arabic language project and came across the topic "doubly accusative".

As you know, I wouldn't bring it up unless it was a stupid piece of nomenclature.

The Quranic citation was Baqara 53 which you could translate in part as "We gave Moses the Scripture..."

Wait a minute.

In English we would call Moses the indirect object and we would call its case dative.

But the case used in Arabic is the same as for Scripture, which we WOULD call accusative, since it's the direct object.

Welp in LSJ a bunch of entries have the note "c. acc. pers. et rei." One example is lissomai, which has this notation in meaning 2. And it means pray to a god (the pers.) about something.

And we would expect the god to be in dative as well. Classical Greek did have a dative (modern Greek does not), but it's not used here.

Also liteuo has the same note, but the pers. is somebody you entreat, and the rei is what you entreat on behalf of. And that is "for" which usually takes the dative in Greek.

I said all through my Greek thread that using case names turns out to be confusing because we keep thinking in Grenglish and Greek doesn't work that way. It turns out Arabic has the identical issue, only Quranic Arabic has already dropped the dative that Classical Greek kept.

I may do an Arabic thread to give examples of all the problems as well as give citations. You can read my Biblical Hebrew and Greek threads for a sneak peak at the kind of things grammarians have been screwing up for 25 centuries.

Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- maybe it's just me

When you use a verb that needs a preposition, do you struggle with where the preposition goes relative to the predicate?

The farther you put the preposition from the verb, the harder it is for your reader to know what you meant. 

But sometimes it is uncomfortable to put the preposition between the verb and predicate.

Maybe it's just me. I grew up west of Pennsylvania Dutch territory and had schoolmates who were Mennonite or at least "plain". I was used to phrases like the classic "throw the cow over the fence some hay". (tossed plenty of hay in my time too)

In that case the syntax should be "throw some hay over the fence to the cow", because "over" is part of a prepositional phrase, not a complement to the verb. In German, "to the cow" would be in dative and "some hay" would be accusative and there would be no doubt what you were throwing.

Even if you grew up immersed in the language you write in, you can make mistakes. I'm working on Arabic for a project on Samaritan scripture, and James Price assures us that kids are prone to a specific mistake if they grow up with parents who speak Arabic, but the kids don't. (Had to edit that one a couple of times)

So cut yourself some slack, but EDIT EDIT EDIT.