| | I've been eating a lot of canned vegetables these days. I'm beginning to realize that in life, it is unreasonable to expect everything to be clean and neat and organized. Somewhere along the line the you must be able to accommodate the chaos, the entropy around you. I can't account for my every minute, but that's really not a problem. I would end up wasting more time trying to audit every last part of my 24 hour days.
I have this constant feeling in the background of my thoughts that I am waiting for something, preparing for something. Organizing my shelves, my clothes, counting my dollars. Like a standby waiting for orders, like those Japanese soldiers roaming around the jungles decades after the war has ended. I realize now that the regimentation I am looking for is never going to come from the outside. If I want to make the most of life, I have reach inside, find out what I want to do, to accomplish, and find the nerve to pull through our human tendency to acclimate to dull routine. All I have to do is get used to a higher level of productivity. Easy.
The Persian word for Cow is Gav. The Afghans pronounce their v's like w's, which is how they were pronounced in Persian originally. Cow sounds a lot like Gaw, which I suspect is not a coincidence. More interesting still is the Persian word behtar, meaning better. "Better" in Mazandarani, which is an older dialect of Persian spoken south of the Caspian, is also pronounced "better". The Persian "behtar" is ostensibly made of two elements, the prefix beh, meaning good, and the suffix tar, which is used as a superlative. Does the English suffix ter (if it even is a suffix) and the Persian "tar" have an ancestor that predates English and Persian? Greater, smarter, faster are tempting examples, but meaner, cleaner, closer, are counterexamples and farther is a curiosity in its own right. The question remains, if the English word "better" is really made up of two elements, as its meaning suggests, then what are these two elements? And is the first related to the Persian "beh", and the second to the Persian "tar"?
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| | Posted 7/3/2008 12:17 PM - 26 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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