Feely feely feelings
intertext wrote
I just spent a little time on the We Feel Fine page. Someone (or more likely a group of someones) is studying the "feelings" of people who write blogs by scanning LiveJournal, MySpace and Blogger every ten minutes for "I feel" or "feeling," then producing the results. You can search by country, city, gender, date, and you can also find some of their conclusions, like "angriest cities." Try the "murmer" display, for little snippets that appear on the screen: "I feel like a slug, but at least I got some good thinking done" "I feel like noone reads this." It is a little addictive, but it's also a touch sad, I find - I'm not sure why. Little whisps of anonymous feelings drifting across the screen.
What can one say? It took me back 25 years to our church youth group in Melmoth, Zululand, with Sister Charity, CHN, teaching the kids a song:
Shoo, fly, don't bother me
I belong to somebody
I feel, I feel, i feel like a morning star.
And that makes me wonder what has happened to all of them. Is Sister Charity still around somewhere? Is she still at the Convent of the Holy Name at KwaMagwaza, or did she go to England or Lesotho?
And all the kids, who were then 10, 11, 12 years old -- they'll be in their 30s now, possibly married, some with kids of their own the same age they were then. So I wonder where they are now, Vanessa Leitch, who started it, off her own bat; Tracey Hayes, and their sisters and cousins and several others.
But generally I don't like to write "I feel". I prefer to say "I think". That's probably because I'm an INTP not an INFP.
And that reminds me of something else -- what Stanislav Andreski wrote in his Social sciences as sorcery:
One of the manifestations (unimportant in itself but very revealing) of the timorous but disingenuous humility characteristic of a burrowing apparatchik is the taboo on the word `I'. `One still shudders at the arrogance of the author in his repetitive use of the first singular concerning complex issues' - says a reviewer of one of my books, who for all I know may be the only creature in whom this obscene word can induce actual shudders, although by saying `one' instead of `I' he implies that most of his readers suffer from this allergy. I doubt whether the reviewer in question favours the majestic first plural normal among the older French writers, and still common among their successors, but which in England is reserved for the Queen. Presumably he prefers the anonymous `it', and likes to see an expression like `I think that ...' replaced by `it is hypothesized ...', which, apart from expurgating the dirty word `to think') ministers to the bureaucratic underling's predilection for submissive anonymity combined with oracular authority. I do not see why declaring that I - a mortal and fallible man but entitled to express his opinions - hold this or that view should be more arrogant than pretending to be the Voice of Science"
I just spent a little time on the We Feel Fine page. Someone (or more likely a group of someones) is studying the "feelings" of people who write blogs by scanning LiveJournal, MySpace and Blogger every ten minutes for "I feel" or "feeling," then producing the results. You can search by country, city, gender, date, and you can also find some of their conclusions, like "angriest cities." Try the "murmer" display, for little snippets that appear on the screen: "I feel like a slug, but at least I got some good thinking done" "I feel like noone reads this." It is a little addictive, but it's also a touch sad, I find - I'm not sure why. Little whisps of anonymous feelings drifting across the screen.
What can one say? It took me back 25 years to our church youth group in Melmoth, Zululand, with Sister Charity, CHN, teaching the kids a song:
Shoo, fly, don't bother me
I belong to somebody
I feel, I feel, i feel like a morning star.
And that makes me wonder what has happened to all of them. Is Sister Charity still around somewhere? Is she still at the Convent of the Holy Name at KwaMagwaza, or did she go to England or Lesotho?
And all the kids, who were then 10, 11, 12 years old -- they'll be in their 30s now, possibly married, some with kids of their own the same age they were then. So I wonder where they are now, Vanessa Leitch, who started it, off her own bat; Tracey Hayes, and their sisters and cousins and several others.
But generally I don't like to write "I feel". I prefer to say "I think". That's probably because I'm an INTP not an INFP.
And that reminds me of something else -- what Stanislav Andreski wrote in his Social sciences as sorcery:
One of the manifestations (unimportant in itself but very revealing) of the timorous but disingenuous humility characteristic of a burrowing apparatchik is the taboo on the word `I'. `One still shudders at the arrogance of the author in his repetitive use of the first singular concerning complex issues' - says a reviewer of one of my books, who for all I know may be the only creature in whom this obscene word can induce actual shudders, although by saying `one' instead of `I' he implies that most of his readers suffer from this allergy. I doubt whether the reviewer in question favours the majestic first plural normal among the older French writers, and still common among their successors, but which in England is reserved for the Queen. Presumably he prefers the anonymous `it', and likes to see an expression like `I think that ...' replaced by `it is hypothesized ...', which, apart from expurgating the dirty word `to think') ministers to the bureaucratic underling's predilection for submissive anonymity combined with oracular authority. I do not see why declaring that I - a mortal and fallible man but entitled to express his opinions - hold this or that view should be more arrogant than pretending to be the Voice of Science"