RIGHT ACTION

Gautama Buddha is credited with volumes of sayings, teachings, and admonitions most of which he never uttered. It is fairly certain that he provided the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. Beyond that: barnacles on a whale's hide.

Right Action is usually listed as the fifth of the eight. What constitutes Right Action? Many clichés suggest answers: Take the path with heart. Follow your passions. Follow your dreams. Stop and smell the roses. Many more.

All such answers imply seeking those experiences which offer aesthetic value. This begs questions: How does one determine aesthetic value? How do aesthetics apply to the daily grind? Why should one bother? Today's posting considers four principles that offer insight for navigating the shoals and wicked seas of daily life.

1. Experiences or objects have aesthetic value if they are judged to be meaningful or teach us truths. Watching television rarely fits into this category. Climbing a mountain does.

Get off the couch.

2. Experiences or objects have aesthetic value if they have the power to provoke change. The music of Ludwig van Beethoven comes to mind.

Listen to music (lose the dumb phone and all other electronic gizmos). Sit. Listen.

            Beethoven

Portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820

3. Experiences or objects have aesthetic value if they provoke intellectual or emotional harmony. A book by David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo, does both for me.

Read a book.

4. Experiences or objects have aesthetic value if they present a unique perspective of the world and/or its people. Form creates the value; function, in this case, is not relevant. A painting by Picasso suggests itself.

Stretch yourself culturally (physically, too).

The bottom line: De gustibus non disputandum est.

BUGABOO, The Blank Page

Every writer's nemesis is a blank page. Struggling? Take your last coherent thought, replace what you got with some synonyms, and the same thought comes out in a different way. Fills some space. If yer lucky, might provoke a new line of thought.

Many bugaboos afflict the writer looking for a plot. Raymond Chandler offers this solution: When you hit a wall, real or imagined, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. Even Chandler thought this was often a silly piece of business, but it worked for him. (Read The Long Goodbye. Many tag the book as his best.)

What we are dealing with here are unrealistic fears or dislikes of something real or imagined. Afraid of the dark? That be yer bugaboo, friend.

The word has no entry in Skeat's etymological dictionary. 'Bug' is there. That word derives from the Celtic bwg which is defined as a hobgoblin or spectre. The Irish say bocan. In Lithuania you say baugus which just means 'terrific'; and baugus comes from bugti, to terrify. When you say 'she's a terrific girl' do you mean you're scared witless of her?

Meanings come and go. Confusion ever present. Where's that chump with the gun in is hand?

Well, enough. A blank page can be terrifying. A blank mind is even worse.

A Collie named Blue.

Sometimes ya just got ta stop and eat the flowers.  

PUNCTUATION

Homo sapiens have the proclivity---just looked that one up, a bon mot if'n I do say so meself---for assumption. Time is taken for granted; water is taken for granted; and children---don't get me started on parenting. Bite somebody's head off. We'll just have a look at some punctuation and call it good.

Quotation marks, primes, and apostrophes are used and abused with abandon. Good reason for this: hard and fast rules are not available. Check your three major writing format styles---MLA, APA, and CMS---and you get a plethora of feeble conditional responses. And that's just for the US. In Great Britain, the Oxford Guide to Style (Originally Hart's) provides the descriptive rules.

Descriptive I'll have you note. Not prescriptive. No definitive 'right way' exists. Usage makes right.

Most agree that apostrophes are punctuation marks. Some note that they might be used as diacritical marks. This applies to English and a few other languages. Geoffrey Troy introduced these marks to French in 1529. Before 1868, the Japanese didn't use any punctuation. Only after the Meiji Restoration, when they mimicked everything western, did the practice change. The word itself comes from the Greek (no surprise) προσῳδία [ prosōidía] meaning a turning away or elision. In English, you folks use it for omissions, possessives, and the marking of plurals for individual characters.

Quotation marks, for some grammarians, have status only as a 'kind' of punctuation. Hmm? Problems arise when quotaton marks themselves are punctuated. Americans tend to use double quotation marks to enclose a quotation. The British opt for singles. For a quotation within a quotation, just the opposite. Periods and commas? Inside for the Americans; outside for the British. They do agree that all other punctuation marks go outside the marks.

Primes (and double primes) are used in mathematics and measurement. They look much like apostrophes. 6' 7" for example. In fact, primes don't exist on most keboards and have to be inserted as a special character. Most just use the single apostrophe, as I did. This 6ʹ 7ʺ uses primes.

There are more quibbles, but best to double check a style guide and then use intelligence guided by experience.

A final note: Bernstein, in The Careful Writer insists that 'quote' is a casualism for 'quotation' and should not be used in formal writing. Not everyone agrees.

Edgar, out in the backyard

with his 'prime' ears.