The Life and Times of Miblo del Carpio

Again I have to apologise for not being in sufficiently good health to blog, nor even to give a Word of the Week. So we'll have to wait at least another week for our discussion of philology. In the mean time, there is a little good news in the shape of my achieving 74% for the first assignment of A210 Approaching Literature entitled 'How narrative voice and dialogue are used in the passage from Volume I, Chapter XVII of Pride and Prejudice (pp. 64-5)'. Let us now just hope my health will be back for the tutorial I must attend and gig I have to play this Saturday.

Yep, there's absolutely no chance today, I'm afraid, folks, so we'll have to wait until next week for our discussion of philology. In the meantime, we may take this opportunity to entertain ourselves with the poems on my sister-blog:

With the current economic crisis sweeping the financial world, the subject of this year's Blog Action Day could be hardly more appropriate. Admittedly my understanding of the current situation is far from complete, mostly due to the fact that I have great difficulty engaging with the subject (of the economy), which appears to me to be something of a very badly written fiction bearing no resemblance to reality or to the makings of a real and believable world. A similar feeling is upon me when I watch Question Time, as though I were a being from another planet, curiously witnessing the ways they go about their lives on Earth, but knowing that nothing I will see will hold any inspiration for improving the lives of those in my own world. So it is fortunate that this article is not to be about the economy, but about poverty; a subject with which I can engage, and which it is important that we understand, and in doing so begin to formulate some way to first alleviate and then eradicate this devastating wickedness.

A glance into The Concise Oxford Dictionary may start us off along our path; and there we find:

poverty /ˈpɒvətɪ/ n. 1 the state of being poor; want of the necessities of life. 2 (often foll. by of, in) scarcity or lack. 3 inferiority, poorness, meanness. 4 Eccl. renunciation of the right to individual ownership of property. [ME f. OF poverte, poverté f. L paupertas -tatis f. pauper poor]

Definition courtesy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary

It may be the case that when the word 'poverty' is heard or read by a person, they invariably apply the first definition that the dictionary there provides - that of 'the state of being poor; want of the necessities of life' - and have images of thirst, starvation and stark environment before their eyes. Of course, this is a considerable aspect of poverty, but due consideration must be made to the second of the dictionary's definitions - 'scarcity or lack' - and to what, besides the aforementioned necessities of life, this can be applied. Some years ago, concerns were voiced by Tessa Jowell over what she called 'poverty of aspiration', describing it as being 'as destructive to well-being as material poverty'. I could not agree more, and it is these two types of poverty that this article will try to address.

Education could be considered the main culprit of both forms of poverty. Let us take the first form - the 'want of the necessities of life' - and first outline of what exactly those necessities consist. This article on Wikipedia states the traditional list of basic needs as containing 'food (including water), shelter, and clothing', with many modern lists appending 'sanitation, education, and healthcare'. It can readily be understood that, without sufficient education, neither food, shelter or clothing could be contrived; each respectively requiring the knowledge of hunting, farming and nutrition (knowing how to get, to grow and what it's safe to eat), building and tailoring. And then for sanitation, education and healthcare, education is then required for one to understand their need for each of them, and where to find them.

As for 'poverty of aspiration', education is here required to allow a person to strive for high achievement, to let them see the possibilities of greatness they may have to offer. People's attitudes must need be changed if they don't have this aspiration, and if they wish to be fulfilled.

But education has some other things to fight against; it isn't just these necessaries, these basic needs that it can conquer, and it isn't only this which causes poverty. The planet and its inhabitants are not just at the mercy of its basic needs, these ones aforementioned, but rather man has made in all its wisdom a means to further propagate poverty: this being capitalism. Or, rather, the simple existence of money, which stops us in our tracks when trying to fulfill our real basic needs. It is a cause of both the poverties of our necessities and of our aspirations. Firstly, for a want of money we may start to starve, and in doing so head out to get a job and find some. But this job we may be doing might have very little to offer us, except the means to gain our needs; and in this offering us so little, our aspirations (if we had any beforehand) are quenched, and we are left in a perpetual cycle of needing the cash to live, while needing to leave to fill our aspirations. But here is where education can help: with the knowledge of how to contrive our basic needs ourselves, independently, and completely, we can alleviate and all but eradicate our need for money. And in discovering this knowledge, we can pass it on to others, and in turn they pass it on, and so the world becomes complete and prosperous.

Greediness and jealously are attitudes which must be ridded, in order that poverty can be eradicated; and to that end, education is required. But perhaps all the education in the world couldn't save a soul, and maybe the entire restructuring of this global world is needed if we want to remove poverty, and ensure the happiness, not of the few, but of the entire population.

Requests for blog articles, and even more so for Words of the Week, are extraordinarily rare to come by - so rare, that only two such can I recount from my entire career to date (that is, two in total, of articles and WoWs combined) - and as it is my constant pleasure to satisfy my readers, I now endeavour to meet one of those requests, which was put to me a good few months ago, on the subject of Tribology.

tribology /traɪˈbɒlədʒɪ/ n. the study of friction, wear, lubrication, and the design of bearings; the science of interacting surfaces in relative motion.

Definition courtesy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary

This request was indeed placed for a Word of the Week, and placed by my old college friend and present band mate, Andy. The request now met, I can delete it from the list, but a few words on my requester might not now go amiss.

Tribology, we think, what could drive a person to request such a strange, arcane, and specialised (not to say, little heard of by those not in the know) subject as a Word of the Week on this here totally unspecialised and seldom comprehensible blog? Seldom comprehensible is understandable enough, but as to this particular word, the nature of its requester may shed some light. In fact, this is but a long-winded way of publicly congratulating my friend Andy on his recently being certified a Master of Engineering. Many congratulations, old chap! Here's the Word of the Week you may remember requesting those months ago.

So, there we go. I've barely elucidated upon the meaning of the word 'tribology', besides revealing its dictionary definition and the fact that it is a term in engineering, but since many of these articles in this chapter are to be generated at random (at least their subject matter), I feel it would be fair game to link the ology only loosely to the content of the article. Thus you find me writing an article with the title 'Tribology' about a person who has studied the subject.

Furthermore, I'm changing the rule as to when I learn of next week's subject. Previously the rule was that I will only run my ology-generating command immediately before writing about it; now the rule is that the command will be run after writing the article for the preceding ology, and that next week's will be revealed at the end of said article.

Thus I now reveal that next week's article will be on the subject of Philology.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an habitual person in possession of a lifetime of habit would be unwise to stray from that habit at any point in their life.

Which is why, as we enter this long-expected chapter, I will do no such thing, but will rather dwell on this lifetime habit of introducing and elucidating upon subjects of which I have barely no knowledge whatsoever.

It is to be a chapter devoted to 'ologies', many of which I may never have heard of, and also the majority of which I will not know what they are to be until the day I am to write about them. For, I have devised a cunning method of generating a random 'ology', which will be employed each Wednesday while this chapter lasts, just before embarking on the article. In my ~/.bashrc file I have created the following alias:

alias ologies="grep logy /usr/share/dict/words | sort -R | tail | sort -R | head -1"

and it is this which will decide the subject on which I am to write, and about which I must learn as much as I can. The first two are already decided; but after that it's all down to this handy command to see what we will learn.

Word of the Week

Ology

-ology /ˈɒlədʒɪ/ comb. form see -LOGY.

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-logy /lədʒɪ/ comb. form forming nouns denoting: 1 (usu. as -ology) a subject of study or interest (archaeology; zoology). 2 a characteristic of speech or language (tautology). 3 discourse (trilogy). [F -logie or med.L -logia f. Gk (as LOGOS)]

Definition courtesy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary