{"id":2510,"date":"2013-11-01T11:58:43","date_gmt":"2013-11-01T16:58:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=2510"},"modified":"2013-11-01T11:58:43","modified_gmt":"2013-11-01T16:58:43","slug":"words-packages-of-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=2510","title":{"rendered":"Words – Packages of Meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bookshop<\/a><\/p>\n

A lovely stained glass window at the top of a marble staircase in an old bookshop in the Cuidad Vieja \/old city\u00a0of Montevideo. (They stock modern books, though, lovely.)\u00a0 I took\u00a0a photo to remember what the phrase\u00a0was, and just now\u00a0put it through an online latin to English translation site, and it came up as ‘Truth is the daughter of lies”\u00a0<\/em> <\/span>which isn’t really what I thought I might be expecting – but if that is a fair translation, as on reflection it could be, then\u00a0what an odd thing to have displayed in a bookshop.\u00a0 Next time I go down there I’ll see if I can get some better feeling for what the purpose of these words is.<\/p>\n

I read a lot, and love it when\u00a0words frame something with which I feel close personal affinity.\u00a0\u00a0 This morning I came across a climate change issue\u00a0blogger I hadn’t read before,\u00a0Pointman\u00a0\u00a0http:\/\/thepointman.wordpress.com\/2013\/11\/01\/make-no-mistake-words-are-ammo-2\/<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0 He made some very interesting observations about the alarmists\u00a0 v. sceptics exchanges in the climate change, um, issue\/debate\/word fest.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I was recently accused of being ‘a denier’ which as you know\u00a0is a pretty derogatory term in this context !\u00a0<\/em><\/span>\u00a0 I am however a sceptic, and always feel relieved when I come across someone who has seen through the smoke and mirrors of the issue and realized that (1) climate has been changing since the Earth had an atmosphere, and (2) Man has the huge advantage over\u00a0most other species\u00a0in being adaptive to a wide set of conditions and change.\u00a0 In other words, our hope as a species is to mitigate the effects of climate change, which of course effect all 7bn+ of us to some degree; some more effected than others by virtue of geographic location on the planet’s surface.\u00a0\u00a0It is known from the fossil record that something like 99%? maybe a little less – of species that were once on Earth have\u00a0been extinguished mostly during ice ages and cold periods.\u00a0 Well of course we managed\u00a0to put the\u00a0Tasmanian Tiger <\/span><\/a><\/span>onto the extinct list all by our human selves – and there are other\u00a0species that have\u00a0disappeared because of direct action by Man, but on the whole more disappear by ‘rapid’ environmental change\u00a0 – ‘rapid’ and ‘change’\u00a0being relative in this sense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A lovely stained glass window at the top of a marble staircase in an old bookshop in the Cuidad Vieja \/old city\u00a0of Montevideo. (They stock modern books, though, lovely.)\u00a0 I took\u00a0a photo to remember what the phrase\u00a0was, and just now\u00a0put it through an online latin to English translation site, and it came up as ‘Truth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[219,222,223,220,221],"class_list":["post-2510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-alarmists","tag-climate-change","tag-pointman","tag-sceptics","tag-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6uxpF-Eu","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2510"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2515,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2510\/revisions\/2515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}