Taomeow

I think "floppy" and "flexible" are almost opposites. Floppy flops as it wants to. Flexible flexes as I want it to. (And if one wants a rigid weapon that dictates to you how to use it because it is... well... inflexible -- then why not play baseball instead of taiji? ) Seriously though, I've come to taiji from taekwondo, and a rigid sword feels sort of like a taekwondo punch, straightforward, it can aim where it aims and it hits or misses -- end of story. A taiji punch does not end where it lands, it can curve around its target and strike the next, and the next -- like water, it flexes toward where it wants to go. You can't really block it -- it can go around the block, over, under -- it does not necessarily need to break through. It is my impression -- but, like I said, my jian experience is too limited so it's no more than impression at this point -- that there's similar dynamics involved with a flexible blade that can not only pierce but slice wherever you want, at an angle you choose. So... convinced yet?

Ah... Kavorka explains it.

Thanks for the story, Nungali. Did you feel like kicking his g-stringed ass at any point I wonder?

No, all ethical practitioners of all healing arts, whether spiritual or physical, ancient or modern, are under an obligation to get consent. If the patient is unconscious, the relatives are asked for such consent. Unless it's a life-threatening emergency, a cardiac arrest, a critical bleeding, etc., this applies to all cases. Treating a condition without asking the recipient for permission to treat it is malpractice. Whether medical or spiritual, doesn't matter. Why is it that as soon as someone is in pain, someone who isn't in pain immediately gains a paternalistic sense of moral, ethical, intellectual superiority over the suffering party?..

Healthy is not a prerequisite for being unashamed of one's body methinks. I've worked with very sick people who were not ashamed of their bodies, even bodies devastated and disfigured by illness, and I've known beauty queens/kings who were extremely shy. It's about intent I think. Unless you live in India and the temperature in your room is 120 degrees. Then you're just responding to your environment naturally. But if the mindset is (as it is too often) that of a slave -- to showcase body-as-product, woman-as-commodity -- this, I dislike. Not the nudity, in the least. In Europe I wore a topless swimsuit to a beach where it was common -- as long as the situation does not have the flavor of "human flesh for sale," I don't find anything wrong with nudity. As soon as it does, even a conservative business suit strikes me as obscene.

Nope. I have to use whatever is handy -- a sword, an umbrella, a keyboard -- to fend off metaphors always swarming around my head like so many mosquitoes. Which ones I manage to swat so that they fall and stay immobilized -- I mean get written down -- I seldom remember.

I'm still waiting for someone to sexualize brain surgery, nose picking, and a lecture on quantum mechanics. We the people need our one-size-fits-all preoccupation no matter what the occupation.

Of course! I didn't mean a rigid blade is not a good thing -- I meant a flexible one is not an inferior thing. I'm a beginner with jian, so my ideas are largely theoretical (drawing on the overall taoist principles and taijiquan principles in particular), plus what my teacher says, plus what limited sensory input I got so far. I would surmise that a flexible and a rigid blade would serve different purposes, both in external (which we are in the wrong century to test empirically) and internal applications. E.g. it seems to me that a rigid blade can help with skills of "control," a flexible one, "adaptability." Also it depends on the style. I've no Yang but I have a feeling that a rigid sword is more Yang, a flexible one, more Chen. I may be wrong of course.

I think it's an urban legend. My teacher shrugged off the idea when I ran it by him. He's a former sword champion of Beijing. The origin of the legend? I suspect it's it the male unconscious projecting its eternal dread of non-rigidity onto the object that might symbolize their manhood so readily. Obviously a woman with a sword does not have this venue for projection... so sometimes a sword is just a sword, and if it's flexible, this symbolizes her qi and can be a more complete symbol for self -- "flexible like me" rather than "rigid like my..."

mYTHmAKER, on 06 Aug 2014 - 16:13, said: I want it for internal work. ChiDragon, on 07 Aug 2014 - 11:18, said: Do you have any idea, in general, how to get into it with a sword.....??? Taomeow responded: He has a teacher. ChiDragon responded with the above-quoted. Conclusion: Taomeow shouldn't have fed this insatiable troll.

Mark, thank you. You (and Gödel) are onto something. The 100th anniversary of the first world war and the beginning of the last are pretty much seamlessly simultaneous events in the grand scheme of things. A bird's eye view of longer periods of time can make visible all kinds of conflicts in terms of their built-in Time and Timing peculiarities. Some are fast-acting, we are capable of reacting to them because they are immediate enough for our attention span to cope, to say nothing of our life span. Alas, others, the most precarious ones, germinate a long time -- these, once planted, come to fruition when the generation that planted them is gone, or even many generations. And I can't help wondering if it's in the human power to plant conflicts of this kind, conflicts that are going to inevitably, no way around it, unfold into wars once the appropriate button on their carefully crafted mechanism is activated. Happened thousands of times in our history. And I can't help wondering if it's really our history. No native species of Earth has ever waged wars... a one-on-one fight, yes, a group brawl with a few participants, yes... go to war, no. So, you think UFO visitors are us from the future -- yeah, that would be nice, if only because it would mean there's us in the future. I, however, tend to worry about visitors from the past more than entertain high hopes for visitors from the future. If only because I see the aftermath of the actions of the former every day for the duration of our "civilization," war and rumors of war -- while the actions of the latter are rumors and rumors of rumors...

He has a teacher. That's the only way, really.

R I grew up in the city of a million tigers. No... wait... got confused for a moment. I grew up in the city of a million roses. That's right. There's a war on the roses. Still, whoever believed, the fool that he was, that by any which name a rose is a rose never lived in the city of a million tigers. When you smile at the rose, she blushes. She lifts up her flushed, eager face. If you meant her no harm, you would never discover the thorns. But try grabbing her, bending her, breaking her, try making her yours by force or murdering her -- just tighten your grip! -- and that's when you learn the true name of the rose. The "R" in her name means "resistance." It warns you of grave "repercussions." It rumbles "revenge," it rings out your "ruin," It rolls out the score of your "requiem." So this is the name of the rose, the RRRRRROSE, the roar of the tigress, her teeth and her claws, her unbreakable thorns -- -- feel them rip out your slippery life. The "R" stands for... I could tell you her name but you wouldn't listen... I grew up in the city of a million tigers...

Bingo!

Here's a flexible (semi-, technically?) jian suitable for internal work as well as external -- e.g. for slicing arrogant dragons -- not piercing through but separating between their scales. This one is exactly like what I got. It's a Tang jian, i.e. part of the blade protrudes into the hilt. I don't know much but I'm thinking this feature may be part of what facilitates the even smooth quiver through the whole length of the blade -- which clearly extends into the arm and can be felt in the bones too. Pzzzz...zzzzap...pzzzz... very nice. The balance point is at the width of your hand from the guard. Also, this is a light jian, but not flimsy in the least.

LOL, this is legit! I tried a beer boil with crayfish, but not a vodka boil. Gotta ask Marvin how to make that. Unless Marvin Vodka is served boiled by itself, neat. Or Marvin is the name of whatever they boiled in vodka. Of course an anagram is easier to assemble than to disassemble. To disassemble, one would have to go through all possible combinations -- which can be numerous.

One of my favorite writers occasionally performed somersaults with the language that required encyclopedic erudition to fully get. He didn't care how much of what he'd throw out there the reader might get -- if you could see it, you were delighted, ticked off, or cracking up -- if you couldn't, the author was, at your expense. A palindrome or an anagram, in particular, were never announced when they appeared in the text. And those were just the most minor of his tricks. Sometimes he arranged the whole plot as a palindrome, not just a sentence. One of the anagrams of his name was Vivian Darkbloom. Can you crack it?

To be or not, net ten ton roe bot?

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.

Same thing in Russian -- mashina. And for anything huge or cumbersome -- makhina. Both of the same Latin origin -- machina. This, in its turn, from Ancient Greek μαχανά (makhaná, “machine, tool”), Doric spelling of μηχανή (mēkhanḗ), from which we have mechanic, mechanism, etc. And, oh, machination, of course, which the dictionary defines as "a scheming or crafty action or artful design intended to accomplish some usually evil end."

Well, a cliché is a cliché I suppose, of course all of those attributions are both true and false. I guess we could also say, Italian -- Commerce (banking in the modern sense began in medieval Florence, Venice, Genoa, and Sienna) English -- Mystery (there's a school of thought ascribing the origin of the language of Angles to Angels) Chinese -- Philosophy ( the Greeks learned from the Arabs who learned from the Chinese) and so on. Here's a fun word I know: hydzhybdztsleyki. The "ts" in the middle is really a little explosion in the throat. That's the Karachay-Balkar-Chegem for "girl."

Russian -- Mystery Chinese -- History Hebrew -- Philosophy

Yeah, German is challenging in its own right (I was supposed to learn it in college, but all I retain is a decent pronunciation that can fool people into believing I also know WHAT to pronounce, LOL). But with genders, you have it easy, all you need is an article in front of the noun to give it a gender, give or take a grammatical suffix here and there, and those are few and follow the rules. In Russian, you change the suffix on the noun six different ways, times three genders, to a total of eighteen options plus you change the suffix on the adjective defining this noun six different ways times three genders, so a foreigner faced with a vocabulary meaning of a "stale bun" is looking at 1/72 of grammatical possibilities of handling it in a sentence, of which only one is correct. And with endless prefixes and morphological suffixes thrown in (the ones that change or augment the meaning of the word rather than its function, which can be stringed together the way in German you string together whole words -- and those strings of prefixes and suffixes around a root also require the grammatical ones for functioning, so you attach those too)... a nightmare. That's a synthetic (as opposed to analytic) language for you. German is a bit of a mix, more synthetic forms than in English, but still not too many, right? Russian is almost purely synthetic (not to confuse with polyester... a linguistic term). Those are to avoid at all costs when choosing a foreign language to learn. Chinese is a breeze by comparison. Purely analytic.

With word order being a meaning-conferring feature of grammar, English is straightforward like an army drill. Every word knows its place, its function, and its limitations in a sentence as soon as the drill sergeant barks, "Everybody get in line!" Whether the wether will weather the weather or whether the wether the weather will kill. A language where the word order is optional -- you can stand in line or in line you can refuse to stand (English does take some small liberties, the words can stand at attention or at ease -- but not run around as they please) -- as I was saying, with the word order being optional, instead of an army you get a mob, and organizing a mob is what, e.g., Russian grammar is like. It just doesn't self-organize by rank, and you have to rule a sentence not only by following the rules but often by creating them on the go, in the moment. The bun the waitress brought was stale, and the angry sergeant threw it out the window. In English we have no gender to ascribe to the bun, so it's pretty clear what the angry sergeant did. But in Russian, a waitress is a she but so is the bun, and the sentence goes, The bun the waitress brought was stale, and the angry sergeant threw her out the window. In English it would immediately indicate he threw the waitress out the window. In Russian, it opens both possibilities -- he threw out the bun, or he threw out the waitress, it's up to the listener to decide which. So one has to think harder to avoid ambiguity in Russian, or else hope the listener is smart enough to infer the intended meaning from an inherently ambiguous statement, or else be unclear on purpose if to confuse is the goal.

That's a cool pursuit. Check out my last post in the Sobering Facts thread if you have a moment. I originally meant to post it here.