Latest news with #Beowulf
Forbes
2 days ago
- General
- Forbes
Improve Your Communication By Improving Your Language
If you were to look up the word 'secretive' (meaning, disposed to secrecy) in an old analog paper dictionary, you would find that the preferred pronunciation was with the accent on the second syllable. Although you might think that that made the word sound biological, it was correct—at the time. Language. Open book with language hand drawn doodles and lettering on white background. Education ... More vector illustration. Flash forward to any digital dictionary today and you'll find that the preferred pronunciation is with the accent on the first syllable, while the accent on the second syllable has been relegated to merely acceptable—a vivid demonstration that language is dynamic and constantly evolving. John McWhorter, an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Columbia University and the author of numerous bestselling books, as well as podcasts, blogs, and newsletters, described the continuous evolution of language in his New York Times column: 'we all know language inevitably changes; it's the way we got from Latin to French or from Beowulf to Tom Wolfe. But while that change is happening, we tend to see it as decay, sloth, maybe even a scourge.' So to culminate June as Effective Communication Month, which is 'dedicated to highlighting the importance of good communication in our personal and professional lives,' this blog will focus on how you can improve your communication by eliminating one slothful word that has become overly popular in today's language and by adding a word that deserves to become more popular. The slothful word in question is 'literally.' Sound familiar? I hear it used repeatedly as an intensifier, such as in, 'I literally ate the whole pizza.'The word is intended to mean in a literal sense rather than figurative, but the usage in previous sentence is to add emphasis. Merriam-Webster derides that usage, 'It is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis, but it often appears in contexts where no additional emphasis is necessary.' I derided the word, too, in my prior Forbes post but it continues to be overused, if not abused, prompting Taiwo Sotikare to write on Medium, 'Language evolves, I get it. Words change meaning over time, slang infiltrates the mainstream, and sometimes, a little creative license is acceptable. But the rampant, egregious, and utterly baffling misuse of the word 'literally' has pushed me to the brink.' Steve Eighinger agrees in a post on Muddy River News, 'Do we really need to put an emphasis on what happened? I would argue that if it's a genuinely interesting event, there isn't a need for an extra word – especially that one. So, challenge yourself this week, month or forever not to use 'literally' anymore.' Three other words have become pervasive in our business language: 'believe,' 'think,' and 'feel,' as in 'We believe/think/feel that our new product/service will make us the market leader.' This usage has proliferated because companies want to avoid making forward-looking statements. But those words express uncertainty and imply doubt—not a useful image when a presenter is trying to be persuasive. This is not to say that you should start making forward-looking statements or forecasts in your presentations. Doing so is risky business in this day and age when corporate attorneys insist on avoiding class action suits. To avoid litigation and avoid using the weak words 'think,' 'believe,' and 'feel,' replace them with one word: 'confident.' One powerful word with two big benefits: you avoid being predictive and you sound far more assertive. As William Shakespeare had Hamlet say, 'Suit the action to the words, the word to the action.'
The Guardian
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Predator: Killer of Killers review – animated anthology of Arnie's old antagonists
It's hard to imagine, back in 1987 when the first Predator film came out showcasing big Arnie's rippling biceps, that anyone could have predicted it would spawn such a diverse array of sequel material. But here we are: 2025 brings us an animated anthology, with Predators tearing human kind a new one in Viking times, samurai-era Japan, and Florida during the second world war. This follows the excellent 2022 movie Prey and the mostly stupid Alien vs Predator from 2004, in which a lady makes friends with a Predator, which rather nullifies the scare factor. Killer of Killers opens with the Viking chapter, The Shield, set in AD841. One of the film's better ideas is the Vikings referring to the Predator as Grendel, a reference of course to the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, in which a humanoid monster walks in darkness and hunts the weak … sound familiar? Much Game of Thrones style Sturm und Drang follows, before the most powerful Viking is abducted by the Predators who are essentially doing casting for their version of a reality show. This essentially sets the pattern for the rest of the film. Medieval Japan follows in The Sword, with some handy lessons about teamwork, and then it's on to The Bullet, set in Florida in wartime, a section home to some of the better action sequences, with planes getting sliced into cubes in mid-air by Team Alien. The only problem with this stuff is that you can't help picturing how much more spectacular it would look in live action. The animation is all perfectly competent but it's lacking a little something – that spark of life and ingenuity that can make even flawed animation so fascinating. There's something quite slick about all this, almost to a fault. Was AI involved? We'll probably never know, but it's a problem that the suspicion has got inside the door. Things pick up when we get to the Predators' homeworld for the final showdown, with a Viking, samurai and US pilot set to fight to the death in an arena for the entertainment of the locals. There are some decent jokes and the basic issue of communication between the three is a nice note. It could have sparked a little more joy, perhaps, but it's nice to see a franchise nearly 40 years old committed to constantly defying expectations. Predator: Killer of Killers is on Disney+ from 6 June
The Age
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Trump is trying to eradicate Harvard's inconvenient truths
I began my PhD in English at Harvard back in 1996, after a BA at the University of Sydney. Harvard's president then was Neil Rudenstine, an English professor whose research had been on Shakespeare and Keats. It was Keats who coined the term 'negative capability' in a letter to his brother, which he described as the state 'of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. This condition of open-minded, curious, creative doubt underpins all great universities and is a crucial pathway to knowledge. Harvard University has not always been a beleaguered underdog. With the world's news cameras trained on the colonial brick facades and leafy greens of Harvard Yard, it's an ideal moment to reassess what makes Harvard exceptional, and what social purpose is met by having outstanding universities, worldwide. One of my first memories of being at Harvard is of attending a small poetry reading given by Seamus Heaney in a swimming pool under an undergraduate hall of residence. The pool had in fact been drained a few years earlier, after one Suetonian free-for-all too many, attended by smoking, fornicating, pontificating future New Yorker writers. By the time I got there it had been converted to a decorous small theatre. Heaney had won the Nobel Prize the year before and was a member of the Harvard English department. He read that evening from something new he was working on, a verse translation of the Old English masterpiece Beowulf. Heaney's Beowulf is now a classic of a classic. Its brilliance was to couple the sounds of mainstream English lyric (e.g. Keats and Shakespeare) with rhythms and dialects that are distinctively Irish, Welsh and Anglo-Saxon, reminding readers that Britain's history is shaped by invasion, resettlement and language displacements, over many centuries. Beowulf is a contentious poem. Its aggressive tone and intensifying mood of sadness let us glimpse imaginative residues of Anglo-Saxon migrations, which displaced native Britons and old Roman settlements. Heaney's translation is a reminder not to oversimplify this story into a simple invasion and erasure narrative. It's asking us to think about national identity as changeable, volatile and complex. Loading Later in my degree, I was a teaching fellow for Stephen Greenblatt's classes on Shakespeare. His lectures were about how the power and beauty of Shakespeare depends on the plays' continuous experiments with wildly different, colliding systems of imagination and belief. Shakespeare was purposefully provocative, reminding audiences of the most debated topics of his time: still-unsettled conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism, rifts between monarchy and parliament, conflicts between nation states and threats to political authority. His writing was always at the very edge of what was permissible. Anyone who's been an international student in a great university will have their own versions of these memorable encounters. I couldn't have put my finger on it that night down in the Adams House pool, but it was when I first sensed what is truly remarkable about Harvard and other great universities. The brilliance of its faculty and students comes from being unafraid of new and different ways of thinking. There's a crucial institutional pressure to keep broadening perspective and learning from other deeply creative, thoughtful people in other disciplines. It doesn't work perfectly all the time. As with any complex institution, Ivy League universities struggle with internal problems and conflicts that need fixing. They need to keep draining the pool. But at their best, universities such as Harvard are international communities of extraordinary teachers, students and scholars working to make knowledge from a collective dedication to not knowing and not being right all the time. The questioning of beliefs and assumptions is undergirded by deep expertise.
Sydney Morning Herald
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Trump is trying to eradicate Harvard's inconvenient truths
I began my PhD in English at Harvard back in 1996, after a BA at the University of Sydney. Harvard's president then was Neil Rudenstine, an English professor whose research had been on Shakespeare and Keats. It was Keats who coined the term 'negative capability' in a letter to his brother, which he described as the state 'of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. This condition of open-minded, curious, creative doubt underpins all great universities and is a crucial pathway to knowledge. Harvard University has not always been a beleaguered underdog. With the world's news cameras trained on the colonial brick facades and leafy greens of Harvard Yard, it's an ideal moment to reassess what makes Harvard exceptional, and what social purpose is met by having outstanding universities, worldwide. One of my first memories of being at Harvard is of attending a small poetry reading given by Seamus Heaney in a swimming pool under an undergraduate hall of residence. The pool had in fact been drained a few years earlier, after one Suetonian free-for-all too many, attended by smoking, fornicating, pontificating future New Yorker writers. By the time I got there it had been converted to a decorous small theatre. Heaney had won the Nobel Prize the year before and was a member of the Harvard English department. He read that evening from something new he was working on, a verse translation of the Old English masterpiece Beowulf. Heaney's Beowulf is now a classic of a classic. Its brilliance was to couple the sounds of mainstream English lyric (e.g. Keats and Shakespeare) with rhythms and dialects that are distinctively Irish, Welsh and Anglo-Saxon, reminding readers that Britain's history is shaped by invasion, resettlement and language displacements, over many centuries. Beowulf is a contentious poem. Its aggressive tone and intensifying mood of sadness let us glimpse imaginative residues of Anglo-Saxon migrations, which displaced native Britons and old Roman settlements. Heaney's translation is a reminder not to oversimplify this story into a simple invasion and erasure narrative. It's asking us to think about national identity as changeable, volatile and complex. Loading Later in my degree, I was a teaching fellow for Stephen Greenblatt's classes on Shakespeare. His lectures were about how the power and beauty of Shakespeare depends on the plays' continuous experiments with wildly different, colliding systems of imagination and belief. Shakespeare was purposefully provocative, reminding audiences of the most debated topics of his time: still-unsettled conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism, rifts between monarchy and parliament, conflicts between nation states and threats to political authority. His writing was always at the very edge of what was permissible. Anyone who's been an international student in a great university will have their own versions of these memorable encounters. I couldn't have put my finger on it that night down in the Adams House pool, but it was when I first sensed what is truly remarkable about Harvard and other great universities. The brilliance of its faculty and students comes from being unafraid of new and different ways of thinking. There's a crucial institutional pressure to keep broadening perspective and learning from other deeply creative, thoughtful people in other disciplines. It doesn't work perfectly all the time. As with any complex institution, Ivy League universities struggle with internal problems and conflicts that need fixing. They need to keep draining the pool. But at their best, universities such as Harvard are international communities of extraordinary teachers, students and scholars working to make knowledge from a collective dedication to not knowing and not being right all the time. The questioning of beliefs and assumptions is undergirded by deep expertise.
Irish Examiner
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Film review: Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs are remarkable in The Salt Path
The Salt Path ★★★★★ The Salt Path Casting around in desperation in the moments before they are forcibly removed from their home, Ray alights on a battered travel guide, and makes a snap decision: despite Moth's incurable degenerative disease, the pair pack a small tent and start hiking out around the West Somerset Coastal Path. And that, in a nutshell, is the plot of The Salt Path, a story salted not only by ocean spray but bitter tears as Ray and Moth take stock of their lives, their marriage and themselves whilst slowly hiking the hard yards into their precarious future. Adapted by Rebecca Lenkiewicz from Raynor Winn's memoir, and directed by Marianne Elliott, The Salt Path is a story of major losses and tiny victories, of constant pain and simple joys, of sifting life's hard-earned truths from the chaff of ephemeral irrelevancies. The slow, epic trek is regularly punctuated with unexpected meetings, occasional rudeness and — more frequently — the kindness of strangers. With no roof over their head, Ray and Moth become more observant of the world around them, growing closer to nature and adapting their pace to the slower rhythms of nature. There's humour here too: at one point Moth is mistaken for the English poet laureate, Simon Armitage, which leads to a very welcome cold drink, hot meal, and even a massage for Moth's weary body; later, Moth — who is reading Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf as he trudges along — will lean into the mistaken identity and busk an impromptu public reading that buys that evening's fish and chips. But this is no idyllic hippy-dippy yarn: the couple are at the mercy of the ever-changing weather, subject to brutal economic realities and acutely aware that Moth's agony is worsening the further they go. Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs deliver remarkable performances, and particularly in terms of the couple's intimacy: married for 20 years, Ray and Winn are like a pair of trees growing into one another, stripped bare by an unkind climate, bent but never yielding. Marianne Elliott, transitioning from directing theatre and TV, delivers a film as spare as the story's plot; the film is as unsentimental and healing as the windswept landscape itself. All told, it's a tour de force. theatrical release Karate Kid: Legends ★★★☆☆ Jackie Chan, Ben Wang and Ralph Macchio in 'Karate Kid: Legends' The first rule of Kung Fu, apparently, is that everything is Kung Fu. Karate Kid: Legends (PG) stars Ben Wang as Li Fong, a Beijing-bred teenager and Kung Fu fanatic whose life is upended when his mother (Ming-na Wen) relocates to New York. There he meets Mia (Sadie Stanley), the daughter of washed-up boxer Victor (Joshua Jackson), whose pizza restaurant owes a large debt to a local mobster. And so, against his mother's wishes, Li starts training for the Five Boroughs street-fighting tournament and its $50,000 prize, aided and abetted by a pair of bickering mentors, aka the eponymous legends Mr Han (Jackie Chan) and the original karate kid, Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio). Plot-wise, Jonathan Entwhistle's movie pretty much retells the story of Karate Kid (1984), although here, in a reversal of roles, the young Li gets to train the older Victor as the latter prepares for a make-or-break comeback bout, blending Kung Fu elements — the ability to 'move like water' and become sinuous, unbreakable — into the more traditional boxing skills. The young Ben Wang is an amiable presence in the lead role, even if Li's transition from martial arts novice to maestro is far too rapid to be plausible; meanwhile, the supporting characters are a likeable bunch. The martial arts are fast and furious, and the ever reliable Jackie Chan brings some much-needed humour to the proceedings. It's solid, but no knock-out. theatrical release Read More TV review: Stories of Surrender shows Bono baldly defending his reputation
