Good Morning Kossacks and Welcome to Morning Open Thread (MOT)
We're known as the MOTley Crew and you can find us here every morning at 7:00 am Eastern (and perhaps sometimes earlier!). Feel free to volunteer to take a day - permanently or just once in awhile. With the Auto Publish feature you can set it and forget it. Sometimes the diarist du jour shows up much later: that's the beauty of Open Thread...it carries on without you! Volunteer in the comment threads.
Click on the MOT - Morning Open Thread ♥ if you'd like us to show up in your stream.
Silence is the language of God;
all else is poor translation.
-Rumi
Anyone who reads me regularly knows that one of my interests is language: from the nature of meaning to usage to cognition. One thing for sure about language is that it's tough; it's difficult to understand and use correctly; and, it is subject to misunderstanding and abuse. And that, my friends, is before we introduce such maddening variables as humor and irony.
Much has happened over the last couple of weeks; some friends have been silenced, others chastened. In my mind, much of it was caused by a lack of communication, complicated by misunderstandings and fueled by emotion and history.
So that said I now want to explain Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of langue versus parole.
Okay--just kidding! What I want to do is encourage everyone to speak: respectfully to give voice to your thoughts and expectations, your regrets and successes. At Morning Open Thread we are good listeners.
But enough of that; on to the music!
In "Voices Carry," Aimee Mann of 'Til Tuesday tells us to hush.
Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry
I try so hard not to get upset
Because I know all the trouble I'll get
Oh, he tells me tears are something to hide
And something to fear
And I try so hard to keep it inside
So no one can hear
But then we have Tears for Fears telling us we should probably just shout it all out.
Shout, shout, let it all out
These are the things I can do without
Come on, I'm talking to you, come on
In violent times
You shouldn't have to sell your soul
In black and white
They really really ought to know
Either way is okay with us. What's on your mind this morning?