Quote

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like 'knight.'

Joshua Foer

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Joshua Foer
Age: 42
Born: 1982
Born: September 23
Journalist
Washington
District of Columbia
Something
Evolve
Unplanned
Like
Mess
Irregularity
Leaves
Teeming
Democratic
Quirks
Century
Knight
Words
Knights
Language
Languages
Process
Centuries
Irregularities

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If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.
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Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
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Monotony collapses time. Novelty unfolds it.
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I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I'm ashamed to admit that I still can't read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish.
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As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.
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I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.
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Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.
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With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of always present, ever searchable, unforgetting external memories that only grows as one ages.
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The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.
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Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.
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Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex - and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.
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All across Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, we find cultures that didn't know about mouth kissing until their first contact with European explorers. And the attraction was not always immediately apparent. Most considered the act of exchanging saliva revolting.
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Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth.
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When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.
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