My Thoughts are Ungrammatical

Hey if you dig Marshall McLuhan I recommend The Medium is the Massage , especially if you like things that are well designed and exceptionally hard to read.

Anyway,

This passage supports a very important thing: wars come and go, but my Englishs are Forever.

"The smell on the north sides of trees is different." (Kane 37)

This is from Wisdom of the Mythtellers by Sean Kane. It is a sentence that is both easily made fun of (The smell on the north side of my Uncle Eugene is different) and is reflective one of my favorite parts of the Oral Tradition. It's practical.

Think about it...
Say it...

Practical

My god, I think I just popped a Liberal Arts boner.

They have numbers (the language of God). They made satellites and got to churn the great butter whack of society that makes my bread so delicious and digital. They walk amongst gods. When Oppenheimer passes, girlies throw shirts and men shutter. I have Snoop Dogg; they have the atom bomb.

Well now things are looking up.

Because, now I know that trees smell different on their north sides.

It will be a disease of language that only death or Tony Soprano's two-by-four upside my head can cure.

The specific part that this quote originated from is a section that portrays spoken word as not only a step in linguistic history but as a medium for minute morsels of invaluable information. Within even the most ludicrous sounding epigram is a generation's worth of information. From how to properly wander the forest to the best way to smoke a pipe, the oral cultures created a wonderfully practical collection of sayings.

The examples Kane gives generally come from the indigenous North American people.

For all the white folks out there, here's a little something for ya.

Ben Franklin was a fan of these. His Poor Richards Almanac housed many sayings that ranged from the extremely practical to the painfully worthless. The useful ones still plague society today and the less useful ones allow us to laugh at that savage time from our great internet powered ivory tower. That balding curmudgeon learned us good that a penny saved was a penny earned and that an apple a day kept the doctor away. They were cute and easily memorized but the wisdom in each one could keep a person alive.

This bit from Wisdom of the Mythtellers intrigues me because it is an example of a mnemonic that seems more elegant than repeating something ad nauseum and more accessible than a memory theater for the borderline idiot like myself.

At some point I hope to condense the whole of human knowledge and experience into a group of fart jokes.

"the north side of my Uncle Eugene smells different as the southern wind blows"

(I think I stole that joke from somewhere)