Aristotelian Categories

Hi Steph,
  So I've been researching diligently on my thesis recently, and a certain scholar I keep running into likes to use the term Aristotelian a lot. Now, I know who is Aristotle is, but I didn't know what he meant by it. I looked into it and learned about Aristotelian categories.

Picture from WikiMedia
 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aristotle_Altemps_Inv8575.jpg_)

Aristotelian Categories: simplistically defined, the idea that all things can be divided into set categories

I'll be the first to admit I do not have a firm grasp of this concept, but the scholar used it to explain that he believes we cannot simply assume a word fits absolutely as either a noun or a verb, that maybe there was gradient space where words exist between two word categories. I've been thinking a little bit about categories in a more broad sense lately. Like there are some commandments and morals which are easy to categorize. Killing is bad. Lying is a sin. Stealing is against the law. It is obvious to me that there is an absolute right and wrong here, barring the case of Jean Valjean, but let's just keep this simple.

But there's a lot of other things that I can't put in those tidy categories. Like, if I'm seeking to interact perfectly as Christ did with others, what is the perfect way of speaking, communicating, and interacting? What are the right questions to ask when getting to know someone? How do you put people at ease? These questions are really leading to one big one: Is there a right and wrong way to speak as Christ spoke?

From what I gather, Aristotelian categories don't work very well here. With billions of people living and multiple billions already dead or yet to be living, there is an infinite number of human beings with diverse and idiosyncratic perceptions and means of communicating. I believe it is far too simplistic that there is one perfect way to communicate and put all these people at ease. While this is relieving to me in some ways, it also leaves me wanting answers. Where do you aim to better your communication skills?

And that's just a sliver of all the areas that we can improve in that don't fit in Aristotelian categories. What's the perfect way to serve someone? How do you comfort someone perfectly? How do you balance the many demands of life perfectly? Etc.

There's so much grey, and sometimes that grey is unsettling to me. It is paralyzing in a way. I wish that there was black and white, and the model for how to behave was clear, but it isn't. I guess I have more questions than answers today. What do you think? How do you find a model for action?

Cheers,

Amanda Kae

I want your input too. How do you not be overwhelmed by all the possible correct paths? Where do you find answers for the grey areas of life?

My Favorite

Hey Amanda,

So I realized this week that I can’t be trusted with superlatives, due to an email you sent me.

"My Favorite...": 1. A phrase used for a single person/item/place in any given category as the most preferred 2. A phrase used by Stephanie to denote entrance into an entire category of its own of preferable things. This is probably indicative of a larger decision-making problem.

So the entire text of your email read “Your Favorite Person” with a link, and honestly I was expecting one of at least five different people. Here’s the video Amanda sent me:

Mr. Fred Rogers is in fact one of the coolest people that has ever lived. Watch that video and tell me Mr. Rogers doesn’t sound a lot like someone who had a foster dad named Joseph--I dare you. However, Mr. Rogers (and the also pretty cool, John Green) weren’t on my short-list for “Favorite person” at the moment I opened the email.


I, apparently, have so many favorites that I can't even summon them all when prompted.

The part of my brain that forms opinions i having an existential crisis. When I use the phrase “my favorite” it’s almost as meaningless as the “Best Red Car with a Blue Stripe” award they hand out at Pinewood Derby. It’s like that line from Incredibles “When everyone is special, no one is.” My opinion is worthless.

*shrugs* I’m over it.

Just in case you're curious, here are the list of people I expected to be “My Favorite Person” at the time:


      Neil DeGrasse Tyson--awesome astronomer-smart mouth

     David Tennant-- The 10th Doctor. Long Jacket. Scottish. What else could you want?

     Matt Meese-- comedian and Shoulder Angel

     Dorie Haws-- one of my college professors who taught the most applicable course I have ever taken “Foundations of Developmentally Appropriate Practices” (also wins the award for longest course name). In plain English it’s how to treat children and give them expectations that match their capabilities. And Dorie is amazing.

I liked your moxie Amanda,
Steph

P.S. Speaking of favorites....kid batman playing spiderman.

Anyone else use favorite incorrectly? Who are your favorite people?

Moxie

Howdy Steph!
  So, this week is full of busyness! (Isn't it weird that we have to spell this word with a y because of  business? Business has the etymology of busy + ness, by the way.) Between working my two jobs (part-time, I'm not crazy), writing my thesis, and cooking dinner for dinner group, I don't have much time today, so I'm going to make this post short and sweet.

I've been thinking about your desire for a word that means kick A but without the swear. I agree with you: we need that word. I mean, as I watched the happenings of last week's events in Boston, there was no other word that came to my mind to describe those police officers who searched house by house, apartment by apartment for the suspected bomber--and found him--than kick A. (Bostonians, you're pretty kick A, too.) But I'm a word person, so I'm on the quest to find another word that expresses the pure awesomeness of kick A. Here's what I've got so far:

moxie: energy, pep; courage, determination; know-how 

So, I stole that definition straight from Merrriam-Webster in part because I felt like it was the most scatter-brained definition I've ever read in M-W. Energy. Courage. Know-how. With our powers combined, we are Captain Moxie.

Besides being an awesome way to describe Amelia Earhart, moxie has so much fervor and heart within its meaning. And it isn't your typical adjectival descriptor. You aren't moxie. You have moxie. I kind of love that grammatical structure (insert roll of the eyes here in response to my linguistic nerdiness). It's like you have to search out moxie like a prized treasure to possess it. I love the idea of seemingly normal people, normal police officers taking a journey of courage and energy and know-how and at the end of the day finding the bad guy and receiving moxie. To all those law enforcement officers who woke up as usual and did your job in an extra-ordinary fashion, I--and every other American out there--grant you moxie. Thanks for becoming more than yourself to keep us safe.

Cheers,

Amanda Kae


Who do you know who has moxie? Got another suggestion for kick A?

Tromokratiphobia

Dear Amanda,

So you know how grandpa has a safe filled with guns. And how he used those guns to feed his family when mom was a kid. (That's not figurative. Literally the majority of the meat my mother ate while living at home was killed and butchered by my grandpa). I don't have a problem with guns. I have a problem with criminals having guns. Or convicted abusers. Or the mentally unstable.

Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey, authors of failed bill to extend the same background checks that apply in stores to  gun shows and internet sells, while excluding transactions between family members. And explicitly outlawed a national gun registry. AKA, a completely non-controversial move to increase gun safety.

Why is this a difficult concept for people to support? I'm looking at you Senator Richard Burr (NC), Ted Cruze (TX), John Cornyn (TX), Orrin Hatch (UT), Mike Lee (UT), and 41 other purposely obtuse congressmen from states I haven't lived in. Write your senators! If you live in North Carolina, Texas, or Utah the previous links go to their contact pages so all you have to do is click.  Here's a handy-dandy list of how all of the senators voted.

It's totally cool to not trust politicians to do right by you. But, it's not cool to think that any efforts at gun-control are just a prelude to a totalitarian state. Basically it's not cool to be afraid all the time. This is America. In this world there are places where fear is not a choice. In the child armies of Central Africa, fear is not a choice. In the starved and rhetorically insane nation of North Korea, fear is not a choice. But this is America. Our most endearing trait is irrational bravery.

In Plymouth Colony, almost half of the pilgrims died in the first year. But settlers still came. For nearly a century, the death rate outpaced the birth rate along the Mississippi River due to Yellow Fever, but
Americans still moved out West. We waged a war with one of the greatest powers on the planet without a dream of winning on our own, and we fought that way for nearly three years before France would officially back us up. America, traditionally, is a gutsy nation.


And speaking of being afraid all of the time. I refuse to let terrorists win.

tromokratiphobia: n. (from τρομοκράτης , the Greek word for terrorism, and φοβία, for fear) the irrational fear of terrorism. Notable sufferers of tromokratiphobia include many important persons in the American political world. Like many phobias, tromokratiphobia often leads the sufferer to ignore healthy fears in service of the irrational one. 

I refuse to tell my child that there really are monsters out to get him. I refuse to say that we need armed guards as a daily reminder of that fear. My son is 25% more likely to be struck by lightning than to be killed at school. Meanwhile, one child out of 25 (an average 1st grade class) will drop out of school each year. One third of all elementary school kids won't graduate from high school.

In order to fly, the TSA would have me pass my son through a body scanner, letting men I do not know or trust view his privates. There are 400,000 registered sex offenders in the US. There were 523 terrorism

convictions in the US in the decade after September 11.

Our national obsession with terrorism is distracting us from things we have a much greater need to worry about.

 My heart goes out to anyone that has lost friends or family to violence. My prayers are with the still mourning families of New York, Washington DC, Newtown, Aurora, Boston, and thousands of homes across the US missing loved ones that have died in service to their nation. I hurt to even think about it. In December I cried every night for weeks as I put my son in bed. I know that statistics are cold, lifeless things beside the suffering of so many touched by terrorism.

I don't want terrorists to leave a legacy. Every pat down performed on a terrified innocent person just trying to fly home is a monument to Al Qaeda. They won that one. And I refuse to support a world where they keep winning.

Toby Keith got it wrong. It's not a boot in their ass. It's a smile. It's joy that doesn't worry too much about the worst case scenario. It's persistent bravery. That's the American way.

We get back at terrorists by refusing to be terrorized.

Let there be peace on earth,
Steph

I know this is a contentious issue--what are your thoughts? How do we balance safety with freedom? How do we protect our children without instilling fear?

Like and Share!

Feminist

Hey Steph,

It sometimes feels like my Facebook page explodes with blog posts and political statements on a particular subject. Recently, the substance of that explosion has been about women’s role in the church. As you know, I consider myself a feminist. What I mean when I say feminist is this:

Feminist: a person who supports the empowerment of women to reach their potential

The problem with this word is that it has been through a history of extremes and then tempered to include a very large group of people with a wide range of views. So, I’m not writing on behalf of all feminists. I’m just writing as me.

So a week ago my Facebook exploded with posts about women and prayer. Last weekend marked the first time a woman had prayed at General Conference. Some were excited. Others were dismissive. It seemed like everyone had a thought on the topic. I was surprised how heated some friends got about it. I mean, women have been praying in church for a long time, so the fact that a woman prayed in General Conference seemed to be something we could all get behind. I hadn’t really noticed that a woman had never prayed at General Conference before. It just seemed like some lady would have prayed in over 180 years of history, but all the same, my heart sang out a “Go girl” when it happened.

The oddest response that I saw was several friends news feeding that it didn’t matter that a women prayed and that the Church has always treated women equally. Now, I’m not going to open up the can of worms instilled in the second part of these Facebook updates—that’s for another post. But the mere fact that these friends posted that it didn’t matter points to someone who had posted that it did matter. So it mattered to someone.

In fact, it mattered to me.

See, the set order of things in the Church is to talk generically using a masculine pronoun. From a young age, girls start getting really good at reading themselves into male situations. This is a good quality to have when we’re taught by Nephi to “liken all scripture unto us that it might be for our profit and learning” (1 Nephi 19:23). Through thousands of pages of scripture, women are almost constantly reading the word he and thinking the word she. We’re taught that we are to become like Heavenly Father but we think it’s really Heavenly Mother we are trying to emulate. And I think all this transferring of ourselves has truly been for our profit and learning just as Nephi said it would be. But sometimes trying to figure out who I am gets lost in all the he’s and him’s.

So when Jean A. Stevens prayed last weekend, I just felt good. There was no work on my part to stand with her: I could just be me. With the two prayers offered during the conference by women, I heard double the number of women’s voices than are normally heard at General Conference. That’s a lot more visibility. That’s double the number of times that we as a general membership—men and women—represented our thoughts through a woman. That’s double the number of times that women and girls could turn off their pronoun translator and give the men some practice at it.

While I’ll happily continue "profiting and learning" by likening the experiences of incredible men to myself, here’s to a few more times that I can liken myself to another women.

Cheers,

Amanda

Bowdlerize

Hey Amanda,

You’re getting two words this week, because really they’re just too good to pass up.  

bowdlerize: v. to remove offensive language or content. Named after Thomas Bowdler who infamously created a squeaky-clean, fig-leaved version of the works of Shakespeare.  

minced oath: n. almost swear words. Ironically, usually things you say to sound like a prim English grandmother. Just a heads up poppycock, zounds, and egad, correlate respectively to a particular texture of feces, the wounds of Jesus of Nazareth, and “My God.”

I was thinking lately about how I lack the capability to swear. Not like a 15-year-old boy lacks the capability to swear. I’m actually pretty confident that if I could get swear words to leave my mouth, I'd be pretty good at it. I too could “weave a tapestry of obscenities” that float over Lake Michigan.

I file my own taxes, fill up my gas tank before it gets down to a quarter, am fully responsible for the continued existence of a human child and the phrase “the b-word” actually just came out of my mouth.  Remember that one time we tried to have a conversation about gendered slurs. Which unfortunately didn't get very far. Too much ambiguity between canine mothers and illegitimate sons if you're unwilling to actually say the slurs you're referring to.

Usually, my inability to swear makes me appear to be a more decent human being. Or at least, forces me to be more precise in my insults. However, there exists concepts in the English language that only exist as swears.

For instance:

and

This second one is the more infuriating one for me. You can get by with "professional jerk" or "proactively offensive", but sometimes you just want to give a mildly irreverent compliment. "Hardcore" is a weak substitute.

Have any favorite kid-friendly minced oaths/obscenities? What do you when you can't use the right word?  Get really blankety blank frustrated?

Ciao,

Steph

Sunshine

Hey Steph!

With your lovely introduction to our blog and to me, I felt it only fair to introduce you. So, for my first definition:

Sunshine: the rays of the sun; not just a source of light, but of warmth and the lifting of one’s spirits

Growing up, Mom would always call Stephanie her Sunshine Girl. The name really fits. For those of you fortunate to know Steph, you have probably received one of her hugs. Stephanie was and is fearless in sharing her warmth with others. At age four or five, she would hug women and give them a sincere compliment about their smile or their blouse. She was never afraid to meet new people. This is a quality that I’m still working to catch up with her on, but I’m grateful I have such an amazing example to follow.

Steph, also has the clarity of sunshine. She is my go to person whenever I am feeling upset about some topic currently making its rounds on Facebook or through my head. Steph has that great balance of a listening ear and rational thought. It takes a lot to get her emotionally fired up (that’s not to say she isn’t passionate about a lot of things), so she won’t be offended when you might be a little too fired up about some idea, and she brings a tempering influence to the debate. She is able to consider both sides of a debate and bring an even-keeled thought to the table. Sounds like the best type of politician right? A good listener with vision and the ability to compromise!

Well, I don’t think Steph has aspirations for political life, but you can read her ideas right here on Sistionary—you’re so lucky! Like Steph said, we’re quite eclectic in the things were interested in and the things we write about, but in general you’ll find Stephanie discussing her research and experience as a new mother, backyard farming including the cutest goats you’ve ever seen, smart and quirky people like Brandon Sanderson and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and breaking down gender stereotypes.

Cheers!

Amanda

Who is your go-to person for a listening ear? What warms you up like the sun?

Picture from Flickr user Mertcem. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mertcem/2761825433/sizes/l/

Minutia

Hey Amanda and the world,

Here's my first definition.

minutia: n. Amanda's word for all of those small but wonderful Julie Andrews, bright-copper-kettles, brown-paper-packages moments.

I'm Amanda’s little sister. She was kind of the dynamo of my childhood. She instigated and directed our two-person theater productions, and she even let me play the princess most of the time. The vast majority of the people I played with were actually her friends that tolerated my tagging along. And as I grew older I essentially made all of the same choices that she did- same electives, same AP classes, and eventually same university. The first day of many of my classes started with reaffirming to the teacher that I was in fact, Amanda's sister.

Amanda, you're definitely getting into heaven.
 I'm Maid Marian. She's Friar Tuck. 

We’re both string players. We both suffered through choir (Not because we didn’t like singing. Choir is sometimes awesome. It is also sometimes like a slightly less dysfunctional Real Housewives episode.) Not that it matters in adulthood, but we both seriously rocked at timed writing, and got a little too artsy in the essays we wrote in high school.

Amanda's award-winning cactus and my jealous face

We're a little obsessive. Like we both know who exactly is the son of Gloin, the last man of Gallifrey, and who uses the phrase "bring flavor to the party." We love smart-funny people, movies, and books (and the Oxford comma). And as you probably guessed, we both love words.

We decided we would write on whatever felt important or fascinating to us. But from Amanda you can probably look forward to posts about fierce women in history, writing awesome guitar licks, eating "unprocessed", being attracted to hipsters, and of course, minutia.

Ciao babe,

Steph

Before the Christmas Spectacular.
I'm not sure what we were going for here. 

What are some of the things y’all get all dorky over? Buying a bag of Starburts with an inordinate amount of reds? Birds getting all happy and chatty when it’s drizzling? Double rainbows?