Bryan Lovely on October 13, 2021 at 12:14 pm said:

I literally saw the word in my mind’s eye (sort of a space about a foot in front of my forehead)

I’m the same, except it’s about an inch behind my eyes.

For coming in 2nd place I won an Encyclopedia Britannica (1976 Bicentennial Edition), which I used the hell out of in junior and senior high. I left it with my parents when I moved out on my own, and I’m still angry with my dad for just getting rid of it sometime in the ’00s without telling me.”

A set of encyclopedias was advertised as an essential investment for a middle class family in the 1950s and 1960, and 70’s

As a kid, we were never allowed to use them for writing grade school research papers; or if permitted, to be only one of some 7 or 8 sources.

I craved a set as a kid, but the family never got one. Hell, if the less prosperous families in the local neighborhoods – working class ones with 6 kids and parents who never went to college – had them, why didn’t we? LOL

And of course, by the 1990s or so, they had become viewed as a bit passe, if not even comical examples of social striving.

Yet, in visiting relatives who had inherited extremely outdated encyclopedia sets on the books shelves of the old house they bought, I could not get enough of browsing them. They also had a series of year books from the 20’s through early 50’s, which dealt with politics and technology – though I don’t recall what the titles were.

Some of the older commenters here might remember who put them out and in what varieties.

These obsolete books are of astonishing interest; and I fear that most of them may be lost forever as libraries dump them, and Americans transition to living in the politically induced fog of an eternal Now.

The only problem with picking up a volume from a decades old encyclopedia set, is that you cannot force yourself to put it down.

Tell that to Gavin Newsom.

Watch out, the Swedish Thought Police might get you! 🙂

That movie is based on some very famous Swedish novels written between 1949 and 1953 by Swedish novelist Vilhelm Moberg, who was born in 1898. I can’t vouch for the historical accuracy of the rock’s size, but the novels are very famous in Sweden. The scene is meant to show how hard the work was at that time in Sweden, and I imagine that is certainly the case. The man in the scene isn’t killed, by the way – the rock falls on his leg and he is crippled.

And although the screenplay may have been based on some real event, I have trouble believing that an experienced farmer would be stupid enough to attempt what the actor is depicted as doing.

The stone looks to be – though it is not fully shown – about 3 feet long on at least one axis. Call it half of a 3 ft diameter stone sphere for flattening’s sake. Call it sedimentary rock rather than granite. Even accounting for several rough reductions in volume for the sake of argument, there have to be five or six cubic feet of rock there. Granite is 175 lbs a cubic foot. Even figuring 100 lbs per cubic foot for limestone, that weight is too heavy for a simple pry bar to lift to a sledge. And the idea of placing your shoulder to it is near suicidal. Tempting perhaps, but the mind knows, or should know, better.

I have moved 4′ x 2.5 ‘ x say, 20″ thick granite stones from the field in a hydraulic powered front end loading bucket attached to a Ford diesel tractor of a modest 30 HP. and the front tires nearly flattened.

Farmers are hurt and killed, and not as infrequently as we would like to think, even nowadays.

But that scene, while affecting, seems not true to life.

Of course, he’s a Swede, so who knows. Figures on killing or maiming himself to save wear and tear on the oxen.

I’m the same, except it’s about an inch behind my eyes.

For coming in 2nd place I won an Encyclopedia Britannica (1976 Bicentennial Edition), which I used the hell out of in junior and senior high. I left it with my parents when I moved out on my own, and I’m still angry with my dad for just getting rid of it sometime in the ’00s without telling me.

Yes, English has conventions, but they are not obvious and have to be learned. I have a fair amount of facility with German and some with Latin, Spanish and Italian. Despite the many typos I make here, I’m a pretty decent English speller, but I never make mistakes when writing German, Latin, Spanish or Italian. If I hear someone speak a word properly in those languages I automatically know how it is spelled. Not so with English. I also have to know about its etymology. That’s a very different thing.

I was a good speller from an early age and always assumed it was simply because I read a lot, although I had bright friends who also read a lot who struggled with spelling. When I was in my mid-30s I had a co-worker ask me how to spell a word. I paused, then spoke the letters to him. He asked, “How do you do that?” It was the first time in my life I had ever thought about it so I paused, and thought again of the word he had just asked me to spell, and I realized I literally saw the word in my mind’s eye (sort of a space about a foot in front of my forehead) and read the letters aloud, just like I was reading them off the page of a book.

Decades ago I asked a friend how Med School was going. She said it was going well, easier than Undergrad. I was shocked! She noticed my incredulousness and said, “Oh, don’t you know I have a photographic memory? (We had gone to High School together.) Once I read a page it’s there forever and I can recall the entire page again in the future. Medical school is just all memorization from texts and spitting it back out on the exam.”

I imagine we different humans have different ways of mastering similar feats. The results appear identical, but how we get there may often differ greatly.

Congrats on the second place!

And thanks for the information regarding spelling bees in foreign countries. I wondered about that, but never knew the actual answer. As you write, it would seem unnecessary (even impossible to ever get to a winner) in most, other languages.

My guess is those kids learn the phonetic approaches of those languages, along with English.

As someone with the “spelling gene”, that’s exactly what I did. Other languages aren’t necessarily spelled phonetically (cough*French*cough), but once you learn the conventions, English words of French origin are pretty consistent. Likewise Spanish, Latin, Greek, etc.

“Meringue” tripped me up when I came in 2nd in the state of Alaska in 6th grade. I spelled it with an “A” not an “I”, because while I knew the “gue” convention, I didn’t know the French vowels as well.

John McWhorter points out that Anglophone countries are the only ones with spelling bees, because they would be pointless in just about all other written languages.

AesopFan: the disappearance of towns and other human landmarks in New England predates the first stirrings of wokeness by well over a century. It’s a recurring theme in Frost’s early poetry (in addition to the poem cited above, see “The Black Cottage” or “The Wood-pile”). But yes, those lines from “Directive” do mesh well with Kundera’s observation and the article on Columbus. Frost would have understood what is going on now. In fact, there was an earlier thread about his crossing rhetorical swords with “experimental educator” Alexander Meiklejohn at Amherst College in 1917 or thereabouts.