empathetic

'....You have to endure about 45 seconds of self-aggrandising musical and graphic intro before the news reader even enunciates the headlines – which are then underscored by a soundtrack and punctuated with drumbeats. It’s like watching a musical. The whole panoply of melodramatic music, techno-wizardry and zooming shots serves only to impress the viewer with the over-riding importance of the messenger rather than the message. News readers no longer sit there in front of us and read the news out. Nowadays they have to get up and and pose at various times in front of the equivalent of sophisticated Powerpoint presentations...'

symbols evolve

...'Evolution favours animals that can read and react to those signs, and it favours animals that can manipulate those signs to influence whoever is watching. We have stumbled on the defining ambiguity of human emotional life: we are always caught between authenticity and fakery, always floating in the grey area between involuntary outburst and expedient pretence.'

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

...the revival and universal teaching of the art of rhetoric to the point where it attains something akin to the kind of status it enjoyed in Ancient Rome. While it is not part of a code of conduct, rhetoric is closely related in that, in contrast to the likewise valuable art of written composition, rhetoric concerns how we present ourselves and engage others in public and, hence, encourages us to pay attention to our speech and body language and the way our words affect others. As with etiquette, I think we can all agree public speaking is in dire need of improvement, and for that reason, as well as its obvious practical benefits, I believe this would be a feasible measure people could easily get behind.

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

semblent grises sous la lune