doctor w.c. minor
tuesday: so i am reading the grammarians, i think i might have told you this already, about twin sisters who love words and whose father gifted them, as children, an edition of webster’s second. as they grow older they differ on the use of language and are at odds over the idea of living language.
In practice, though, the principles that govern usage are ever-changing and open to interpretation; the trick is knowing when, and how, they should be broken. read more here.
you know how once you see something, or buy something, you see more and more of the same thing. and so, today, i was killing time and stumbled across this movie on kanopy.com (you must get your own subscription, it’s free with your library card). i found the professor and the madman.
The film is about the professor, James Murray, who in 1879 began compiling the Oxford English Dictionary and led the overseeing committee, and W. C. Minor, a doctor who submitted over 10,000 entries while he was undergoing treatment at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.
in both the film and the novel the characters struggle with usage and documentation of living language. i want to know more.
penultimate assignment: vincent van gogh in acrylic.
this is actually willem dafoe, playing the character, vincent van gogh, in julian schnabel’s at eternities gate. another film about struggles.