It's all about the future. And the past. Children. And archeology.

Saturdays and Sundays aren’t for work – they’re for rest, rejuvenation, and the projects that are on hold all week. Some people think they’re for hiking, but we’ll overlook that for a while. The fact that I’ll be working on an urgent project that landed on my desk yesterday, around noon? We’ll overlook that, too.

Rest and rejuvenation includes my children, who are on an unending quest to drive me screaming to the edge of a bluff and watch me drop down below. We’ve declared our home a “put-down-free zone” to prevent teasing, and in response they’ve encoded their favorite digs at each other into single letters, and now can be heard saying things like “M and L” to each other, which leads to giggling and then shrieks. Kids, if you happen to read this, just don’t tell me what I’m missing. I’d rather set up automatic payment on the utility bills before we hit the cliff, okay?

I’ve been reading various books by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. She’s published three: Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years : Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times, The Mummies of Urumchi, and When They Severed Earth from Sky : How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, and each of these is a get-up-out-of-bed-and-read-bits-to-the-nearest-listener type of book. All too often, that’s meant I’ve ready pieces to the cats. Barber looks at the world through her dual fascinations: linguistics and textile history. She unravels knots in history by mapping the kinds of looms found around the world and the words used for weaving in the languages associated with those places. The effect on me was electric, propelling me to the ancient text I have best access to (the bible; reading Hebrew has that advantage) to seek the words used for weaving, wool, yarn, and other items important in the days before industrialization.

Her latest book, with husband Paul T. Barber, is all about myths set forth in the oral tradition, and it has the same propelling effect. Their thesis – in a nutshell – is that oral traditions meant lossy compression, with an intent to keep certain ideas (“stay away from the volcano” or “precession is real so take it into account while navigating”) intact, coated with whatever extraneous material would keep the story going. Compare the relative likelihood of repetition for an astronomical factoid and the goings on over with Harry and his latest girlfriend... ...that’s what they’re on about. In great, persuasive detail, with insights that will change your worldview.

The mummies get the short end of the stick, because they’re not much like Harry’s girlfriend. The fascinating, worldview-changing, get-on-the-phone-and-share-the-amazement story that it tells is a little more dust-coated. It has, however, permanently changed my feelings about Chinese and Celtic history. And plaids, yeah, those too... ...textile history is just the sort of thing a geeky mind can get waaaaay into. The linguistic aspects are more pertinent to this translators blog, though.

And the New Yorker gave me some food for thought, too. One of their January issues had a most disturbing article about a profoundly gifted teen: gifted, as measured by IQ tests. Now, IQ tests are fine and dandy and they really can help identifying issues that make life harder – or easier – for any particular kid. But giftedness-as-collapsed-into-a-number seems to be a horrible misstatement of a child, and that story depicted part of the ‘gifted industry’ which has sprung up in response to some odd need in American culture. And that industry? I distrust it. I do not think it’s there for the benefit of the children, and I do think that the parents who get sucked into it may be failing their children’s less glamorous but no less real needs due to the flashy, chorus-line style declamation of the gifted children’s strengths.

The gifted industry seems to be promulgating the notion that children with an IQ of 170 or so are so brilliant that they see normal people much as a normal person would see a mentally disabled person with an IQ of 30. Including, so state the websites, their parents and teachers. That is so arrogant, so hostile – and so wrong – as to be dangerous. Kids, even the most brilliant ones, need to operate in the world. Telling them “well, you don’t have to because the rest of the world is stupid” will hobble them as surely as blindfolding them would. People are what it’s about, in our world, and finding what to enjoy and appreciate about them is the smart thing to do. And with IQs like that, you’d expect them to do the smart thing, right?

What I want for my own children, other than that they stop teasing each other, is that they grow up to be well-grounded members of the society they are in, enriched as much by their contributions to the world as by the world’s to them. I want them to know that they can learn something from everyone, and to have the ability to listen to everyone, regardless of the number posted on their foreheads. A wealth of life and love concerns me – far more so than how long it will take them to buy a home. Would this be different if they had great big numbers tattooed on their forheads? I doubt it. Emotional peace and self-worth through contribution to a society that is meaningful is a true benefit for anyone.

Signing off with a cuppa, until tomorrow. Translation news resumes after the weekend... and do feel free to comment!