Regrets, regrets, regrets...

Life is an inextinguishable crop of regrets, according to Joseph Conrad.
Unfortunately, as we grow older it becomes sadly true.

 A rerun of the the most logged pre-death comments. 

 

Regret having worked too hard. 

Regret having believed the nonsense.

Regret not having said so. (Peter Trainin)

Regret not having studied hard enough

Regret not having seized all my opportunities

Regret having eaten or drunk so much

Regret not having spoken my mind

Regret not having given up smoking

Regret  not having travelled the world

Rewrite the sentences above starting with either:

 

I should (not) have ......

or I wish I had (not).....

or If only I had (not)

Add three more from your own personal situation.

 

Ex: I should not have wasted my time playing computer games,etc...

MEMORY and Memories

Memory plays an invaluable part in learning foreign languages as it is one of the most important human faculties. It can be defined as the process in which information is coded, stored and retrieved.
Memory, however, is more than just the ability to recall and we know very little about how the mind remembers things and how and why it forgets other things.

          THE VARIETIES OF MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES

Memory can be divided into several different types:

Episodic memory: The memory for past episodes and events in one´s life.

Factual memory: The memory for facts, such as that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492.

Semantic memory: The memory for meaning: the average person remembers several hundred thousand words and meanings.

Iconic memory: the memory for visual information as when you are watching a new film.

Echoic memory: the memory for sounds, the one which stores your auditory information

Topographic memory: the ability to orient yourself in space

Sensory memory: we can even remember the smell of some tasty dish, or thousands of different people´s faces.

Photographic memory:visual memory

Instinctive memory: the newborn baby "remembers" to suck at its mother´s breast.

Collective memory: According to Carl Jung we share collective race memories as archetypal symbols.

Procedural or skills memory: Our skills involve memory: from driving a car to walking..

Haptic memory: a database for touch stimuli

Past-life memory:Some people appear to be able to "remember" events from before their birth.

Declarative memory, etc..

There is hardly a moment in our lives when memory is not playing a crucial role, and the more we understand how it functions, the more we can help ourselves at work, at home, in play and in study.

From The Brain Book by Peter Russell 

                               Our  Cultural memory 

                     Our law of historical memory
                Selective memory 

                                Curating memory

·         Globalised memory

·         Marginalised memories

·         Memory and affect

·         Memory and anti-colonial struggle

·         Memory and class

·         Memory as gender/sexual politics

·         New technologies and memory

·         Racialised memory

·         Religion and cultural memory

·         Space, place and memory

·         Theoretical approaches to cultural and collective memory

 

                                 A MEMORY EXPERIMENT

Read through the following list of words just once. Do not study them, just read each to yourselves in 60 seconds:

water, life, dog, line, home, mouse

field, balls,rabbit, apple,sheep, head

bone, year, goat,Maharishi, hill, owl

oar, donkey, shape,crop, wind, pig

tool, cow, door, stone, flower, cat.

Now, find yourselves a pencil or a pen and write as many of the words as you can remember, in whatever order they come to you.

You are unlikely to have recalled the whole list of 30 words. You are more likely to have recalled: water, life, flower and cat than year and wind. The increased probability of recalling the first two or three items is called the primacy effect; and that of recalling the last few items is called the recency effect. The Von Restorff effect is the tendency to remember outstanding elements in a list: in our list above Maharishi. You might have also recalled the two words positioned on either side of Maharishi...

from Fast Forward 3 Classbook by Marion Geddes O.U.P.

Share your mnemonics ability. Guess what the following will refer to: CORMUNOAPONVI,HOMES; FANBOY,etc.. 

From the seven sins of memory by Daniel Schacter I´ve learned they are:The sin of transience,of absent-mindedness,of blocking,of misattribution, of suggestibility,of bias and of persistence...(They could be virtues after all to keep ourselves alive)

Double negative: Yes to No No

The double negative is considered substandard as it does not do" nothing" good for the English language. It is just a repetition of the negative for emphasis or when there is no intention of having the two negatives cancel each other out. Shakespeare used it quite often as it was common in Old English and Medieval English. George Orwell criticized the"not un..."habit in writers and journalists.


TRANSFORM THE TWO NEGATIVES INTO JUST ONE:

He cannot make friends with nobody

I haven´t never got the time to sit down any more

They didn´t have no apples

I never saw nobody

They didn´t know nothing

I hadn´t never been so tired

I could not travel nowhere

I am not going to buy no car

She didn´t have no motorbike

His clothing wouldn´t be no protection from the rain

 

Inspiration from Eats, Shites & Leaves by A. Parody


Be straightforward; say the following phrases in a more direct manner Avoid the typically English understatement : Litotes:

The thought of death will be not unwelcome. B. Russell
She is not unappealing.
not unstable
not unimportant
It´s not an unjustifiable assumption that
I´m not indifferent
leave no stone unturned
not unsurprisingly
not unemotionally
not untrue
not unlike

Let´s quote  George Orwell: " One can cure oneself of the "not un formation "by memorizing this:
A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field  .Politics and the English language . Collected Essays