Quote:
Originally Posted by maddz
Yeah, I'm with you on that one. It's as though schools these days don't teach social history along with the glitzy bits, let alone logical thinking. I read a review of an alt hist novel once which 'called out' the author for not including Native Americans (is that the current term?) in a story set in a version of North America which was uninhabited apart from magical megafauna when Europeans arrived. Duh - why would there be Native Americans in an uninhabited continent?
|
Logical thinking? Perish the thought. I was forced to take logic and language courses in school, along with ethics (this was regular everyday school, not college/university) and they've all served me well. Hell, for that matter, my mother insisted I take typing and Spanish, too, and ditto, as it happens.
But...there's only so much you can do to "teach" logic. It's innate for some folks and not for others. I deal with the latter all the time. I explain something; they seem to get it and then in our next correspondence, they're back with the same question--because they can't apply what they learned with Question A to Question B, even though they are effectively the same question. It's like computers (or word processors, for that matter). Some people will always learn by rote and push buttons. They won't understand what that button really does.
I first truly observed this, a million years ago, when I was beta-testing an IBM OS/6 installation (yes, really) in 1978. That system (like Wordperfect which followed) clearly showed the surrounding (HTML) tags, opening and closing paragraphs and the like. Some of the women (yes, natch, pink ghetto, amirite?) could "get" it and understand what the tags did; some never would no matter how earnestly others tried to show and teach them.
Logic is a gift. It can be honed and refined and perfected (one hopes) but I don't believe it's genuinely teachable to someone not born with it.
Quote:
As a teen we used to stay at my godmother's cottage which was a converted shepherd's hut in the middle of a field in Wales. It had an inside loo of sorts (you used to have to dig a hole in the garden at the end of your stay and empty the commode bucket into it), and when it rained, you had to wear wellies in the kitchen. There were mice in the roof - we'd hear them at night. Everything used to be damp when you first arrived as there hadn't been heat for a couple of weeks - it would take a couple of days to air out.
So yes, I agree history is far too clean!
|
Every time I hear authors/readers of romances talking about the sex scenes in some of these historical romances, I have to leave the room to cover up my giggles. I mean...the idea of modern-day sexual practices on "nethers" that weren't so
clean...slays me.
We spent 7 years building a log home for my (late) FIL, atop a mountain in western Wyoming. We didn't have power, running water for the first few years, or a (good) place to sleep indoors, etc. We had an old hunting cabin that had been built by my FIL 30 years earlier and the sound of mice in the sod roof was a nightly event. (Not to mention all the other critters!).
Hitch