Sleeping Problem Yet Again

ここ数日、眠りに問題あり。寝つきが悪いし、自分のグーズーといういびきを聞きながら眠っているような状態。

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ずっと気になってるんやけど、「素と健」って何？んで、このバランスの悪いフォントはなんで？

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Mr. [T.S.] Eliot describes [Rudyard] Kipling’s metrical work as “verse” and not “poetry,” but adds that it is “great verse,” and further qualifies this by saying that a writer can only be described as a “great verse-writer” if there is some of his work “of which we cannot say whether it is verse of poetry.” Apparently Kipling was a versifier who occasionally wrote poems… (“Rudyard Kipling” by George Orwell)

Hmmm… What is the difference between “verse” and “poetry”?

So far as writing goes, all one can attempt is a process of simplification. The first step… is to find out which of the abstract words habitually used by politicians are understood by large numbers of people. If phrases like “unprincipled violation of declared pledges” or “insidious threat to the basic principles of democracy” don’t mean anything to the average man, then it is stupid to use them. Secondly, in writing one can keep the spoken word constantly in mind… [if] you habitually say to yourself, “Could I simplify this? Could I make it more like speech,” you are not likely to produce sentences like the one quoted from Professor [Harold] Laski above: nor are you likely to say “eliminate” when you mean kill, or “static water” when you mean fire tank.

(Professor Laski: “As a whole, our system was a compromise between democracy in the political realm – itself a very recent development in our history – and an economic power oligarchically organised which was in its turn related to a certain aristocratic vestigial still able to influence profoundly the habits of our society.”)

The “educated” accent, of which the accent of the B.B.C. announcers is a sort of parody, has no asset except its intelligibility to English-speaking foreigners. In England the minority to whom it is natural don’t particularly like it, while in the other three quarters of the population it arouses an immediate class antagonism. (“Propaganda and Demotic Speech” by George Orwell)

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EVEN MORE PALESTINIANS BEING KILLED IN GAZA!

From the BBC website: [Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi] Livni told a meeting of her Kadima party that she would topple Hamas if she became prime minister after the general election on 10 February.
“The state of Israel, and a government under me, will make it a strategic objective to topple the Hamas regime in Gaza,” she said. “The means for doing this should be military, economic and diplomatic.
“Israel must react when it is fired upon, must re-establish its force of dissuasion and stop the rockets,” she added. “This is what has to be done and this is what I will do.”
[Benjamin] Netanyahu, whose right-wing Likud party is currently ahead in the polls, meanwhile called for a more “active policy of attack”, accusing the current government of being too “passive”.
"In the long-term, the toppling of the Hamas regime is inevitable," he said while visiting Sderot on Sunday.