Tag Archives: Social Sciences

made of win

Sharing Knowledge

Amateur wireless station (LOC)Today, I had the privilege of introducing one of the students who started a blog to HTML. She knew about computer languages, to the extent that she knew you needed a language to get computers what you want them to, but she hadn’t thought about how you would need to have a language to make websites do what you want as well.

And now she not only knows that HTML paves the path to controlling what her site looks like, she’s already started learning the basics. I won’t lie; it was really fun watching her excitement at discovering how to create buttons and links. I felt bad reminding her about her homework.

But she did walk out with more information, and a broader field of passion, because she learned something new today. And she found the practical aspects, along with most of the information, by taking the initiative to search for what she didn’t know.

That’s what happens when we share the information that we have with those who don’t know about it. Will HTML change her life entirely? I don’t know. Some of the most poignant lessons in my life come from my Year 11 experiences. But with most of her life, and all of college, ahead of her, I may have only shown her the tools she can use to continue creating in yet another medium.

Watching her joy at playing with the basics for any website inspired me to really get back into increasing my coding knowledge. It will probably take me awhile, I do have a thing or two to do, but I’m excited to expand my collection of information. Because that’s what sharing knowledge does.

made of win, writing

Cut off your nose to spite your face

1 Comment

Dictionaries hold the answersI used the phrase “cut off your nose to spite your face” recently, and then wondered where it came from, because, really, it’s an odd phrase.

It means to injure yourself in order to harm an adversary (or variations close to that) and carries the idea that revenge or anger motivates the self-inflicted damage. And the phrase apparently comes from England in the 1500s. Where most of the really interesting and useful phrases do.

Which also means that I’ve never used this phrase correctly. I generally use it in the sense that a person is too stubborn to willingly do something, despite  surmounting evidence of said thing’s benefit. The word “spite” really should have clued me into the violent elements of the phrase, but there you have it.

So if you’ve ever wondered, like me, about the phrase, now you know. What other words or phrases make you curious? I think I’ll have to look into more because words are fantastically fun.