On 11/29/20, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Miriam is always accusing me of inserting tones into what I have to say
and Carl has in the past too. That has never made sense to me because I
have always understood the word tone to be a quality of a musical note
or some other kind of sound akin to pitch. I was not real clear what the
difference is between a tone and a pitch, but neither word seemed to
have any application at all to something I write. So I just now decided
to look it up in a dictionary. I used the Wiktionary application that is
built into my JAWS screen reader. The first thing that is discussed is
exactly what I understood the word to mean. It said that a tone was a
specific pitch. In that case it is pretty much the same thing as a pitch
as I have always understood it to mean. In that case I often hear
different tones in what someone has to say when they are speaking. It is
what I call a tone of voice, but it still seems that that does not apply
to writing. As I looked further down the page there was some discussion
of things like muscle tone and tones of colors. I skimmed past that
stuff because I didn't see how that could relate to this context either.
But I did find something about applying the word tone to writing and I
suppose that is the context that I was looking for. It was brief. It
simply said that it referred to a way of writing. Well, everyone has a
way of writing, so I suppose everyone has a tone to their writing. But
if that is tone then I am only conscious of only one tone to my writing.
It is simply to say what I have to say as clearly as I can. I do not
succeed in being as clear as I want to all the time and when I am asked
for clarification I try to explain myself again as best as I can. When
someone does not specify what they are having trouble with in what I
have to say I often do not know what to say and I think I often say the
same thing over again with the words rearranged a bit. It would really
work a lot better if someone who did not understand what I was trying to
say would do some explaining to me, some explaining about what and how
he or she did not understand about what I said. However, whether I
succeed or not I still try to be as clear as I can. But what I am being
accused of is inserting some kind of nefarious tones into what I write.
That makes no sense at all. I simply say what I have to say and do not
even think of being somehow underhanded or whatever. Again, the only
tone I strive for is clarity. So it still makes no sense to me that I
would be accused of using tones of any other kind. All I can say is to
repeat this again. I say what I mean and mean what I say. And I do not
insert hidden meanings into what I say. I wouldn't know how to go about
that even if I wanted to.
--
___
Sam Harris
“Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is
likely to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our
powers of wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the
one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter
our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which
we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes
is true from what he has good reason to believe. The methodology isn't
perfect, and the history of science is riddled with abject failures of
scientific objectivity. But that is just the point-these have been failures
of science, discovered and corrected by-what, religion? No, by good
science.”
― Sam Harris
