Tag: history

Do You Really Know the Language You Live In?

On By Gabriella L. GarlockIn language, writingLeave a comment

TSElastyr

You think in this language, you know who you are through language; you LIVE in the language of English, but how much do you really know about it?

Thanks to the unique historical development of the English language (no other language on earth can claim its complexity), we’re blessed with one of the greatest vocabularies anywhere. We have a variety of synonyms even for common, everyday things.

In fact, I’ve been frustrated trying to express myself in other languages, only to find I have to use the same word in one sentence I just used in the last sentence. Really? I have only one choice to mean two different things for which I have a comprehension of subtle differences?

As frustrating as an Inuit trying to tell us what kind of snow it was. Okay, SOME languages have us beat in SOME ranges of synonyms, but STILL, for the most part. . .

Today in Part I of a two-part blog, it’s necessary to give some fast-and-loose history before I can talk in Part II about the actual words and how we can use them to add precision and depth to our writing.

Part I: A Concise History, or, Why We Don’t Speak British

To understand how the English language came by a far greater vocabulary than most languages in roughly half the time, you have to look at England.

Not yet a twinkle in a Frisian’s eye

In Roman Britain (from Julius Caesar till they threw up their hands in frustration in 410 AD and left), the natives didn’t speak English because it didn’t even exist yet. THEY SPOKE BRITISH! More accurately, they spoke old Brittonic or Celtic which is where Gaelic and Welsh come from.

The Romans felt they had a handle on the Britons, but then the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, and a smattering of Frisians kept invading from what’s now Denmark and north Germany. When the Romans left these folks over-ran England and before you knew it everyone was speaking Anglo-Saxon.

We also call it Old English, but in actual function, it’s a completely separate language from modern English. Not only have the words and sounds (and alphabet) changed considerably in that time, but the grammar is completely foreign to modern English speakers. Still, those Anglo-Saxon words DID change and are still around, becoming all the most common of the words we speak today, like WORD and WE and SPEAK and TODAY.

(Paul Kingsnorth manages to write for us, using only an Anglo-Saxon/Old Norse vocabulary adapted for modern readers, a novel that is fittingly shows the reaction of a native Englishman when the Normans come in and change everything.)

But of course the land we now call England after those Angles (don’t feel bad for the other tribes: we already have a Saxony and a Jutland and some Frisian islands) was just so freaking adorable that invasions happened again and again.

Ragnar Lothbrok and his infamous brood, on HISTORY channel

Right about the time the Anglo-Saxons forgot they were the barbarian invaders and settled down nicely into Christianity, along came some REAL barbarians: Vikings! The name struck terror in the hearts of English monks and priests everywhere, since their churches housed exactly the kinds of goodies the Vikings wanted to take home.

Until they didn’t even want to go home. Old Norse shared Germanic roots with Anglo-Saxon but it wasn’t the same language, and you can draw a big diagonal line across England from the northwest to the southeast with place-names showing just how far the Vikings pushed in and settled. The Vikings’ language didn’t displace Anglo-Saxon (not the way the Celtic languages were pushed out and stayed separate languages), but they added a whole lot of words.

A new patois: English Kings speaking French

The Anglo-Saxons never stopped fighting the Vikings, and they were so tuckered out from these battles that the Normans had an easier time sweeping in from France in 1066 and taking over. (There’s a spectacular early movie all about it: it’s called the Bayeux Tapestry.) In fact, William the Conqueror did the job so impressively that no new Vikings even bothered to invade after he set up shop. And neither did anyone else, ever again, ever.

William brought with him all his French friends to enjoy the spoils and BAM, everyone who was anyone in England spoke French. But Anglo-Saxon didn’t just go away; the French nobles had to talk to their servants and those servants talked to the rest of the peasants, and what would you expect with all that mingling? The two languages had a baby called Middle English.

Okay, it took longer than nine months, but the process was evident all along. Eventually Geoffrey Chaucer, who could’ve written in French, up and decided to give the local vernacular a whirl in works like the Canterbury Tales, and the pure French of the ruling class began to fade away.

“More than kisses, letters mingle souls.”  –John Donne

But we’re not quite yet modern English: there’s one last major wave of influence that will tweak the language, but this time there was no marauding or killing involved. There was, however, considerable sighing and swooning and everlasting promises.

Latin was no stranger to England: first the Roman overlords spoke it, then the church leaders after Christianity came. But after the Renaissance took off down in Italy and spread out, English poets were more than a little embarrassed that their language was downright clunky compared to those beautiful Italian sonnets.

Folks TRIED to write sonnets in English, but the rhythms of the language just didn’t fit, either. So English writers just started STEALING new words left and right–prettier ones. (Not just that, writers like Shakespeare eventually adopted new poem forms that made English sound better anyway, like the blank verse iambic pentameter of Shakespeare’s plays.) They stole from Italian and they stole from French and they stole Latin-sounding words that really made English sound grandiose and respectable.

And they ALSO did something that would make past editors of the Oxford English Dictionary sit up in their graves and cry, “Desist!”:  they made up new words!! (In the modern age we’ve seen how tech has required rapidly introducing new acronyms and memes, but we’re also a lot more chill when people just do what people do, and diss the old-fashioned idea that language is static and carved in stone.)

So many new words were successfully added into the English vernacular that Middle English was left in the dust. But here’s the clincher: the old words didn’t go away. The time of Shakespeare is known as Early MODERN English, and it had Anglo-Saxon words, and it had Norse words; it had a splash of Celtic and there were still the French words and the Latin ones and the Italian ones and even some words from the New World just being explored.

And this still wasn’t the end of the behemoth language English. It was one thing to add new words from new lands being explored–but all languages were doing that, all the time. It was another when the speakers of English became the conquerors and the British Empire expanded around the world. Native English speakers were living on five continents and absorbing words by the hundreds.

This is just the briefest history of England and its language, showing how we got so many words. In Part II I’d like to show you what this means for you: why all these synonyms you have at your disposal each carry the weight of history along with their meaning.

See you in Part II: A Precise Lexis

One Discovery Can Change All of History

On By Gabriella L. GarlockIn history, language, writingLeave a comment

This is a really nice example of how a single discovery or breakthrough can change all of history. Of course, the iconoclasts who love the existing history books have to be flexible and allow it to happen! Cracking the Rosetta Stone: BIG, big deal.  Dead Sea Scrolls: not as earth-shattering as you might think. Go figure.

We’ve had the Voynich manuscript in our hot little hands for centuries, yet because no one had cracked the code, we haven’t known exactly what it was we had. Now because of computers, that may all finally change. As was noted in Star Trek: the Next Generation, “As far as we know, it might just be a recipe for biscuits” (The Chase).

But it will be fun to finally find out.

 

Waiting for the Eagles

On By Gabriella L. GarlockIn writing4 Comments

Dear God, this has to stop. I didn’t know people could react this way; I’ve never known such a great loss before. I didn’t know I could so awkwardly push aside the thought of someone I claim to love, and a month later I’m still in high escape mode.

Before and after work at the coffee shop; now my novel is in the hands of beta readers and I’m committed to furiously reading and critiquing at least four other stories. Guilt-ridden that my cat is so lonely. I’m too old to run from my feelings by blasting music in the car. I’m too aware to keep being such a coward.

“Best Big Brother Ever”

Because Michael deserves me thinking about him, not forgetting how much I need him, how much I need to know I’ll see his wry smile again. He deserves better than being brushed out of the way by words on a screen until all I have left of him are the mere glimpses that bubble to the surface inevitably in the course of any given day.

It seems I’d rather turn myself into whatever-this-is, I’d rather feel guilt than the pain of grief and losing my brother. Because it still doesn’t feel real. How do you go from the point where he’s alive and part of your life to the point where he isn’t and you’re used to that? No, I’ll never get used to that! I refuse to.

It seems I have a long way to go.

One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor

Because no one ever simply walks into Mordor. You trip and fall, painfully you slide over broken rock and turn aside into the beckoning arms of forgetfulness, frozen in time.

And you never come back from Mordor whole–isn’t that what I’m running from? You have the scar from a Morgul blade, you can see the Thestrals, you can see Both Sides Now.

If I remember him, he’s a memory

Why on earth do people always die at the END of stories? How does that help me? How am I supposed to know what the scene looks like after he’s gone? How do I write the rest of this stupid story that just won’t stop playing out?

Michael doesn’t deserve to be a memory avoided; I don’t even yet know how to make him a memory at all. Not JUST a memory; he’s so much more. But if I remember him, he’s a memory. Certainly if I memorialize him, then I can’t deny that now he exists only as a memory.

The Seven Stages of Falling Off a Cliff

And if I sublimate what he means to me in a work of fiction, have I buried him once and for all? If I imagine myself one day explaining, Oh, yes, that’s how my brother inspired me. This is what he taught me. This is why I wrote this story. There I go–trying to paint a future without him when I can’t even see-feel-touch the present without him.

It’s so much easier to talk about myself, how hard I work and what I think about and what I avoid like a coward. Look how busy I am, look how well I’m carrying on.

Don’t look at the lost little girl, heartsick, waiting for her wandering brother to come home and make it all better. Because he always came back home. Just when I needed him. I just need to wait a little longer. I’m told that the eagles are coming.

No, one doesn’t simply walk out of Mordor, either, do they?

walkmordor

A Muse of Fiery Dragons

On By Gabriella L. GarlockIn history, writing2 Comments

When it was just me and a tree, I knew it all

St. George and the Dragon Day – something I like to celebrate, as it reminds me of those far recesses of childhood when I began to learn the world was SO BIG, and even bigger when you thought about all history. And in my head I had such a sure, vivid, timeless yet evolving image of all the stages of history in all the places I knew of. What does an “absent-minded” daydreaming six year old who has never left Michigan know? A whole lot! Enough to fill a universe. That’s the nature of the brain.

I suppose these vast conceptions of places like medieval England or colonial America or Neanderthal Europe were informed by folk tale books my mom read, TV and school–but I’ve been around the world and dangerously over-educated in the 4+ decades since and these “forms” (in the Platonic sense) in my mind’s eye have not much changed. This feels very much like a collective unconscious. Somewhere there is and always will be an England of rolling green hills where a maid tends her sheep across the river from a village fair outside a Gothic cathedral, and archers roam the forest and knights in armor ride out from a castle with crenellated parapets. Somewhere there will be a dragon and a St. George to do battle with it.

What the other realm has to do with inspiration

These places are real in the way everything in a dream feels so much more present and tangible and real than being awake: in your dreams, the smallest thing can be infused with a sense of the greatest symbolism, and what happens next always has the feel of momentous inevitability. This is how good writing works: you set up a world of believable vastness and palpable intimacy, where events or imagery sustain multiple meanings, and the plot develops logically and naturally from the introductory matrix.

When I write I don’t feel like I’m creating a new place, rather, I’m trying to re-capture one that already exists–has always existed–in my mind, which is the same as to say it already exists in the “out-there” where all possible places and settings have always and will always exist. Inspiration is just getting to a point where I can remember it. I’m just tapping into something outside of myself. I’m being reminded by a “Muse”.

But the Muse is elusive! I can only actually write while I’m awake, with all the meaning-less distractions and inelegant minutiae of everyday life crowding in. How can I possible get past all that to a mental state where I can touch that other realm of inspiration? Most of the time it’s as hard as remembering your dreams. You forget just as soon as you remember a piece of one.

And what memory has to do with inspiration

My dad is nearly 82 years old. Since starting up the whole genealogy thing a few years back, I’ve made a point of asking questions about my parents’ childhoods, and I get very frustrated at how little he remembers. Is he holding back? Or can he honestly not remember a day out of his entire fourth grade, or one of the dresses his mom always wore? And yet, since I turned 50, a part of me has started to believe it. I’ve reached an age where I have to face the fact that maybe not remembering that certainty of childhood has less to do with simply not thinking about it lately and more to do with the fact that there are memories that may well be gone forever. You start to get pretty desperate to tap into that world-eternal you had all around you as a child.

I still play this one game sometimes while trying to fall asleep: I scrape and think really hard and try to come up with one early memory from childhood that I haven’t thought about almost since it happened. Maybe it will keep my brain and memory in shape. Maybe I’ll actually learn something about myself. It’s a game because I don’t always win; in fact, it’s quite rare that I un-earth a genuine long-buried gem and the corresponding feeling of supreme satisfaction. For just a moment, I know all the secrets of the universe yet again.

Is education inspiration?

I’ve spent a life voraciously chasing after that complete education, the level of knowing it seems like everyone else must have, a basic understanding of all history and myth, of geography, of the “greatest” writers and artists and musicians, the times of the greatest break-throughs for science and mathematics, how a cell works and how a galaxy is born. Reading every word Shakespeare ever wrote (happy birthday) and doing a dissertation on his histories. I think I always thought that’s how someone achieves enlightenment–er, peace of mind–er, being a real human being.

But apparently my Muse is the same she’s always been: someone who puts me in touch with a conception of the world I’ve always had. Or maybe I’ve just set up a false dichotomy: I suppose even as a child I had to overcome staggering inanity and mundanity. Probably trying to find school-clothes that weren’t laughable and doing homework that was a painful exercise in futility were just as frustrating to my higher self then as these stacks of unsorted receipts and boxes of unsifted cat litter are today. There were bullies then who teased me about my overbite and flood pants and my uncool mind-absences, and there are bullies today who torment me over my awkward bookishness and unfulfilled potential and my uncool absent-mindedness.

Daydreams and distractions, still

I think now that reaching my Muse is more of the same creative selective-attention I learned as a child. For sheer-survival I learned to tune out–as soon as they were gone–the unpleasantness of nose-bleeds on the school bus and that girl who always said out loud how messy my hair was or how I acted like a boy. In my head all that mattered were the woods I played in and the books I read. Today I sit in my condo and listen past the distant road traffic and screaming kids and that jack-ass running his leaf-blower at dinnertime and sometimes I really do manage to hear only the birds outside. I play with my cat and some string and sometimes I really do find myself as single-minded and in the moment as she is.

Perhaps it’s the pernicious TLE déja-vu seizures I have that have me obsessing on capturing something lost from childhood:  in the moment of the seizure it sure feels as powerfully atmospheric as a dream. Or perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve been around the world and still I’m right back where I started:  a daydreamer in a book under a tree, desperate to prove one way or another that what you all thought were “mind-absences” were, in all ways amazing and worthwhile, me being very much present someplace after all.

stgeo

How many ways can you tell a (hi)story?

On By Gabriella L. GarlockIn history, writing1 Comment

I’m not biased, am I? –You’d better be!

So why do people choose to write historic fiction instead of straight-out fiction? Or instead of fiction fantasy, where you don’t actually need to do the historic research and a few anachronisms may be expected, even encouraged? All right, strange question to begin a blog post that isn’t actually about historic fiction but rather the writing of history. I would posit that historic fiction and history books are not two distinct entities, but rather two ends of a spectrum whose middle ground is rather more trodden than you might expect.

The Powers That Be Still Decide What We Think Is Our History

Once, all written history was as trusted as absolutely true as an article on snopes.com. And those writings almost always had the “official seal of approval” of the state or the Church or whoever held the greater sway. If the illustrious powers that were in all their wisdom didn’t want you to hear about it, you didn’t hear about it. The bulk of European histories before the Renaissance were shaped by the unshakable belief that history was ordained by God:  rulers and Popes and bishops and noblemen, of course, carried out the actions that led to historic events and trends, but it was God who put them on their thrones.

“But I know all that,” I hear you saying. Yet consider: how do we learn our history today? It really isn’t that much different than once-upon-a-time because most of the populace is a bit lazy, and even the critical readers among us–if they don’t have an interest in learning about a particular time and place–are going to fall back on the same sources as the non-readers: what they learned in school and what they see on the big screen. Look how many people believe that all the whites at the first Thanksgiving were Pilgrims–and Puritans at that–the way they were in their school play, or how many folks buy wholesale the conspiracy-theory depicted in the Oliver Stone film JFK.

And We Seem To Be Happy To Think That History Is Etched In Stone

Text books in school are always notoriously behind the times, but most parents and educators don’t seem to mind much: for one thing, books can be expensive, and it’s expected that they can’t always be current. For another, most of society is usually content if history class gets the general idea right, and along the way maybe teaches our kids a little something about the good guys and the bad guys and some skills in reading and remembering dates and writing reports. I’ve followed my niece’s primary and secondary school career in the cyber-age, and it’s surprisingly similar to when I grew up: you have access to information, but knowing what to do with that information is all the difference. You can only learn so much actual fact as a youngster. A student like me from the information dark ages of the 70’s who has been taught to read and think and argue critically is a hundred times better off than a student today who has all the information in the world at her fingertips through her laptop.

Information and education are NOT inter-changeable commodities. –Yeh, I said it, you can quote me.

And yes, I know you know that, but where did it all start, the idea that we could even question what our government or our church or Mr. Pendleton our sixth-grade history teacher wanted us to know about history? For the most part, we have Niccolo Machiavelli to thank, the guy who is somewhat-unfairly eponymous for the scheming, manipulating political villain. Before he pointed out in The Prince that history was created not by God or by God-appointed rulers but by fallible human beings with a variety of motivations, there was no (official) notion that there was more than one way to interpret history. Suddenly it was all the rage to depict the events of history being caused by ambitious, smart or otherwise influential persons, through charisma or manipulation or sheer luck.

Machiavelli Says. . .Consider the Source

Post-Machiavelli we are able even to have the concept of “historiography”–that is, not the study of history so much as the study of the ways history is depicted. History can be interpreted through a moral lens, where the good guy comes out on top, or events can be depicted to bolster up a particular ideology, or they can be construed to re-affirm the superiority of one nation over another. (No, really?) These are the bold strokes; there are far more subtle ones at play that have taken all of us in at one time or another. Even me. And I did my dissertation in this neck of the woods. (What follows is quite an original thesis; here’s stipulating the caveat that if you take it and run with it, I’ll call it plagiarism, thanks!)

Shakespeare’s histories, the next-gen of the ideas of Machiavelli, gave us in the guise of individual characters a whole pageant of these “theories of historiography”, though they weren’t known then by this name. Check out the first tetralogy of history plays–that’s a fancy way of saying the three parts of Henry VI followed by Richard III. You have Henry VI, the pious but weak ruler wandering around in his own medieval church pageant, and his practical, down-to-earth statesman and all-around good guy Gloucester depicting a more secular or humanist approach to governing, and in comes York (Richard III’s father) as the ambitious Machiavel. By the time you get to Richard III’s antics you see a control-freak so manipulative that he psychologically starts to cave in on himself–really quite a modern idea in the sense that I could only label it with blatant anachronisms drawn from Freud and Jung and Engel’s biopsychosocial ideas. (But hey, Oedipus Rex existed quite a long time before the Oedipal complex, right?)

Look At All the Amazing New Things We’re Learning About Richard III!*

Ironically, the injustices done to the image of Richard III as a notorious Machiavel at the hands of Shakespeare and others in relating his history illustrate the same sort of Machiavellian “singly-motivated” telling made possible by the originator of the archetype himself. We’ve long known that here is a history ripe for revision–but whether that revision will be in the hands of an artist (like me, and the idea for a new Richard III play now-fermenting) or a historian, it is quite simply waiting for one thing: a new motivation for the telling of the story.

So here we are, right back where we started. I write historical fantasies because I want to deliver a certain message, a lesson or a truth that I personally believe. Those who write historic fiction are generally drawn to a “truth”, a topic associated with a particular time period, and the way they can drive home that idea to the reader. Writers of fantasy, those who have a message, have a more wide-open field upon which to play, but they can still draw from specific time periods and places to handle subjects that mesh well with the events of that part of history. And those who write the history books, well. . .they, too, have an ax to grind.

All of us writers, though, will probably fall into just one or two theories of historiography, vindicating Machiavelli, but perhaps our consciousness of the fact is what will make all the difference. We each have our own truth. We each have a story to tell. Just look at all the ways we can choose to tell it.

*The skeleton in the parking lot has captured my imagination this past couple years, and the story continues to unfold:  http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-21063882

RIII

Revisit, Review, Revise–But Don’t Reverse History

On By Gabriella L. GarlockIn history, writing1 Comment

Why a post about Thanksgiving in February? Well, my blog purports to address revisions of history: fictional stories that convey more truth than fact, genealogical accounts that shift the focus of history from huge international events to the simple truths of everyday lives of ordinary people, and non-fiction work that blows us away with new discoveries in history, in anthropology and DNA, in science and how we comprehend the world and the universe. I’d like to comment on a quintessential part of American history that is absolutely ripe for revisionists–and not for the better.

Here is my how-NOT-to-revise-history polemic.

I believe that re-writes of history are a constant, as we discover more facts and as we find it desirable to emphasize certain aspects of that history to further our interests and beliefs in the present day. No single interpretation of history is ever going to be flawless or final, but that doesn’t negate the necessity of examining the past in new ways–on the contrary, I heartily believe in and encourage the existence of several versions of history existing and circulating at any one time.

HOWEVER. Having said that, I don’t believe we need to allow free-for-all revisions of our heritage to suit the zeitgeist of any particular group. On the contrary, a modern sensitivity to a pluralist view of what history’s lessons are or should be should make us that much more critical and careful about being as truthful and honest as possible. We have an age-old problem wherein our cultural attempts to redress the wrongs of the past sometimes lead us to allow the formerly-repressed voice to assert anything at all it wants–perhaps motivated by guilt or ignorance or just not wanting to be left out of the protest/party happening out in the street.

How not to celebrate a Quatercentenary

The year 2020 approaches, and with it, a 400th year commemoration of the foundation of Plymouth Colony. Already we have groups–some of them with a seeming-stamp of “official approval”–completely in denial of the notable values practiced in this Colony (but rarely in any other early European settlement attempts) and attempting to subvert what it is we’ve always celebrated about Thanksgiving, turning it instead into a day or mourning (for atrocities against Native Americans) and vilifying people like Governor Bradford (come on, do you even know what he generally stood for?!) –Strange, I generally genuinely like people who attempt to “subvert” anything! And I’m usually the champion of the politically-correct–at least the original goals of PC, before it became the free-for-all I decry above.

It’s become apparent that groups such as Plymouth 400 don’t speak for me; this isn’t political correctness, it’s misguided (all right, even malicious) distortion of history. We have nothing to learn from either extreme’s version of history, particularly when the purveyors of such versions behave so badly in the present. (You’ll have to Google around for some of the incidents at play in and around Plymouth, Massachusetts.) And we have much to learn from a historical look at why Thanksgiving became and stayed a national holiday in the first place. Hint: it wasn’t actually about blithely giving thanks and throwing around pumpkins and turkey drumsticks.

Give earlier Americans who selected Thanksgiving a worthy holiday some credit: we don’t celebrate Plymouth Colony because they were the earliest European colony; they weren’t. And we certainly don’t celebrate it because it epitomized white/native relations. Rather we still celebrate because it was the exception to the norm, an example of how integration should have been, and how it still could be if we only learn the lessons of history.

Why did the 1800’s “discover” the Thanksgiving holiday?

Remember, when the holiday was established and took hold later in the 1800s, our country was in the midst of increasingly ugly race relations; people knew it. Lincoln was responding to the ultimate human degradation, slavery. Out west whites were at war with Native Americans and atrocities were committed on both sides. The notion of genocide even became a possible vision for some. And often-violent prejudice met the most recent immigrants: Slavs, Chinese, Jews.

Given that backdrop we can see that celebrating the first Thanksgiving was NOT a quaint hypocrisy; it was a fervent wish by people weary with all the hate and violence that surrounded them.

Were there ulterior motives at play when Massasoit showed up with twice as many of his folks to the Plymouth colonists’ harvest bash? Sure, they wanted to let it be known they were watching. But hey, they brought food. Was there political maneuvering on both sides that first year, a search for alliances and allies? Of course, and that’s precisely the point: these people believed–and went on believing in spite of occasional individual mishaps–that this whole living-together thing could be accomplished without bloodshed.

Cut to the past century, as we continue not to learn the lessons from Plymouth Colony: Japanese interment, backlash against the latest immigrants, SE Asian or Hispanic or Muslim. . .You’d better believe I’m going to point out how ridiculous it is to equate Governor Bradford with the KKK or to turn Thanksgiving into a national day of mourning.

Well, given that there are some groups of people still fomenting dissent among the races, I guess I can see why they’re threatened by the vision of the First Thanksgivng after all.

Disclosure: I descend not only from Governor Wm. Bradford but also the mythological American love story, John Alden & Priscilla Mullins.
Disclaimer: I felt this way about Thanksgiving even before I found out I had ancestors on the Mayflower.

Reading suggestion:  Nathaniel Philbrick provides a good balanced example of all the voices preserved surrounding the impact of Plymouth Colony on the New World, and vice-versa:  2003. The Mayflower and the Pilgrims’ New World. G.P. Putnam’s Sons. That’s the young person’s version; I found it quite challenging enough!

1stTh