Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today we're waxing poetical about the difference between verse and prose. So, the most characteristic feature of poetry is that it's written in verse as opposed to prose. There are many different ways to define poetry, but that's another video. In this video, we're going to examine some technical elements of verse. And in English poetry, many of the terms we use to discuss those elements go back to Greek and Latin poetry. Now what verse actually is is a little hard to define, but perhaps it's easiest to say that when composing verse, the poet is paying particular attention to the rhythm of the language, whether or not it's following a set repeated rhythmical pattern, whereas prose instead mainly follows the natural flow of speech and grammatical structure. The word verse literally means turned from Latin verterra to turn, and the metaphor this employs is one of plowing, reflecting the way the plow is turned at the end of each row. So Latin versus, originally referred to furrows in a field, and thus metaphorically lines of poetry. When combined with a Latin prefix pro, forward, versus also leads to the form proorsus, thus porsus, and finally prosa, literally straightforward, referring to straightforward or direct speech without the sophisticated ornamentation found in poetry. So turns out that the English word pros, in fact, comes from the same root as verse. Interestingly, Latin verterra can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root where to turn or bend, which is also the source of Greek raptane, which gives us rapsode, a Greek word for reciders of poetry. Sometimes, by the way, the word verse is used to refer not just to a line of poetry or as a synonym of poetry in general, but to specific groupings of lines in a poem, also known as a stanza, which literally means a stopping place, from the idea of the stop at the end of each stanza in a poem, and comes through Italian ultimately from Latin stare to stand. Verse is also used to refer to the parts of song lyrics that aren't the chorus. Now what often defines a stanza or verse are elements like rhyme scheme and meter. Rhyme is a kind of repetition often found in poetry, in this case the repetition of the sounds at the end of words, and so a regular pattern of rhyming sounds at the end of lines of poetry can be used to organize it. As in, there once was a man from Nantucket who, uh, well, you get the point. However, this isn't the only way you can use repetition of sounds to organize poetry. When you repeat the sounds of beginnings of words, it's called alliteration, literally to the letter, as in Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. The oral poetry of the Germanic tradition, for instance, was organized that way, with specific regular patterns of where those alliterating words should fall in a line of poetry. The basic rule was that each line of, for instance, old English poetry had to contain four stressed syllables, and at least four unstressed syllables, and one or both of the stressed syllables in the first half of the line had to alliterate with the first stressed syllable, but not the second stressed syllable in the second half of the line. Here's an example from the Battle of Maldon. Which can be translated into modern English. There can be more than four unstressed syllables, and their positions in each half line can vary according to five different patterns, but therein lies the artistry and variation of the metrical structure in Germanic alliterative verse. But getting back to rhyme, the word partly comes from Old English rim, number, counting, reckoning, from Proto-Indo-European ray to reason or count, a variant of R to fit together, which also, by the way, gives us the word harmony. The other source of the word rhyme is Old French rim, meaning rhyme, which ultimately comes through Latin from Greek rythmos, meaning rhythm, thus making rhyme and rhythm etymological doublets. In fact, the modern English spelling of rhyme was a conscious partial etymological restoration of the Greek to make it match the word rhythm. The Greek noun rythmos comes from the verb rain to flow, from the same Proto-Indo-European root that gives us the word stream, making it very appropriate that the term flow is used to describe the rhythm and rhyme of rap lyrics. Greek rain also gives us a number of other English words, such as diarrhea, rhinorrhea, a fancy word for a running nose, and logoria, the excessive flow of words. This last one is sometimes used to simply refer to verbosity and excessive use of jargon and big words. Another word used to describe this kind of verbosity is sesquipedalian, an intentionally ironically long word, meaning literally a foot and a half long, and that's a foot in the poetic sense of a metrical foot. The word comes from Latin sesquipedalis, a word used humorously by the Roman poet Horus in his Ars poetica to criticize poets who use overly long words. Now, speaking of poetry and diarrhea, or at least the unexpected flow of bodily fluids, we have the Old Norse myth of the meat of poetry. The two groups of Norse gods, the Isir and the Vanir, ended their war with each other with the ritual of each spitting into a vat to symbolically seal the truce, as one does. From their spittle was created the wise being Kvasir who could answer any question. He travelled around to spread his wisdom to humans and one day encountered the dwarfs Fialar and Galar, who killed him, drained his blood, and turned it into mead which could make anyone who drank it into a poet or scholar. But the dwarfs' killing days weren't over yet. They also killed two giants, and when Sutungar, the son of those giants, came for revenge, the dwarfs bought their safety by giving him the mead. Later, the god Odin came in disguise to recover the mead, and after a series of adventures, broke into Sutungar's mountain fortress with the help of Sutungar's brother, Baugi, using the drill Rati, and there encountered Sutungar's daughter, Gunlud, who was supposed to guard it. Odin seduced Gunlud and slept with her three times in exchange for three sips of the mead, which, being a god, was all he needed to drain all of the mead. Odin then transformed into an eagle to escape with the mead, but Sutungar also transformed into an eagle to chase him, and with Sutungar in hot pursuit, Odin accidentally, well, allowed some of the mead to leak out behind him. I'll leave you to ponder what exactly that means. When Odin reaches Asgard, he spews up the rest of the mead into containers set out by the other gods, and so the mead of poetry was given to the gods and those humans who were gifted at poetry. As for Odin's, uh, droppings, that's called Skald fieflerhüter, the rhymester's share, the portion of poetic ability given to the poetic hacks of the world. Now, getting back to rhythm and rhyme and the formal properties of verse, although not all poetry has to follow a regular set pattern in the rhythm, we often talk about poetry in terms of its meter, also sometimes called prosody. The word prosody, by the way, looks a bit like prose, and they are in part distantly related as the first part of prosody comes from Greek pros toward, which comes from the same root as Latin pro, but the second element of prosody is the Greek word oide, meaning song, which is also part of that word rapsode we saw before. As for the word meter, it comes through Latin and Greek, ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European May to measure, which has a number of other derivatives in English, like measure, immense, and month. Now, different poetic traditions from around the world have different systems for their metrics, but the one you'll most likely come across in an English literature class is essentially the one borrowed from the Greeks, though I'll make one caveat that Greek metrics is quantitative, that is, it's concerned with long and short syllables, literally how long it takes to say each syllable, whereas English metrics is accentual and depends on which syllables are stressed or unstressed. Nevertheless, we tend to use the same terminology from the Greeks, also used by the Romans, to refer to English meter. The basic unit of meter is the foot, as we saw in the word sesquipedalean, made up of some small number of syllables, usually two or three, and though I can't say for certain, it seems likely that the sense comes from the idea of dancing or tapping your feet when you raise your foot and when you lower it. The English word foot in the metrical sense is simply a translation of Latin pays foot, which is a translation of Greek poos foot, and in fact, all three roots come from the same Proto-Indo-European root ped. Each foot in this Greek system, therefore, has a part where the foot is raised and a part where it's put down. In Greek, arsis, literally lifting, and thesis, setting, or placing, though there's disagreement about how to use these terms in English, depending on whether you're talking to a metricist or a musician. The point being, a foot will involve a combination of stressed and unstressed syllables in modern English meter. So an iamb is a foot consisting of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, such as the word because. And I should point out that a metrical foot does not need to correspond to individual words. Longer words might be made up of more than one foot, and short words might form only a part of a foot. The full etymology of the word iamb from Greek yambos is uncertain, but it might be connected to Greek yaptane, to attack or assail, or more literally to put forth or send forth, with the metaphor being that you send forth words of attack as you might send forth arrows or spears, since invective and satirical poetry was typically written in iambic meters in ancient Greece. As for yaptane, its further etymology is unknown. The word yambos has also been connected to the mythological figure yambe, who used vulgar humor to cheer up the goddess Demeter when she came to Attica searching for her missing daughter Psephany, thus accounting for the humorous aspects of the festivals for Demeter in Attica. Next, the trochey is the opposite of an iamb, a foot made up of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, as in the word unit. The word trochey comes from Greek trochios pus, literally running foot, from the verb trechane, to run, presumably because it was felt to be a very quickly moving meter, ultimately from the root dreg to run, from which we also get the word truck, originally in the sense of a little wheel, but later being used to refer to a wheeled vehicle for carrying heavy loads. A dactyl, which comes from Greek dactylus finger, is a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, like the word internet, and may have come from the idea that, just like a finger has one long segment followed by two short ones, in Greek quantitative verse, a dactyl is one long foot followed by two short ones. We don't know where Greek dactylus comes from, but some have suggested a connection with the Latin word for finger, digytus, which comes from the root dague to show, which also interestingly gives us the English word toe. The opposite of a dactyl, that is two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable, as in the word absolute, is called an anapest, literally struck back from Greek ana, back against, and pine to strike, so-called because it's the opposite of a dactyl. And the final main type of foot is the spondy, made up of two stressed syllables, as in the phrase, big mood. Spondy comes from Greek spondaeus, from the verb spendane, to poor libation, in other words to make a ritual offering of a drink, from the proto-Indo-European root spend, to make an offering perform a rite, hence to engage oneself by a ritual act, which also gives us such words as sponsor, spouse, and respond. Now these various feet can be combined in different numbers to make a line of poetry, so monometer has one foot, dimeter has two feet, trimeter has three feet, to trameter has four feet, pentameter has five feet, hexameter has six feet, and so on. So when you say iambic pentameter, that's a line made up of five iams, and though typically a line of poetry will be made up entirely or predominantly of one type of foot in English prosody, a good poet will sometimes substitute one foot for another for special effect or for emphasis, as in this line of iambic pentameter by Edmund Spenser, in which the word love is emphasized by the substitution of a trochee in the first foot. Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught. The traditional study of metrics involving stresses and feet is theoretical and abstract, but in the 19th century and beyond, some researchers began to bring new scientific approaches to the study of prosody. In our previous video about poetry, we saw how Hermann von Helmholtz studied sound perception in music, how some sounds were perceived as musical, while others were just noise. Using a complex array of instrumentation, an approach he got from Gustav Fekner, the founder of psychophysics, an experimental approach to studying the relationship between physical stimulus and perception. Well, Helmholtz's student, Wilhelm Wundt, who became known as the father of experimental psychology, was the first person to call himself a psychologist and is probably the most important figure in psychology, combined psychology with this physiological approach, which had a major impact not only on the study of music, but also on metrics. Wundt's student, Edward Wheeler Scripture, who helped to bring experimental psychology from Germany to America, focused on prosody and speech and began to develop a scientific approach to studying meter, using various specialized equipment for examining speech with a high degree of accuracy and precision. He found, for instance, in the recitations of Trochaic verse, the emphatic syllable was usually longer than the unemphatic one, and that, in English at least, increase in duration and rise in pitch are ordinarily associated with increased stress, and that these associations are essentially mental ones and are not independent physical or physiological phenomena. So, maybe quantitative verse and accentual verse are not as separate as they first appear. Now, in addition to rhythm, poetry is also notable for its heavy use of figurative language, in part to allow poetry to carry a lot of meaning in relatively few words. Figurative language is also used to make poetry more memorable, in that it can have a more dramatic impact on the audience, and this is all loosely described as part of a poem's imagery, a word which is now used more broadly than just a description of physical appearance. In its most basic sense, figurative language is constructed in such a way as to convey extra meaning beyond its literal sense. That's the difference between literal and figurative language. Literary scholars have divided up figurative language into two types. There's tropes, meaning literally turns from Greek trapping to turn, from the root trap to turn, and there's schemes, meaning figure or form, from Greek echene to have or hold, from the root seg to hold, which also gives us the word school, from Greek skole, originally meaning leisure. In tropes, words are used in such a way that the figurative meaning departs from the literal meaning. The most well-known tropes are metaphors, from Greek literally carrying over, and similes, from Latin literally comparison or likeness, in other words similar. Both types of comparison, like the explicit comparison in the simile used by Robert Burns, oh my loves like a red-red rose, or the implied comparison in the metaphor used by William Shakespeare, all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players. There are many other tropes, so I'll give just a few more. In metonymy, from Greek literally change of name, a word is used to refer to something that is closely associated with it, so you could say the crown to refer to a king or queen, or Hollywood to refer to the film industry. And synecdoche, from Greek literally receiving together or jointly, uses a part to refer to the whole. Like when a ship's captain says, all hands on deck, he doesn't mean the sailor's disembodied hands, he means the whole sailors. A conceit, related to conceive and concept, from Latin concipera, to take in, take hold of, had the original sense of a thought, notion, something mentally conceived, but in literary context, came to refer to a figure of speech in which there is a striking and elaborate parallel between two very dissimilar things, basically a special type of metaphor or simile, such as comparing the state of a lover to a ship caught in a storm, as Sir Thomas Wyatt does in translating into English one of Petrarch's sonnets. These are often known as Petrarchan conceits, since Petrarch uses this trope extensively, and Shakespeare parodied this kind of figure when he wrote, my mistress eyes are nothing like the sun, an idea picked up by Sting in his 1987 Nothing Like the Sun album. An extreme version of this kind of trope is the metaphysical conceit, used by the so-called metaphysical poets of the 17th century, such as John Dunne, who compared Saxe to a flea-bite in his poem The Flea, in a totally not weird at all attempt to convince his girlfriend to sleep with him.  By the way, the sense progression of the word conceit goes from something formed in the mind to fanciful or witty notion in genius thought, to vanity, exaggerated estimate of one's own mental abilities, which is the sense most commonly known today. And finally, there's irony, which occurs when there is a gap between one thing and another, such as the gap between what you literally say and what you actually mean when you say, good job, to someone who has just knocked over their glass of wine, or the gap between what a character knows and what the audience knows, like the way we know Peter Parker is really Spider-Man and Clark Kent is really Superman, but no one in the story does. Irony is all about that gap. As for the etymology of the word irony, once again the term comes from Greek, ultimately from the word iron, meaning dissembler, one who says less than he thinks, which probably comes from the verb irane, to say, from the root where, to speak, also source of words such as word, verb, and rhetoric. Now people often complain about the word ironic being misused to mean something more along the lines of coincidental or incongruous. Most famously in the Alanis Morissette song ironic, but it should be noted that the sense of condition opposite to what might be expected, contradictory circumstances, goes back a long way, perhaps as far back as the 17th century. What's more, the sense that those pedants insist on isn't even the original sense of the word, since in Greek the philosopher Plato used the word irony to describe his own teacher Socrates' tactic of deliberately pretending to be ignorant as a rhetorical device to get the better of his opponents in an argument. Ironically, language changes. Schemes on the other hand are a type of figurative language which departs from standard usage not in terms of the meanings of the words, but in the order and syntactical patterns of the words. This can include things like rhyme and alliteration and repetitions of the sounds of words, but also includes many other types of repetition and rhetorical devices. While these devices occur with much greater frequency in poetry, they can also turn up in prose. For instance, an aphora from Greek literally carrying back, in which one or more words is repeated at the beginning of successive clauses, is used by Martin Luther King to great effect with the phrase, I have a dream. And chasmus, Greek for crosswise or shape like the letter chai, in which the syntactical structure is reversed or mirrored, can be seen in John F. Kennedy's famous line, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. And in zygma, from Greek zygnomy, to yoke, a word is used simultaneously with two different meanings, as in Ben Franklin's line, if we don't hang together, we shall hang separately. Or Rihanna's line, only thing we have on is the radio. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarked to Henry Nelson Coleridge, his nephew and son-in-law, yes, they're the same person, as reported in the Younger Coleridge's specimens of the table talk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, prose is words in their best order, poetry is the best words in the best order. The Elder Coleridge said this in the context of making a snarky remark about Edmund Burke's popular essay, a philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, saying it was neither profound nor accurate. But if you want to know more about the sublime and poetry, you can check out our previous video, Sublime. Now returning to the word trope, that same root also made it into English poetic vocabulary through another more circuitous root. In Latin, in addition to meaning a figure of speech, it also came to mean a song, one presumably using various figures of speech. And from that it became the vulgar Latin term tropare, to invent or find, from the idea of composing a song. This eventually leads to modern French trove to find, but it also produced the old Provençal form tropare to find, and tropador, which becomes English troubadours, itinerant composers and singers of lyric poetry in 12th and 13th century Southern France. They were the ones who kicked off the whole courtly love thing, drawing especially on the love poetry and pickup guide by the Roman author Ovid. You know, love-sick young men secretly pining for often unattainable women, going on adventures or performing services for their beloveds to win their favour, and all the while composing love poetry in which they worship the ladies using quasi-religious language. It's where we get the modern trappings of romantic love, including much of the language of modern love songs. Well, that Provençal love poetry became very influential throughout medieval Europe, and was taken up and adapted to Italian by the poet Giacomo D'Alentini, who was also credited with inventing the poetic form the sonnet. The word sonnet means literally little song. From Italian sonnetto, O Provençal sonnet, ultimately from Latin sonnus, sound, which can be traced back to the proto-Indo-European root swen to make sound, also the source of the words sound and swan, on account of the sound the bird makes, though you might not exactly consider that a song. Well, if the Sicilian poet Giacomo D'Alentini invented the sonnet, it was the Tuscan poet Petrarch, who was also credited for helping kick off the Renaissance, who perfected it. After Guitone Darezzo introduced the form to Tuscany. As we know it today, the sonnet consists of a single 14-line stanza in iambic pentameter with an intricate rhyme scheme, and features a volta or dramatic turn in the middle, marking a shift in thought or emotion. Petrarch sonnets were structured as an eight-line octave with a rhyme scheme of A, B, B, A, A, B, B, A, and a six-line cestet with the rhyme scheme C, D, E, C, D, E separated by the volta in between. As you can imagine, such a strict and complex rhyme scheme required much skill to pull off. The form was eventually transported to England and taken up by many English poets, including Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Edmund Spencer, and William Shakespeare. The English sonnet took on the structure of three quatrains and a final rhyming couplet, with the rhyme scheme A, B, A, B, C, D, C, D, E, F, E, F, G, G. From the earliest sonnets of Giacomo D'Alentini and Guitone Darezzo to the influential sonnets of Petrarch and Shakespeare, the form had always been associated with erotic love, though later poets would experiment with writing sonnets on other topics as well. The sonnet form, with its complex 14-line structure, is just long enough to be able to explore a complex idea with dramatic development, but short and intricate enough to acquire considerable ingenuity on the part of the poet to really show off their mad skills. So it's not surprising that it became one of the most popular and prominent poetic forms. Now, as long as we're discussing technical aspects of verse, let's look at some of the other major genres of poetry, starting with what is probably the oldest, the epic. Indeed, the oldest surviving work of literature is the originally Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, but perhaps the most influential and well-known epics are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and it's from Greek that we get the word epic. Epic is derived from the adjective form epikos of the Greek noun epos, word or story. This can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root wekwa, to speak, which also produced the Greek word ops, meaning voice, which when combined with the word callos, beauty, produced the name calliope, literally beautiful voice, the Greek muse of epic poetry. Today, the English word calliope is also used to refer to a kind of steam organ, now most associated with merry-go-rounds and other carnival rides, invented by beekeeper Joshua C. Stoddard, who also invented various agricultural machines, such as a kind of hayraic and hayed tether, as well as a fruit-pairing machine and a fire escape system. Epic indeed. The epic is a long narrative poem in elevated style that generally focuses on the exploits of heroic figures whose actions have a bearing on a whole people. The particular poetic structure or form of the epic depends on the poetic tradition it comes from, but in Greek epic poetry was always written in dactylic hexameter, Greek poetry was never rhyming by the way. In fact, for the Greeks, poetic genre was primarily determined by the meter and only somewhat by the content. English epics have been written in a number of meters over the years, such as heroic couplets, rhyming pairs of lines in iambic pentameter, rhyme royal, iambic pentameter seven line stanzas, rhyming ababcc, or unrhymed iambic pentameter known as blank verse. Other poems we would today refer to as epics include the old English heroic poem Beowulf and the Homer-inspired Roman Aeneid by Virgil, which in turn inspired John Milton's Christian epic Paradise Lost, which itself influenced William Blake's epic, Milton, a poem in two books. Another genre English poetry gets from the Greeks is the lyric. The word lyric refers to its original musical accompaniment, the lyre or lyra in Greek, which ironically, though it's kind of the prototypical and national instrument of ancient Greece, with a myth about its creation from a turtle shell as a peace offering gift from the god Hermes to Apollo apologizing for stealing his sacred cows, seems to be a non-Greek loanword from some previous language spoken in the area. It's ironic then that today we think of lyrics as the words of songs, but originally they were the musical accompaniment. Greek lyrics were written in a variety of often quite complex meters that involved the combination of different feet and line lengths, but excluded meters that were strongly associated with other genres, such as the dactylic examiners of epic and didactic poetry. And Greek lyric could be about a wide range of topics from war to drinking to philosophy to love. When we talk about lyric poetry in the English tradition, we usually mean poems written in the first person that express personal emotions and points of view, and that are usually relatively shorter and not narrative but more descriptive. And, unlike Greek lyric, there isn't really a set form or meter associated with it. One particularly influential set of lyric poems is found in the lyrical ballads, a joint work by the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The title is actually kind of paradoxical, which reflects the differences between the two poets, because a ballad is a kind of narrative poem or narrative folk song usually originally transmitted through an oral tradition and not expressing a personal point of view. Wordsworth wrote mainly lyric poems for the collection, whereas Coleridge's main contribution was the long narrative poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner written in the style of a medieval ballad. The ballad had its origins in the later Middle Ages, and often features folk heroes such as Robin Hood and is structured in stanzaic forms such as quatrains in alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines. Ironically, the word ballad comes from the late Latin word ballare to dance, which also gives us the words ballet and ball as in the fancy dancing party. In Old French, a ballad is a kind of dancing song, and it was only later that the word developed its sense of a narrative song. The ode is another Greek form that has a somewhat different connotation in English. In ancient Greece, the ode was a kind of lyric stanza that could be sung by a single poet or a chorus of singers and dancers. One form that influenced English poetry was that used by the Greek poet Pindar, which had a complex structure involving three parts, the strophe, anti-strophe, and epode. Other types of Greek lyric, including those solo odes, which were favored by archaic Greek poets such as Sappho, Alchias, and Anachryon, were adapted into a Roman form by the poet Horus in a collection known as Carmina but in English as the Odes, and featured instead regularly repeating stanzas and usually a direct address to someone. Though the subject matter of Greek and Roman odes could vary, Pindar's odes tended to be encomiastic poems, that is they were being written to praise and glorify someone, and that's the sense that's generally implied in English by the term ode, though English odes could also be written in complex stanzaic forms mirroring both Pindaric and Horatian odes. English odes include such notable examples as Andrew Marvell's and Horatian ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland praising Oliver Cromwell's bloody and genocidal conquest of Ireland, and the more meditative great odes of John Keats, such as Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn. We've already seen the etymology of the word ode, which comes from Greek oide, song, also the second part of rap-sode. It can be traced further back to Greek idane, to sing, from the Proto-Indo-European root wed, to speak. Another Greek form that has shifted in sense from simply indicating the meter to later referring to the content is the elegy. Elegy, from Greek elegos, is a bit of a mystery word, possibly a borrowing from Phrygian, a now extinct Indo-European language that was spoken in Asia Minor, but its ultimate source is unknown. Originally it seems to have been a general word for song or perhaps specifically a song accompanied by the flute, but in terms of Greek poetry, it refers to poems written in elegiac couplets, consisting of a hexameter followed by a pentameter line. Greek elegies could cover a wide range of topics, including epitaphs on tombs, but Roman poets developed a specialized form of love elegies. And although some English poets continued to use the term in this general sense, such as John Dunn, who wrote elegies on often erotic topics, gradually the term became specifically associated with poems about death and mourning, such as Thomas Gray's elegy written in a country churchyard, one of the first English poems to make the connection between elegy and death. But English poetic forms have come from non-Greek sources as well, such as the haiku, borrowed from a Japanese tradition. The Japanese word haiku is a contraction of haikai noku, comic verse, coined by the 19th century poet Masa Okoshiki from the Middle Chinese words bae, perhaps meaning comic, and qiu, line. Originally a comic form, haiku came to refer to a short poem made up of five, seven, and five on, roughly speaking syllables, featuring two images or ideas separated by a cutting word, and a seasonal or nature reference. The form was adopted into English in the early 20th century and taken up by such poets as as Repound, though both the form and the content of English haikus have been treated loosely. A more homegrown English poetic genre is the largely oral and often body genre, the limerick, which although it seems to date back at least as far as the 18th century, doesn't gain its name until the late 19th. The name may come from the county and city of limerick in Ireland, possibly in reference to a parlor game in which participants make up a nonsense verse sung with the refrain line, will you come up to limerick? The place name limnach in Irish means literally bear ground of the horses, from lom, bear, na, the, and ach, horse, from the same Proto-Indo-European horse root, equo, that gives us the word equestrian. Alternatively, the word for the humorous poetic genre might come from lyric, in reference to Edward Lear, who popularized the form in the 19th century. The limerick consists of a single five-line stanza in anapestic meter, rhyming a, a, b, b, a, with the a-lines as trimeters, and the b-lines as dimeters. Since I've already alluded to the body man from Nantucket lyrics, here's a limerick about the limerick by scholar and humorous Professor Morris Bishop. The limerick is furtive and mean, you must keep her in close quarantine, or she sneaks to the slums and promptly becomes disorderly drunk and obscene. Another genre is satire, which in English literature is not generally considered a poetic form, but rather a mode of writing in both poetry and prose. In Roman literature, however, it was a poetic genre written in deck-tailic hexameter lines. In fact, the Romans claimed to have invented the form, though in a sense there were forerunners in Greek iambic poetry, so-called because it was written in iambic lines. What these various genres and modes have in common is that they are all attack poems. They use humor and wit to criticize vices, folly, and other shortcomings of everything from individuals to society at large. The two most notable Roman satirists are old friend Horace and juvenile, and these two poets have lent their names to two categories of satire in the English tradition. Horacean satire is urbane and witty, and uses more gentle humor to point out human folly and failings. As Horace himself explained, he wished to laugh people out of their vices and follies. Juvenalian satire, on the other hand, is more serious in style, intending to evoke contempt and moral indignation in the reader. Now, although the emotions sparked by satire range from rye amusement to downright contempt, it would be more appropriate if it sparked sadness. Actually, the word sad didn't originally mean sad, but instead sated or full, going back to the Proto-Indo-European roots sa to satisfy, also source of the word satisfy from Latin satis enough and facra to make. The sense shift that happened from old English to middle English was from sated to heavier ponderous, both physically and through metaphor mentally, to weary or tired of, and finally to unhappy by around 1300. That word satis, by the way, also comes into English with the prefix add to, first becoming old French assais, sufficiency, satisfaction, compensation, then Anglo-Norman French assets, and finally English assets, which was a Norman legal term, meaning enough wealth to settle the claims made by a deceased person's estate, and was later taken as a plural form and back form to asset, referring to a single item in the assets column in balance sheets by the 19th century, and now just means property. But for our purposes it's the related Latin word satire, sated or full, that's important, because it was used in the phrase lang satura, literally full dish, and was thus used to mean mixed dish, dish filled with various kinds of fruit, which then in a metaphorical sense became the word satira, meaning a poetic medley, particularly collections of poems in various meters by the Roman poet Aeneas, and further gained the sense of work intended to ridicule vice or folly, perhaps influenced by the satyr plays of the Greek dramatic tradition, satyr referring to the goat man creatures of Greek myth whose etymology is unknown. And it's from Latin satira that we get the word satire. If this whole etymology seems a little far-fetched to you, let me double down on it by pointing out that the roots saw also came into Greek, but because of a sound change in which pre-vocalic s becomes h in Greek, as we can also see in Greek hepta, meaning seven, as in heptagon, corresponding to Latin septum and English seven, the Greek derivative is hadros, meaning thick, strong, or large, which comes into English in such words as hadrosaur, a species of dinosaur, and hadron of large hadron collider fame, productive little root that Proto-Indo-European saw. Although there are other forms we could mention, I'll end with one final one, related to satire, but also to epic, the first genre we looked at, that is, parody. Also not strictly a poetic genre in the English tradition, parody goes back to that same Greek word oide, song, along with the prefix para, meaning beside, counter, against, or perhaps in this case, mock. According to Aristotle in his poetics, the Greek parodia genre was invented by one hegemon of Thassos, who took well-known poems, particularly epics, and tweaked the wording to change the sublime into the ridiculous, in other words, mock epic, and it's in that sense that we get the modern genre of parody, in which there is a mismatch between the style and the subject of a work. Another word for this kind of thing is lampoon, which seems to come from a kind of scurrilous French drinking song, which features the refrain lampon, let's drink, from lampe to drink or guzzle, ultimately from a Germanic word related to the verb to lap, meaning to lick up, as a cat does when drinking, stemming from the Proto-Indo-European root lab, meaning lapping, smacking of the lips, to lick. So, if you like surprising etymologies, lap that up. And with that, we've taken a quick lap around the primary technical elements that help us divide poetry from prose, and while rhyme, rhythm, and figurative language may not be enough to make good poetry on their own, creating verse does turn on the way language, sound, and imagery can work together to make thoughts and ideas more memorable. Thanks for watching. For more on the subject of poetry, there's a companion video to this in which we talk about another definition of poetry, as the way the brain perceives the world. So check that out. If you enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections, please subscribe and click the little bell to be notified of every new episode. And check out our Patreon, where you can make a contribution to help me make more videos. I'm at alliterative on Twitter, and you can visit our website alliterative.net for more language connections in our podcast blog and more.


So in this pal world video, I'm going to show you guys how you can farm legendary schematics from bosses like jet wagon without breaking a sweat This is by far the fastest way I have seen and which you can easily do. It's unreal stay tuned How's it going guys? My name is DPJ and the winners of my weekly giveaway for power world you can see on screen now Your name is here hit me up on discord And I will sort you out a copy of this game as simple as that now I haven't another weekly giveaway to be in the chance of winning simply drop a like on this video Leave a comment down below and make sure you are subbed with those notifications turned on good luck everybody Okay, so credit to this one goes to a language who hit me up over on my discord He told me about the strat. It works like an absolute charm. It's also hilarious to witness at the same time So this farm is for those players who are more or less at that end game farming building breeding farming wise I'm talking legendary schematics and this strat will allow you to kill bosses Instantly and have the best chance of dropping said legendary schematics So I've been using this for a few days now and I have gotten lucky with few schematics. I've had drop so it 100% works for sure So to do this guys You need a rocket launcher as well as any pal capable of freezing enemies on the spot with that ice move called Blizzard spike now this as far as I'm aware is the owner one that actually freezes enemies like it's on the spot Where they like form into an ice cube But I could be mistaken and maybe other Moves the ice powers in this game can do where they freeze enemies on said spot But either or guys you need an ice move which freezes enemies under spot So they form the ice cube for about five seconds Plenty of powers in this game earlier pals to have that blizzard spike move But that's what you need guys You also need the rocket launcher which you unlock in game too. So keep that in mind Okay, so to do this guys it's simple find yourself that world boss that drops that legendary schematics and do the following Use the blizzard spike move on them Once they freeze you simply shoot them with that rocket launcher It's better to try and shoot them towards their feet So it propels them higher But in doing this guys you'll notice the enemies the bosses will skyrocket into the air and then die from that fall damage Now this works incredibly well On jet dragon the twins Which are palladius and necromus and just about every other boss in that game Which you can indeed freeze because you need to be able to freeze them What I will say is I couldn't get this done on uh, Thustallion but obvious reasons and it also wouldn't work with on bosses within caves Because obviously your threes and they'll hit the roof, but it won't fall enough to die So Thustallion and those bosses found within caves and any other boss you can't freeze This won't work with but every other boss in the game. It definitely will Now the bosses I've tried and it's worked absolutely fine for me are jet dragon, necromus, palladius Zuzaku, hymnpacker and many other bosses You will have to try and test this uncertain said boss We were looking too far with jet dragon and medialness using Thustallion My Thustallion needs to use the move on jet dragon while I'm on the floor So my my Thustallion needs to be on the floor when I use the blizzard spike move on jet dragon And then I shoot him with that rocket launcher if I do this while I'm in midair Yes, you will freeze but it doesn't seem to go up into the sky Weirdly enough though It's the complete opposite when you try and do this under twins with necromus and palladius You have to do it from when you're in midair Freeze them from in midair then shoot them with that rocket launcher from in midair And then they just fly into the sky and die from fall damage Kind of weird but hate works right now so take advantage of this while you can So yes, if you're looking too far with legendary schematics, try this technique I guarantee you will love it people Now also, you don't need to be mounted on said pall You can have a pall that has this move that will do it for themselves When they're flying said road boss, you can stand back and wait for them to be frozen As soon as they are frozen, though you just shoot them with that rocket launcher You don't have to be mounted on your pall as you'll see me do it on Thustallion on screen This is not the case as long as they get frozen and you shoot that rocket launcher at them while they're frozen in that ice cube They should nine times that 10 fly up into the sky and land and die Now sometimes they can bug out and they'll fly up into the sky. They go so high They just reappear with a bit of their health gone, which is I've had it happen a couple of times One more times and not I've had them shoot up into the sky hit the floor die on the spot and get that Loot and like I said, I've been lucky a couple of times now I got the legendary Pompassion shotgun and they also got the uh, I think it's the heat resistant armor or the cold resistant armor I can't remember which one is where you see it on the screen now. So yes super super lucky on my behalf It also works on other world buses like german tide 2 and so forth german tide though again I had that weird bug where I say bug the whole thing's a bug but and that weird instance where I shot him He flew so high into the sky He literally vanished then I think he reappeared on the spot And then he only had like a bit of his health taken off But it definitely works. I've done it a few times him to try it out. I also tried on king packer I tried it on a Nubis and I've tried it on a few other buses too. So yeah, it definitely works on any bus That isn't resistant to ice and can't be frozen or inside a cave any other bus It works perfectly fine on now in regards to the legendary schematics The legendary old bull comes from king packer the legendary Pompassion shotgun comes from sazaku The legendary paramount armors come from necromus and Palladius. That's the heat and cold resistant pellet armors The legendary rocket launcher comes from jet wagon So yeah guys you can farm these all day every day to get those legendary schematics and just do what you gotta do there So yes people an easy glitch an easy exploit and how you can farm these schematics without worrying about buses even Touching you so yeah do it while you can because there's no doubt this is going to be patched out of the game without a shadow of a doubt So yeah people use this and abuse it while you can But on that note guys the end of the video has arrived if you enjoyed it leaving a like really helps out Feel like what you see and want to see more power would be sure to subscribe and hopefully guys I will see you on that next one


Hello, and welcome to Harsh Critique. Today we're going to go over the draft I created for the video on Tuesday. Just an update on that when I was recording that video, the SCP was up to plus six. It was only like an hour after I'd posted it. After I think it was 12 hours, it dropped down into the negatives, and I decided after taking a bit of a nap, actually more than just a nap I hadn't slept for quite some time at that point. But after waking up, I decided to take it down and decide on whether or not I wanted to work on it some more, because I was not satisfied with it. So given that, I thought it would be a really good idea to go over it in a Harsh Critique video. And here's the thing, normally I would do like I did my very first Harsh Critique, where I critiqued one of my own works and acted like it was somebody else's and treated it, you know, mean and all those things, but I can't really do that here, not honestly. I mean, I can't even do the play thing where I'm pretend, because you know, and I know this was written by me, but I think I can still be pretty harsh with a Harsh Critique of myself, probably more than anything else. So let's get started. First of all, as if you number, I'm gonna, we're gonna go with xxxx now, because it's no longer actually up on the wiki, so it doesn't have a number. Special Containment Procedures. Should the SCP, at any point, discover its capacity for self-propelled flight, it is to be recaptured and administered Class C amnestics before being released back into the general population. An interview should be conducted to determine how this information became known to the object. Also, this was in the original first bit. Right here, there's a problem with the English. The SCP is to be given a lifetime supply of pizza deliveries, no word in between, local spicy crust pizzeria. So that's, I accidentally deword there, which is the kind of thing that you could probably notice if you just read it through once after you're finished with it. But it was in such a hurry to post it, that's what you get for trying to do everything in like an hour and a half. Sometimes it works. I've done that before and it's worked perfectly well, but every once in a while. And here we go. This line here, I thought about it later and was like, I'm not entirely a fan of it. SCPXXX is to be made to believe this was a result of winning a radio call-in contest. So right from the top. The first paragraph is fine, but this sentence here is where it starts to fall apart for me, because it doesn't feel quite right. Is to be made to believe is such an awkward phrasing and then the clinical tone kind of goes out the window, not entirely, but the clinical tone suffers a bit because this was a result of winning a radio call-in contest. Now, I don't need to say any of these things. We don't need to explain how it is explained to the object how he has this free pizza. He just wants some free pizza. Leave it alone.  SCPXXX is to be granted disability compensation by the US federal government due to several back injuries. This cover story should be reinforced whenever possible, and the SCP should be discouraged by reasonable means from seeking to lose weight. So that parenthetical there, originally it was by any means necessary. I changed it to by reasonable means. I actually mentioned this in the last video I did, but after thinking about it, that whole parenthetical doesn't need to be there. Could just be, should be discouraged from seeking to lose weight. You don't need to put by reasonable means. That's assumed already. And prior to that, this cover story should be reinforced whenever possible. Is it a cover story or is it actual reality? Is getting a disability compensation or is he just being told that he's getting one? It's a little unclear. That is not great. Should SCPXX's weight fall below 150 kilograms, entity has to be remanded to foundation custody and its containment procedures re-evaluated. So again, this is a bit of a problem because it's like, what are we doing here? I've created a world, or created in this particular head canon, in this articles canon I should say, a program. And it's mentioned near the end, and not at the beginning because that's just how SCPs are generally structured, but it could have been mentioned up here. There could be information about the project containment at large, which is the name of the actual project that allows us to take, like say, this guy who can fly, but he can't fly if he's fat. So if he's fat, he's just a regular guy, he's a little lighter on his feet every once in a while. So you can let that man be out in the wild without putting him in the box. But if you're going to do that, that is a deviation from the norm, and you need to address that, you can't just assume that your reader knows what you're thinking when you wrote it. And that is a big problem with this SCP. SCPXXX is a human male that is 57 years old, 176 meters, 176 meters, that would be great, 176 centimeters tall, and weighs approximately 188 kilograms. SCPXXX is capable of projecting a telekinetic lifting force on itself. Now, here's a question that somebody asked me in Discord, and I didn't have an answer for it. How do they know it's a telekinetic lifting force? Think about that. Of course, he can generate a lifting force, but we have no idea how he generates it, right? But how do we know that it's a telekinetic? We list it as telekinetic. And at no point is there any testing done on this, or at least if they should say there's no testing shown in the article, which if you say a thing like that, you need to back it up somehow. And also this next sentence, this extends only to SCPXXX's own body and the entity has shown no capacity to lift other objects. This is a problem because, okay, I say this about other people's drafts sometimes, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention it for when I make the same mistake. Every once in a while, people want to talk, people in their mind, they think that the anomalous is normal, and so they need to explain that what isn't anomalous about a thing. You don't. Like, I think I've used this example before, but if you have a book whose cover is made of living human skin, you don't then need to say, but the pages are normal. At least not in a clinical document. Now, in normal human conversation, you might want to say that just to be sure that people are clear on it. But in this clinical document, there's no reason to say that. So in this case, if I say it's a telekinetic lifting force on itself, that should be the end of it. I don't need to say, also when I say, on itself, this means it extends only to its own body, and the entity has shown no capacity to lift other objects. I already said that when I said, on itself, there's no reason to assume that it could do anything else. Unless I say so. And finally, the entity's speed of movement while utilizing this lifting force is inversely affected by its weight. That sentence is fine. I like that sentence. I like that sentence. I will keep that sentence. At a weight of approximately 73 kilograms, the entity is capable of traveling 4.7 meters per second's capacity for self-directed flight. Oh, self-direct flight. Not self-directed flight, but self-direct flight. I only just now noticed this problem. There's some of this other stuff I've thought about for a little while, but that one I only just now noticed is completely eliminated. That's not a great phrasing. It had approximately 103 kilograms of weight. See, the phrasing there is a little wonky. Any further weight beyond 103 must be supported physically. Not physically, physical. God, you can tell that I wrote this when I was working on NoSleep. I hadn't slept for like 23 hours and I was trying to bang it out in like an hour or 20 minutes. Jesus Christ. I mean, to be fair, I'm not saying that the video I did was bad for the purpose that I created. I'm saying that this article doesn't work. It's not good enough. It needs more polish. It like, because what I was showing you was my writing process, which is still a valid thing that you need, you know, you can look at and you can learn from. And I'll probably do more videos like that. But goddamn, this could have used more polish before it went up on the wiki. And in fact, probably could have used an entire rework because I have some structural issues we're going to talk about in a little bit. SVXXX suffers from sleep apnea, type two diabetes, heart disease and back injuries as a result of its obesity. These injuries, these injuries, that's bad. That's not good phrasing because we listed sleep apnea, type two diabetes and heart disease. The final one, yes, is back injuries. And then when we say these injuries, we're referring to the back injuries. But the way that sentence is structured could be better because these injuries ignores the sleep apnea type two diabetes and heart disease. Are you saying that his heart disease and type two diabetes don't require continued medical attention? Come on, man. And allow foundation staff to monitor his weight on a regular basis. I don't think that last sentence is actually valid. I think that's telling the audience something when you could be showing them. If you want to do that, you could show incidents like because we have the least incident reports, right? Why don't you show him showing up at a doctor's office and getting like, oh man, that's another thing I need to talk about a little bit, a little bit. We're going to go over the rest of the actual article pages first, rather than the stuff that I would like to include. SVXX was founded and developed an all of this, the various incidents things here, like it's this guy starts watching the biggest loser. He starts reading on articles on the internet about losing about people who've lost weight and their lives are either better or worse, whatever. And then there's the solutions. I like the format for this, by the way, this is actually I really enjoy the way this is formatted. I think I'm probably going to use this and something else at some later point. But the content misses for me. And here's why. You've created a character or I shouldn't say you. This is me. I've created a character. I'm making it like it's somebody else's problem, somebody else's mistakes. I created a character here, but I haven't connected the audience to them, right? And there was a line I kept wanting to include something along the lines of SVXXXX's personable and friendly and the foundation is working on rectifying that problem, which as a line is great, but there was nowhere I could fit it in. I think that would have really helped a little bit in that vein. But you need to talk to this guy or at least see him talking to somebody else, I should say, there needs to be an interview. Like if you're going to build this character up and you're going to try and show that the foundation is more cruel when they're trying to not be cruel, which is the whole point of this, then you need to show me the character who's suffering, right? You can't just list off a suffering in a bulleted list. Yes, that's how the SEP format works, but you can still work around how the format will do the interview logs, talk to him, show him dealing with certain issues, even have a journaling or something like that. Those are all different various possibilities. You don't have to do all of them. You don't have to do any of them. You may have some other solution available, but you have to do something to connect the audience to your character or else they're never going to care about what happens to them or worse yet, they're going to care what happens to them, but they're going to think that you're just putting the character through hell in a way that doesn't lead to anything important. And that's another big problem with this SEP. It doesn't have a strong message, right? The idea is this, there's a guy who can fly and the foundation knows that they can keep him in the general population of they can let him be in public because if he's fat, he can't fly. And in order to keep him fat, and this is the thing, they're like, let's not keep this guy in a box. Let's be a friendlier, nicer SEP foundation, and we're going to let him live a life that's going to be limited. There's going to be a lot of monitoring involved, but it might be less expensive and it might be more effective for his morale to let him live a normal life, except they don't do that.  They have to get involved in every little thing. And the truth of the matter is, is that if dude didn't, if they didn't get involved, dude would probably still be fat. Once you get fat, it's very difficult to not be fat anymore. All they got to do is keep an eye on his weight and like if it actually goes, see, they're not even doing that. They're not keeping an eye on his weight and seeing if it actually goes down. They're trying to preemptively avoid him losing weight. Just remember this problem. But anyway, that doesn't work unless you as an audience really connect with the character that's being affected by the foundation's actions. And the way this is written doesn't allow for that. You just learn about a dude. I mean like, it's just some guy. And people in the worst part about this is because it's not personal enough, it can feel cheap. And we're going to keep going through some of these incident logs real quick. We've got this one about the fresh produce, which it feels, and by the way, the spicy crust pizza ria thing works, except it feels like it makes it into a joke, right? And we're talking about a lot of the people who, you know, every person in the world, almost every person in the world has dealt with weight issues in one way or another, either from being to some people too skinny, some people too fat, but no one's happy with the way they look, right? Everyone deals with this problem. And if you make it into a joke, only a very limited group of people are going to be able to find that funny. This isn't supposed to be funny. It's supposed to be horrifying. And it is, but also in a way that kind of pokes, it feels like it pokes fun at the main central character. And as I said before, you're supposed to connect with the central character. If you're laughing at him at certain points, that's not a good sign for the way your emotional through line is supposed to hit the audience. And we start here with the fresh produce. And this is where it starts to devolve into silliness, because, okay, fine, they replace his fresh produce with decompose with like rotten stuff, whatever. And then he tries to do aerobic exercise and they break up the sidewalk outside. And again, that's fine. That one there, the breaking up the sidewalk outside, cool, whatever. Although as again, as I said earlier, they should probably just monitor his weight. And if it actually goes down, start working to solve that problem, not do this preemptive stuff. But then we get to the last one. And that's where it goes over the top. This is this is was the mistake right here. I think I tried to do a natural escalation, which is good when you're doing so doing a story, you want to do escalations. And generally, you want to do an escalation in the rule of three, which means you start with one thing, and then you escalate again, and then you escalate again. And the final one is the one that gives you the punch. Now here, I put four things in, which doesn't work at all. That's that's a big problem. And honestly, they're not thematically really very connected. They're independent incidents. They don't follow a narrative thread.  So he goes to the park to walk instead. And then they rob him. So those two are connected. But the first two, not really, they're not really connected to anything. And what we have here is not a story, but instead a series of events. And you might be like, isn't that the same thing? Not really. Each individual event might still be connected to the other, like these things do follow one another. But there's no thread. Like if this first event happened six years ago, instead of just before the produce thing, it wouldn't change anything about it. It would still mean exactly the same thing. Correlation doesn't equal causation, right? That's that also applies to your storytelling. Just because two things happen at the same time does not mean that they are related. This I fixed this very shortly after I posted it. But I didn't actually put this in a box and it just like opens up like this. Which I saw this the first time I was like, really? Really? God. It's just that's just bad. That man, how tired I was really shows in this. It feels like I'm making an excuse, by the way, when I say that I'm tired. And that's why I wrote something that was subpar. But to be honest with you, I should say this, I've written things that are subpar before. The being tired thing led me to think that it was okay to post it. I've written things that are bad before. And I've known not to post them. I was so... My problem was it's not what made me write the bad thing. It's what made me look at a bad thing and go, yeah, this is fine. Click. Anyway, I'm still I'm pretty tired right now. Actually, I haven't slept again for almost 24 hours, but I actually don't mind this. And again, this is the problem. The containment at large, which if you watched the video, when I came across it as a title, I was like, oh, that's that's a good I just typed it. And then I was like, that'd be a good title.  And so I actually literally went on the internet and looked at like other ways to say at large, and there really wasn't a better way to put it. Plus, it's such a good pun for the for the story. You can still do that in the title. I don't know that it works. Maybe I'll have to still think about that. I'm not entirely sure I'd like this. I even feel like salvaging this. This is definitively salvageable. This is almost there. Although, no, I don't know. I think I could probably make it work as a mediocre piece if I just made a few tweaks and changes in order to make it good. I think it probably requires I could make it survive on the wiki. That's easy. But to get it to the point where it's actually good, I think would take a lot more work. And I'm not entirely sure I'm willing to commit to working more on this. We'll see. But yeah, structural problems with this is just that it's a character focused piece that doesn't really focus on the character as much as the things happening to that character. Always understand that when you have a character, you want to tell his story. He needs to be involved in his story. It needs to it can't just be things happening to him. Your character needs to have agency. Otherwise, what's the point of even telling the story in the first place? Anyway, I would be remiss. I never want to be the per kind of person. And I'm sure I've done it before, like the hypocrisy of pointing out the problems and other people's works and not noticing it in my own. It happens. I've got a couple of articles. Honestly, I'll tell you right now. There's a couple of articles I've got up on the wiki right now that should be downvoted off that weren't. They're worse than this and somehow are still up. So I'll give you that. But I try to aim for higher than mediocre. Like I've said this before in the standards video, like the wiki standards are not particularly high. You can get away with very low quality work. This is below mediocre, which is bad. You can get away with mediocre. You can't get away with worse than that. Oh man. Anyway, that's the video. I hope you enjoyed it.  I'm looking at this right now. I'm like, why did I think this was okay to post? It was okay as a lesson. I'm fine with the video that I made. Like why did I I just I really wanted I really wanted to post on the video. And I was just like, you know, this is good enough. Fine. Post didn't even give it a second thought. Would have been nice if it would have really been better if it'd been one of the actual ones where I've done the exact same process. Actually, we're at one in like 30 minutes before and it's still up. It's rated like 150 something. But but no, not this one, the one I actually recorded turns out to be not dog shit, but not good enough. Oh man. Gotta love when that kind of thing happens. Oh, and by the way, I was looking at my list of art. I said I was at 99 articles and I still am now because I went up to 100 and then back down to 99 when I self deleted. But there are by different metrics, I've got more than 100 articles on the wiki. It's just some of those articles aren't counted by certain. It's like some of them. Some things don't like say that some of them don't count an author page as an article, even though it is creative work. If you like the video, this is a very, very good time for you to pledge on Patreon because it is the first of the month. And Patreon will actually take your money as soon as you pledge and at the first of the month. So anyone who pledges at the end of the month is really helping me out. But if you'd like to pledge, always a good idea to get started at the beginning of the month so you get the most value out of your pledge. Head on over to patreon.com forward slash D Sumerian and pledge at any level. If you pledge at anything, I think between five. Yeah, anything between five and $20. Your name will be on every video I do. And when you pledge, I will say your name in the next video I do. If you'd really like to support my content, scroll down just a little bit, hit the subscribe button, hit the notification bell, and let me know I'm not alone out here. I'll see you on Tuesday.


Hello and welcome to NewsClick. I'm Poranjoy Gohar Thakurtha and with me here in the studio I have Aatishi Madalena. She's a spokesperson of the Amadhi Party. And in the first part of this interview with her, we talked about politics. But she is a topper. She's a history topper from St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi. Then she studied at the University of Oxford. And besides being the only woman in the Amadhi Party's Political Affairs Committee, she used to be the advisor to the Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi, Manish Sisodia, on education between July 2015 and April 2018. So, in this segment we're not going to talk about politics, but we will talk about education. Aatishi, you have received a lot of kudos. You've received a lot of praise from large sections of people cutting across political lines for your attempts to change the government school system in the national capital. In fact, you were hired for a salary of one rupee. And then when in April 2018, there was this advisory from the Home Ministry. The Ministry of Home Affairs headed by Mr. Rajmath Singh, which says your entire appointment was null and void. That post should not have been created in the first place. And that was the end of the story. Now, how do you see, I mean, how, why did it take the Ministry of Home Affairs? What should I say?  It should not have been made in the first place. How do you see the situation? I think they removed us if you see the letter that we got. If I remove the legalese from that letter, it basically said that we are removing you because we can and that we could have given post factor approval for your appointment, but we are not doing so and therefore you're dismissed. But I think in the larger context of the conflict between the central government and the Ahmadini Party, that is where we can find an explanation for this. And the explanation for this lies in the fact that many of the advisors in the Delhi government were actually helping run the reform project that the Delhi government has been carrying out, including myself working on education, some others working on different reforms in different departments. And I think that one can see the fact that the central government has been trying everything in their ability to prevent our government from functioning. This is where I'm finding it difficult.  Now, Mr. Manish Sisodia invited Narendra Modi to visit the schools and he said, come with an open mind and make schools like this all over the country. Now, don't you see, I mean, is the government simply being cursed? But if there is something good that is being done, why should politics, in that sense, intrude into an attempt to improve the education system? And everybody and his brother doesn't matter what your politics is, what your political ideology. We all would agree that the primary education system, the school system in this country could certainly do with a lot of improvement. I think this question will need to be answered by the home minister since he's the one who dismissed me. But I think that the larger question is that in the politics in our country, you have government after government, party after party who comes into government and yet nothing changes for the ordinary people of this country. I think with the Amadmi Party's focus on improving governance for ordinary citizens of this country, be it issues like water, sewage, electricity, health, education. I think that if the people of this city begin to see that this governance is possible, that schools, government schools can function well, that government hospitals can function well, that if there is no corruption in the system, the system can work differently, then business as usual for all other political parties is bound to come to an end. No, is it as simple as that? Just because you did good work, you opened 8000 new classrooms in government schools. You send principals, 300 principals, 100 teachers, you send them to Cambridge, you send them to Harvard, you send them to Singapore's National Institute of Education. You had modern state-of-the-art facilities, you opened libraries, etc., etc., etc. You did a whole lot of things and we can talk about some of these in greater detail. Above all, I think Delhi was the only government in the country where about 25% of its budget was devoted to education and the budget, in fact, doubled from 500 crore to 1,000 crore. Now, why would anybody want to oppose it? That's the million-dollar question. And I think that if you see that education in this country, for example, has always been run for only 5% of the people in this country. So you have 5% of children who have access to world-class education. But you have a large majority of the children either going into budget-private schools or going into government schools, neither of which are functional. So I think for the first time there was an attempt to actually improve government schools. But it seems that the central government didn't want it. Interestingly, not just the current central government, but all political parties, especially in Delhi, both the Congress and the BJP, their leaders actually have a lot of stake in private schools. Many politicians run private schools. So the very people who are charged with... Are you trying to suggest that because there are some BJP politicians, some Congress politicians that are involved in running public schools, they have a vested interest in putting down the government schools in the city? Is it as straight as that? Absolutely. And this is not just what has happened in this tenure. I think one can see that for the past 20 years, there's been a systematic neglect of government schools. Many of the things that you talked about that the Ahmadi Party government has done, none of this is rocket science. This could have been done by any government before us. The question is, why is it that they want enough classrooms for children? Why is it that teachers were not trained well? Why is it that there was not enough budgetary adaptation? Everybody knows the infrastructure was in a mess. So you people tried to improve the infrastructure. Everybody knows that children from disadvantaged, underprivileged sections of society go to government schools that they can't afford private tuition. But people have also raised some doubts. Let me ask you one doubt. The poor performance of the children in class 5, in class 6, and the fact that there's a no detention policy all the way up to class 9, and there have been successive reports in by the annual survey of education reports, all of which shows that the quality of education is very, very poor. How do you suddenly explain that in the central board of secondary education results come? Delhi's performance is excellent. It goes up from 88% in 2017 to 90.6%. All the students clear exams. And these are the students who study in about a thousand state government-run schools which are opting for the central board of secondary education. I think one needs to understand two things here. First of all, is there an educational crisis in the country? Yes, there is. Pratham's ASA report has been telling us that for more than a decade that half the children in this country don't even know how to read and write. And this is precisely the situation in Delhi. When we ourselves found that 75% children in class 6 could not even read their textbooks. So we have been carrying out a lot of reforms in the past three years to actually bridge this learning gap. So even if the child is in class 7, does not know how to read and write, we have been focusing on making sure that they first learn how to read and write and then we move them ahead with the syllabus. So I think there's been a lot of research on this particular issue because this is not a problem just in Delhi. So we have adopted this method called teaching at the right level where children are grouped by level, not by their actual grade. So if you have a child in class 6 who does not know how to read and write, there's no point in making them sit in an algebra class. One minute. Do you think this problem has been worsened because of the no-detention policy? Do you support the no-detention policy? See the no-detention policy is a good idea. But I think it's a policy that's come before its time. That one needed far better systems of teacher training, improved curriculum, better teaching methodologies, better systems of assessment before one could actually introduce the no-detention policy. Now what we have effectively done with the no-detention policy is that by taking away exams from the system, we have removed whatever little accountability that existed in the government school system. Now children and parents are not accountable. Children don't even need to come to school for a single day in the year and they would still be promoted. Teachers are not accountable because whether the children learn or whether children do not learn, they're going to get promoted to the following year. Your government, when did the other extreme? By saying we should have CCTV cameras, close circuit television cameras.  This has been criticized severely that this is not the way to hold either teachers accountable for attending classes, teaching students properly or for that matter monitoring what students do in class just because there are some delinquent students and there have been some terrible incidents in the national capital region. This is not the way forward to have the CCTV cameras inside each classroom. Yes. I could turn the question around to you that for all of us of people in the city who have children studying either in government schools or in private schools, security is a major concern. And we have, as you have said, had multiple extremely serious incidents as far as security and safety of children go. Now my question to you is, okay, you oppose CCTV cameras. Do we have any... You've already never had your way. So I'm asking, do we actually have any other solution? How do we actually ensure... The solution is precisely what you talked about. That in the 50,000 classrooms that we have, how do we actually ensure the safety and security of children? Okay. The accountability of teachers can be ensured by several other means, which we have tried, especially bringing in accountability by community participation in schools. But tell me, is this the only way to ensure security of children? Isn't this a kind of intrusive way?  But is CCTV just because it's a quick fix kind of a solution? But what other solutions exist? I think that one also has to understand that a government is operating on a very large scale. We have 50,000 classrooms where children are studying it at any given point of time. In a thousand-odd schools? In a thousand-odd schools. So how do we ensure that there are 16 lakh students who are studying in our schools? And we do not want to put the safety of any single child at risk. So what method do we have to ensure this kind of decentralized security mechanism? We have said this repeatedly. If any people have suggestions that they can give us, we would be happy to adopt other means of security. Alright, let's take a step back and talk about the kind of education. You've talked about the tyranny of completing the syllabus. Now what can you do with this? You can't do anything about it. It's a problem, it's an old India problem. How can Delhi be an island in a problem that you're having? Let's say, yes, the way the whole education system is structured in this country and teachers are under a lot of pressure to complete the syllabus. So at the end of the day, the teachers said, yes, I've completed the syllabus irrespective of whether the students have learnt or not. And that is precisely what we have been trying to change in Delhi for the last few years.  Two years ago we were running this reading campaign as a part of improving the foundation skills in our schools. And one very senior, committed, sincere officer said to us that if we teach children to read for a month and a half, then what about the syllabus? To which another officer pointed out to her that if she didn't know how to read, how would she do the syllabus? And I think that the entire system has been operating without actually thinking about the child who's at the centre of it. And even if you look at the syllabus, the syllabus that we currently have in schools is not designed for first generation learners. Our syllabus, our teaching methodologies, teaching practices have not changed in the past three decades, even though the social demographic of children coming into government schools has completely changed. More than half the children who are coming into government schools today are actually first generation learners. Aditi, another issue on which you had a huge problem with the left-wing governor was on the issue of regularising the appointments of about 15,000 odd contract teachers. Now you believe that Delhi is different from other places that almost all these contract teachers have degrees. They're well-trained, they're well-educated, and Delhi government schools, unlike, you know, state schools, state government schools in other parts of the country, they all appear for the exams set by the Centre Board of Secondary Education, other than, of course, the Kendra Vidyalaya and the Navodaya Vidyalaya. Now the question is, again, the left-wing governor rejected this proposal several times. Several times. What are the reasons he gave? See, I think the left-wing governor rejected this proposal not because of any specific reason that he had, but I think it was because it was an election promise of the Ahmadi Party because there is absolutely no reason why a teacher who is equally qualified as a teacher who is going to, who has not been teaching in our schools, there is no reason why you would not choose a teacher who actually is more experienced. These are teachers who have been teaching in our schools, many of them for four, five, six, seven years. They are used to teaching, they have the experience of teaching in the specific situation and circumstances of Delhi government schools. They are used to teaching first-generation learners. And now we are going to get in a corridor of 15,000 new teachers who will take several years to actually get accustomed to this situation. These teachers are qualified, they are experienced. Why has their regularization not been approved? Because the LG tries to stall everything that the Ahmadi Party government does. So just as I talked about in the letter of the advisor, it almost says something like, I am refusing because I can. Interestingly, not in this matter, but in another file, the left-in-in governor had actually written these words that he rejected a policy of the Ahmadi Party government. And I quote here because I do not think this is a very good idea. He doesn't like your face. So it seems. Last question. This whole idea about introducing spoken English. There is an opinion that has been expressed that it is an elitist. That it is better to ensure that they speak their mother tongue. Yes, only a small section would go to the IITs and institutes of higher learning. But we should get about time we get rid of our old colonial hangover. I know we are speaking to each other in English. Precisely. How important is spoken English for the underprivileged sections? I think it's probably the most important thing for the underprivileged sections because the entire access to jobs, the access to the market, actually depends on spoken English. And interestingly, this was a demand that came from the students of our schools. Last year, the chief minister and the deputy chief minister were interacting with Delhi government school students who had cleared the IIT JEE exams. And in that interaction, one student got up and said that sir, our schools have very good education. But because we don't know how to speak English, when we go to the world, we lack confidence. And I think that if government school students get access to spoken English, there is nothing that is going to prevent them from being at par with private school students. Okay, last few questions. Education, you know, we see across the world this debate, role of the private sector, role of the government. What are your views? I think it is the responsibility of the government to provide high quality education to every child in the country, irrespective of their ability to pay. And I think the primary responsibility does lie with the government and there is no two questions about it. Unfortunately, governments have failed to play this role and therefore the private sector has been the one who has been the provider of any high quality education. The armed army party does not say that we will do away with the private sector. For us, our philosophy has been that we are going to improve the quality of government schools to a point where they are the schools of first choice. And if you are going to get high quality education without paying anything, why would anyone want to pay high fees for it? The failure of the state, can it be compensated by the private sector? I don't know what your parents who have been part of the public education system. There have been professors of history who would go along with you. I think that the failure of the state can be compensated by the private sector because only very few people can access the private sector. And therefore, anyone who does not have the ability to pay therefore does not have access to social mobility. So what you are saying is that if you are born into a poor family, you will always remain poor because you cannot get access to good quality education. And you will do well only if you are born into family that can afford high fees. And what should be the role of the state in controlling regulations on private schools including the fees that students should pay? See, as a government, we have never interfered in the functioning of private schools. What they teach, how they teach, what activities. Do you believe the government should control fees? You know, as in the case of public health care? I think that there has to be some... Private schools often claim that they are doing something for the underprivileged but actually don't. So I think that there needs to be, minimum regulation needs to be introduced both on private schools and private hospitals. Especially when land has been given by the government often at throwaway prices to these private schools. And land has been given to these private schools on certain terms and conditions where they are supposed to admit children from underprivileged sections where they are supposed to get their accounts audited by the Delhi government every year. So the only thing that the Delhi government has been doing is what is its legal regulatory function that we will check your accounts. What that has meant is that now for the past three years private schools have not been able to hike their fees. Because many of them have crores and crores stashed in their bank accounts and yet are increasing fees year after year. Adishi, you are no longer the advisor to the Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi on education for the last two months you've been without a job. You're not even getting the... You're one rupee salary. One rupee salary too is not getting. What are you doing on the education front now that you're no longer holding the official position that you were? So I was joking to someone a few days back that two months ago I used to get one rupee a month for giving advice to the education minister. Now I give my advice free of cost. But yes, I think that while one can say that in a light mode I think that of course the role that one could play in that capacity as an advisor to the education minister can no longer be played and I think that that is where the politics of the BJP seems to be so petty because it's not about my designation. The fact of the matter is that we had been trying to reform schools. We had been trying to improve the lives of 16 lakh students who study in Delhi government schools. And the central government's decision to remove me as an advisor seems to indicate that the central government doesn't want the children of the poorest children in Delhi to have good education. Something that the Bharati Chanta Party and the Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi would certainly disagree with and instead say how your party believes in sensational dramas rather than work on the ground. Something that you will surely disagree with. I think that the past three and a half years our track record and governance, especially in Delhi government schools has shown that there has actually been absolutely no sensationalism. And the people of this state and the people of this city and the people of this country will judge you. Absolutely. Now for your words, but for your actions. Thank you very much, Atishi, for coming here and giving us your time and giving us this interview. We just heard Atishi Marlena in the first part of this interview. We discussed politics. She was then talking in her avatar as a spokesperson of the Aam Admi Party and in this section we've talked about the education system and the role she played as a former advisor to the Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi on education. Thank you for being with us.