Flexible, resilient, resistant, robust, strong.
Brittle : decayed, easily broken, flaking, fragile, inflexible, oxidized, rusted.
Aware of metonymy and the implied skein of weighted and valanced relationships that through common repetition bind languages into stability, I've never embarked, as might a devoted linguist, on a mathematical or schematic model of language clouds.
Some time ago, it was enough to note for college freshmen that while the term "stockings" might elicit many associations, the combined term "stockings and fireplace" would probably lead in western culture to some thought about "Christmas" or "Santa Clause".
The context for consideration of how language works may have changed from teaching about "telling details" and "levels of specificity" in description to discussion about the legitimacy of language as regards describing anything, but language behavior -- the development of a grammar and lexicon, multiple idioms and syntactic flexibility -- has, thank God, a natural evolution, one resistant to malicious re-engineering.
"Brittle" is a material property defined incidentally and implicity by the character of off-stage force or stress involved in its definition. For example: for resisting heavy winds, a windowpane of certain dimensions and material manufacture may be quite adequate and strong; for resisting a hammer, quite brittle.
In essence, a windowpane may be neither brittle nor strong but only what it is ideally observed, that is without context or intention: i.e., a windowpane may be purely its design, formulation, physics, and name until intended for some purpose and tested for use.
For The Birds
I have had fun with this already on this blog: "Black Widows, Black Crows, White Gulls -- Hitchcock's Metaconflict."
Our computers may some day make plain that every human thought and expression, action and enterprise, may be predictable in terms of pattern and pattern genesis, but that day is not this one, and struggles involving consciousness, language, and perception plus the development of conscience and judgment would seem ongoing.
In English, and sadly ignorant I know no other language, we have a technology capable of acquiring, evaluating, and evolving foreign, new, or novel perception and expression. With enthusiasm, it gets its collective head around new plants like "Islamic Jihad" and "taqqiya"; it affords windows (without glass or windowpanes) through such terms as "deconstruction" and "semiotics" for looking over itself as a phenomenon as if the observers themselves were above, beyond, or separated from its living existence; it differentiates between the sense of care, compassion, fear, and prudence involved in, say, oral hygiene and visits to the dentist and the possibility of having one's teeth knocked out in a bar fight or a car accident; altogether, it affords tools for weighing what is good and life affirming and that which is not and may be providing license to evil or inducing it.
Do Hitchcock's birds know they're evil?
Do, say, the two older sisters in "Cinderella" know they're evil?
In human aperception, Hitchcock's birds play as a force of evil, coordinated, conscious, malicious, but unfathomable for being beyond the reach of human conversation and reasoning but without bounds as regards launching an air war and, however briefly, producing a truce.
(An equally dstructive comet or several would exhibit no such political or social cooperation or malice).
In consideration of what I call the "dark mirror of language", the birds may well have their own story, say one that faults humans for environmental aggression and depredations that kill their own (those old plastic six-pack rings, fish lines and hooks, old nets and such might suffice for missiles) and that finds in the town a useful symbolic target for delivering their message through the vicious application of beak and wing.
All that, however, strikes me as conjecture: some other force or many may be mastering and driving the birds.
In Hitchcock's classic, no character ever comes to know what has motivated the birds. Not even the bird lady, an eccentric ornithologist, can have a heart-to-heart with a presumably pissed-off gull as neither party possesses language for it.
The fairytale sisters, fairly the same who appear in King Lear, have a different problem: their collusion in their own interests bars perception of and sympathy with their younger sister's existence, self-possession, and ambition. Restated: aggrandizement, ego, greed, and excessive vanity in the oldest position the youngest for discarding and enslavement.
Fate in folk tales and plays has a way of handling such sisters, much to the pleasure of the poet-inventors of them and the timeless love of the audience for their works.
I'm less certain of the goodness of fate in human affairs, but there is in the Cinderella story, a story more ancient than anything English, a prize about compassion, empathy, revenge, and justice in the global legacy that has kept it transmitted into modern times.
I don't know yet about the fate of the tortured "anti-brittle" idea but am certain that "Cinderella" will prove a survivor for ages to come.
Reference
Credit to Nassim Nicholas Taleb for inspiration.
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