Anyway, as I was saying before you so rudely interrupted, the mosquitoes are big in the territory. Their stings brought out lumps on truthful Jones as big as tennis balls, he tried everything to get a bit of sleep, DDT, poison gas, and a sawn-off shot-gun, but they did not trun ahair. So, one night, he thought of a bright idea: instead of going to bed, he tooks hes mattress and blankets and a hammer and got into a big iron tank that was empty on account of the dry season.

Why the hammer?

Well, he knew the mossies would fin him and attact with their pro what’s their names and try to cut a hole in the tank. And he was right. They attacked one at a time at first, and every time a proboscis stuck through he bent it with a hammer. A shrewd old head was truthful.

Must have been.

You can ask Truthful Jones. He did not get his nickname for nothing. Anyway, he was very weary seeing as he had not slept for six months. So he soon fell sound asleep. And when he woke up the tank was on the banks of the yarra river in Melbourne two thousand miles away.

Thinking and reasoning

Many people, and most newspapers, confuse causality and correlation from time to time. A correlation is a statistical statement referring to the degree of relationship between two things, but id does not mean that one causes the other. Technically, a correlation is a statement about how closely the occurrences between two things fall along a single straingt line. The degree to which this happens is expressed.

If a reasonable high correlation is found between two things, after many measures or observations have been made, we are able to make predictions about the likelihood of one thing occurring if the other occurs, but we cannot claim that one causes the other. To illustrate this: there is a high correlation between people suffering heart attacks on a single day in Sydney and the melting of tar on the roads. Should we conclude that one causes the other? Does the melting tar give off a poisonous gas, or something? Not likely. These two events correlate, but in this case both (we know) are cause by a third distinct factor – high termperature.

Now we can differ a correlations and the other things that we though before is a correlation ship. Not every cases happen in a same time have a correlation ship.

One of the most common complaints that mothers make about their young children is that they wake regularly at night.

Such children about one in five of all babies are exhausting, and their persistent waking, often accompanied by incessant crying, can be a serious problem. In a number of popular manuals on how to bring up babies, suggested that night waking can be avoided by leaving the child to cry or by other such rigid procedures. This is wrong. Parental mishandling does not cause night waking and parents should not feel that they are to blame if their baby wakes at night.

There was no question of this ‘creating’ children who were likely to cry a lot and hence, perhaps, cry more often at night on waking. It seems to reflect a different character in the crying of these children, perhaps as a result of the events surrounding their birth, and the mothers seem to know that this crying will not be stopped by leaving the baby alone.

The study also suggests that night waking could be predicted at birth and such help as is available begin right away. This, best of all, would arm the mother against people who try to tell her that she herself to blame.

Jargon is technical language developed and used by people who participate in a specialized field. Every occupation or special field of interest, from rocketry to rock collecting, hang-gliding to hydroponics, has its specialized vocabulary. These functional varieties of language are fully understood only by the initiated those who know their way about that particular field.

The uses of Jargon

It seems true, in general, that things are invented or brought into being in response to a need. This is certainly true of jargon.

The invention of specialized vocabulary in specialized fields has come about because of:

1. the need to communicate about things and ideas which cannot be accurately described using ordinary colloquial, or ever formal, language or, in other cases, the need to communicate in one word (or few words) what would otherwise require many words of descriptive, everyday language. This use jargon seems to be justified.
2. the desire to hide knowledge from the uninitiated (those not qualified in a particular field). Jargon words, in this instance, are intended to mystify and to sound impressive. When used this way they hinder communication rather than facilitating it. Such use, whether in commerce, law, medicine, or a field of science, deserves critical exposure.

A much trickier customer is the jogger who looks as though he’s just wrapped himself around a large steak and a couple of beers.

This is the man who has got the bug very recently. The other week he almost got out for seven days in a row, and if he could get a clear run at it he’d bowl off three miles without any problems, but the trouble is that from his place no matter which way he turns it’s all hills, and of course the neighbors, who probably couldn’t walk around the block without lying down, are all looking with sneers on their faces, so he cannot stop on those first hills, and boy, that makes it tough going once you’re on the flat, so there’s not much left in the old tank once a couple of miles have been covered, and he’s not boring you is he, because by the look of you a few miles on the road wouldn’t do you any harm, even your eyes are not too healthy, they are sort of glazed looking.

If you are trapped with one of the fresh fanatics there is not much to be done. You could try quoting the playboy story by the doctor who suggested that all that jogging will eventually jar the internal organs so much a jogger’s lungs and heart might suddenly slip down towards his knees.