HW 32 - Comments 3

Comments I made:
Sophia:

I think that you chose an interesting topic to work off of. I really liked the question and response section, but when it came down to explaining them I was a bit disappointed. Not necessarily with your analysis, but with the way it was formatted. I kind of forgot previous answers and had to re read them a few times. I felt that you could have given some insight after each quote to keep the reader thinking.
Also, the Author of Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Fear of Death is Irvin Yalom, not Irving Yalon.

Jasper: 

I think you chose a very thought provoking subject, and had an extremely good "experimental" example with the old man, but I also felt that part of your post came out of nowhere.
While it was relevant to the topic, you go from "went bankrupt paying for their own medical care," to "I was with Kevin"... I understood what you were going to talk about because of your elevator speech from earlier, but if I had no idea what you had said in class, I would have been like "cool...he was with Kevin".
You have the ideas and the arguments, I think that maybe a little bit of organization is in need, overall, good job! 

Comments on my Blog:
Sophia:

My first impression of your post was that it was REALLY thorough (showed depth/insight). You explained every detail of your thinking, and what led you to your conclusion that people have tried to make the word die have less of a bad meaning.

Overall, I thought you were going to go further with it (for instance, asking people what they thought illness and dying meant), but the research you did was really interesting.
 

Zoe(9th Grader):

you have gone into so much depth with this!
i find it very interesting that the originally definition of ill was to be evil. in all this is very nice work 

 
Dad:

I thought your approach was well thought out. I think it's safe to say that the concept of death and dying is something we're all bound to examine every now and then. Hopefully one doesn't become obsessed with the concept. Not being the most religious of persons, I can see Epicurus' perspective as an healthy way to deal with what's inevitable.

It's interesting how you've examined the origins of words and the way they change their meaning over time. Kind of like children playing telephone, where each one whispers a message to the next and the final version is often quite different than what it started out to be.
 
Sarah M:

I really liked the research you did. It was very different from a lot of the things people did. My favorite line was "But the etymology of "die" shows that over time, humans have tried to make the idea of dying happier by "euphemistically" changing words. " Because it showed how humans in general try to soften the blow of harsh terms or events.  

Jasper:
I like your post because it was an original idea to go back to the first meanings of the words. I thought it was interesting how the word illness meant evil. I think you should have gone into why you think they had these definitions and how it connects a little more. 

Sarah T:
''The oldest definition was recorded around 1200 meaning, 'morally evil'"
When I read this it reminded me of how people used to think that if someone was sick that they were possessed by the devil or some evil spirits.