Adam Byrn Tritt's Blog, page 3

Student Perception of Speed as Affected by Diction: how charged words, as opposed to academic and neutral language, heighten emotions, create bias and skew judgement with specific emphasis on outliers

It has been a long time since I have done a study. 1988, I think. Designed one or run one. A long time since I have written one, and I know I have made many errors here.

I have been telling my students that words matter. Words create perception and they can be used to create bias, emotion, action or inaction. We study appeals to pathos, logos, ethos, kairos.  Loaded language and logical fallacies. But I often sense they do not believe me.  So I thought I would put them in the middle of their...

Student Perception of Speed as Affected by Diction

It has been a long time since I have done a study. 1988, I think. Designed one or run one. A long time since I have written one, and I know I have made many errors here.

I have been telling my students that words matter. Words create perception and they can be used to create bias, emotion, action or inaction. We study appeals to pathos, logos, ethos, kairos.  Loaded language and logical fallacies. But I often sense they do not believe me.  So I thought I would put them in the middle of their...

Service

My father was in the US Navy. He was a bubblehead, as I have been told those who serve aboard submarines are called. He also served aboard a destroyer and it is quite possible I was, shall we say, engendered, within that destroyer, when it was in the Charlestown Navy Yard. I have the American flag that draped his coffin, given to me by an honor guard upon his burial, on my bookcase.

My grandfather, my mother’s father, Albert Cohen, English, joined the Canadian Army as an electrical engineer,...

After You, I Insist

It is six years since writing this. The truck has come. Joyce is at home, tumors in her liver, her lungs, colon, and lymph nodes. Today she will speak with a doctor about helping her leave before even that is out of her control.

And I am supposed to help in this. That is my honour. That is my sadness. As the collective memory takes another blow, there are things that will no longer be remembered. Those things will no longer have happened. When Joyce leaves, If I forget, so will they.

Some ar...

Vote for Adam. Wait… what? A New Adventure.

Not ever wanting to be bored, not having enough to do being a precint committerperson, a chairman of the county’s voter registration committee, teaching full-time, which is never just full-time, and seeing patients, I thought I’d run for office.  But not just any office. I chose an office that is so obscure, yet important, with such a misleading name that I can’t just run for it – I have to fully explain it nearly every time I mention it.

My wife always wanted me to run for office. She was th...

Masks

I buried your masks
Today, in the warm sun,
In the shade of the oaks,
Where one day
There will be laughter,
Where the squirrels play,
Where the woodpecker nests,
Where the songbirds drop seeds.
First the gauze and plaster mold
That rested against your face,
Then the plaster decorated
As though you were a queen.

Now that there is a house
I am safe in,
I can stay in, and
No one can make me leave,
I can bury them.

A deep hole and a kiss
Longer than expected—
The contour of your lips,
A pause, a...

Something Holy

I heard the jingling of a collar last night. Throughout the house, the tag against tag. I could hear them jangling from the denim in the cadence of her jaunt, side to side, side to side.

I looked outside. No dog. Certainly none inside. Back to bed, then, the jingling toward the room, side of the bed, stopped.  I slept well.

I can’t remember when she left. A year? Two? But I remember her eyes. And the sound of her heart.  As well as I remember her gutteral moan and her whistle. The rhythm of h...

What Shall We Do?

I know a man
Whose wife has moved
Into the stars.
She lives in the constellations
And wraps herself in
Shawls of nebulae.

I know a man
Whose wife lives in
Music. Old songs,
Rock and Roll.
She is found in color,
Audacious, bold and
Bright.

Mine has taken new residence
in trees
As their Goddess.
And who would kick a woman
From her home?  She is in
The waters too, in rocks,
And Sunflowers.

Men,
Our wives are
Everywhere, Everything.
Love has made it so,
The heart has built
A new panthe...

Shells

Adam Byrn Tritt

She walks along the weaving foam,
waves bright under the full moon,
picking up shells,
perfect shells,
white shells,
bright shells,
leaving footprints to
fill with glistening sea.

She wants them all.
Each shell, every shell.

Then, when her hand, her arm, are full,
returns them,
one by one,
in splendid moonlit arcs,
again to the sea,
walking away with one,
only one,
the first one.

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Object Permanence

There is a story you’d tell
every winter evening,
of parents with linked hands,
a chain down the steep hill,
a wall held on to
by the children going to school.
One by one, each making
his or her way, over the ice,
parent to parent, top to bottom,
slippery to safe, home to school.
And when the day was done,
back again, hand over hand,
climbing the hill,
school to home again,
in the safety of
parent to parent to parent.

And when school was out, morning,
sledding from the top of the
snowy street...