Mistakes have been made

Dang.

In yesterday’s blog post, I misspelled the last name of the Feldenkrais colleague who transcribed and translated the missing pages of AY 284, SLOW IMPROVEMENT, and kindly made them available. Her name is Yaelle Kesten. I apologize for my mistake. While I am fessing up to blunders, I need to tell you about another one. A couple of weeks ago, I used a sign that I had seen on someone’s front porch to illustrate a post that I titled, The next step. The image showed that famous quote, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” attributed to Confucius.

That is wrong.

The quote comes from chapter 64 of the Dao De Ching, which Laozi, the founder of Daoism, wrote. As it happens, Laozi was a contemporary of Confucius. This confusion seems to be quite common; however, that is no excuse for my error. I am sorry for having made it.

If the spellings confuse you, then, like me, you learned the name Lao-tse instead of the contemporary Laozi, and Tao Te Ching as the title of the book. These terms used the "Wade-Giles" system of transliteration favored by earlier generations of Western scholars. Pinyin, the official international standard for the phonetic transcription of Chinese using Roman script, has replaced it. (The word Pinyin means “spelled sounds.”) This revised, more phonetically accurate way of writing Mandarin in the Latin alphabet is why we now use Daoism instead of Taoism and Beijing instead of Peking.

Mistakes have been made. I mean, I made mistakes.

We no longer use correction fluid to fix mistakes on a typed page. Or carbon paper, for that matter.

Time marches on. I am doing my best to keep up or, failing that, at least to catch up.

Thank you, Yaelle, for pointing out my misspelling kindly. And thank you to Lavina Plonka, the only person who pointed out the misattribution of the journey quote. (Please check out her website here and be sure not to miss her awesome Creative Body YouTube videos!)