One nifty feature with a word processor program is that one is able to find the words or phrases easily and quickly, even if it is a very long document. Pressing down at the same time both the Control key and the F key using Wordperfect accomplishes very quickly what could take quite a while "by hand." By hand, meaning of course running one’s eyes across every line searching for a word or phrase and hoping one doesn’t miss it. It’s one thing, for example to look for the word "agriculture" or any other word in a one or two page document, it’s quite another to find every use of that word in a many-page document.
I’m almost certain that there is no word in the English language that has the letters wxyz consecutively in them, and if one typed those letters at the very end – or anywhere within – a 200 page word file, the Find feature would locate that letter combination within seconds. If one wanted to find the word agriculture in a document of the same length, that feature could show if the word appears at all in that document, and if it did every time it did appear. Each time it did find that word, that word would be highlighted and the program needs to be prompted to find the next appearance of that word.
What immediately follows are some quotes and sentences found in various documents that either have the word agriculture in them or were noted that those words related to agriculture.
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** . . . the man born to farming, / Whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, / To him, the soil is a divine drug. – Wendell Berry in [The Man Born to Farming]
** Every year brought spring / . . . and every year the valley of the St. Lawrence, which / had lain asleep under the snows for four months, offers men / its fields to plow and harrow and fertilize and seed and harvest/ . . . different men / . . . but always the same land. – Ringuet, translated from French
** The land is life. – Robert Hollier
** Life above the soil depends upon the life within the soil.
** If the fox preaches salvation, farmers watch your chickens. – Flemish proverb
** . . . As a member of the NFU my understanding of the general policies of that organization is that it is solidly in favor of family farms in an environment of sustainable agriculture. I was not aware that this was left wing. . . – Leo Kurtenbach in letter to the editor of the Western Producer, April 15, 1999
** The first wish of Virgil (as you will find anon by his verses) was to be a good philosopher, the second, a good husbandman: and God (whom he seem’d to understand better than most of the most learned heathens) dealt with him as he did with Soloman; because he prayed for wisdom in the first place, he added all things else, which were subordinately to be desir’d. He made him one of the best philosophers and the best husbandmen; and to adorn and communicate both those faculties, the best poet. He made him, besides all this, a rich man, and a man who desired to be no richer –"O fortunatus nimium, et bona qui sua novit!" [O fortunate exceedingly, who knew his own good fortune.] // To be a husbandman, is but a retreat from the city; to be a philosopher, from the world; or rather, a retreat from the world, as it is, as it is man’s into the world, as it is God’s. – Abraham Crowley (1618-1667) in his opening paragraph to his essay "Of Agriculture."
** I remember the time when the stable would yield / Whatsoever was needed to fatten a field; / But chemistry now into tillage we lugs, / And we drenches the earth with a parcel of drugs; / Makes each fallow / Physic swallow – / All we poisons, I hope, is the slugs. / Lor, when I was a youngster, who thought, to be sure, / Of guano, or gypsum, to use for manure? / Of acids and salts from the blue bottle shops – / Where we soon shall be going for tinctures and drops, / Draughts and potions, / Washes, lotions, / Pills and powders to doctor the crops. / Well, there, to myself I says often, says I, / Things will come round again, I've no doubt, by-and-by; / And your wiseacres find, after all's said and done / That the old plan of fanning, my bucks, is the one; / Drop reliance / On their science / Only finishing where they begun. – author unknown, from a 1846 issue of the famous British weekly periodical, Punch.
** A farmer should have parental love towards his crops and livestock. This is a heart of a true farmer. – Cho Han Kyu, South Korean founder of Natural Farming with Indigenous Microorganisms, Acres, May 2010
** If we have too much, why worry about the future? – Plato
** The man least vulnerable to propaganda is the illiterate peasant who possesses no radio. His views may be narrow but they are at least his own. Most vulnerable of all are the people who listen and believe. Are people of that kind tending to multiply? There are some grounds for thinking that they are. – C. Northcote Parkinson, in his essay [Can Democracy Survive?]
**The old mare watched the tractor work / A thing of rubber and steel, / Ready to follow the slightest wish / Of the man who held the wheel. / She said to herself as it passed by, / You gave me an awful jolt / But there’s still one thing you cannot do, / You cannot raise a colt. – Source unknown
** Ill fares the land, to haist’ning ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay. – Goldsmith
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What prompted this column outlining the nifty Find feature of a word processor, was that I had laid one of a number of donated copies of "Our Daily Bread" on my desk and wasn’t sure if I had already copied the intended quote, "The more of Heaven there is in our lives, the less of earth we will covet." Filling in the blank space on the screen with the words "the more" revealed that I hadn’t as yet, but it also revealed some other food for thought with the words "the more" in it. Here’s a few:
** The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it. – Jean Paul
** I went in search of my art, often in danger of my life. I have not been ashamed to learn those things which to me have seemed useful – even from vagabonds, barbers, and executioners. For we know a lover will go a long way to meet the woman that he loves. How much the more, then, will the lover of wisdom be tempted to go in search of his divine mistress. – Paracelsus
** System is to modern business what lubrication is to machinery; the better the means of lubrication, the smoother and more efficient the running; the better the system, the greater ease and dispatch in managing small details, and the more time following out the main paths that lead to success. – John Younger
** Gratitude, like faith, is a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it grows. – Alan Cohen
** The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction. – Rachel Carson
** I cannot remember a time – since the last war – when the political community has been so out of touch with the public that elects them and pays their keep. This estrangement is the more ominous when it becomes clear the politicians have abandoned their constituents to seek the indulgence of the rich and famous. It does seem to me, listening to the Tories and the Liberals and the Reformists, that they are really working for the Business Council on National Issues by day, and selling subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal by night. // Not only do they all walk, talk, sound and look alike, they have the same ideology. Dorothy Smith, who received an honorary doctorate from a university in these parts (central New Brunswick), and has become one of our foremost thinkers and scholars, ‘sees ideology not as a specific set of beliefs but as a biased method of enquiry that entails a systematic means not to know and see the situation of others.’ But isn’t this true of our present day ideology of money and profits as preached by our politicians? – Dalton Camp in his ‘Political Comment’ column in Oct. 6 ‘99 Guardian
** It is one of the more curious ironies of modern industrial societies that, whilst religious belief is declining, interest in religion as a phenomenon flourishes. This paradox is of particular interest to sociologists, for in spite of its declining status, religious belief remains one of the most important sources in society of meaning and morality. – from the back cover of Sociology of Religion a collection of essays which was edited by Roland Robertson which was first published by Penguin Books in 1969