During a tour of Germany in 1958, Marx, accompanied by his then wife, Eden, his daughter, Judith and Robert Dwan, climbed a pile of rubble that marked the site of Adolf Hitler’s bunker, the site of Hitler’s death, and performed a two minute charleston.
(0)
Should I die,
Leave my remains
To the corps of Marines.
(0)
When, exactly, did ‘hacker’ become synonymous with ’startup founder’? It’s a strange internet we’ve got when the folks doing all the talk about technology have a cursus honorum in mind that consists of either: becoming a beloved and widely read blogger, or founding a web company, convincing someone to invest millions of dollars in you, and then getting bought by Yahoo.
More than just a clever rearrangement of a previous Apodion post title, you might have seen Language Log or Language Hat comment on Nathan Bierma’s column about National Grammar Day, one of these tiresome celebrations of pedantry by the sort of people who get their kicks by bitching about how ‘decimate’ really means ‘reduce by one tenth’, or how (pace jbo) ‘I could care less’ means the opposite of its speaker’s supposed intentions.
Normally I wouldn’t bother with a comment myself, given the repetitive nature of this kind of grousing. But an excerpt from Mr. Bierma’s column caught my eye:
Brockenbrough reprimands pop stars for grammar gaffes in song lyrics, including Bryan Adams for singing “if she ever found out about you and I” (it should be “you and me,” she says) — even though that’s the best way to rhyme with the line before it: “She says her love for me could never die.” And she takes Elvis to task — is no one sacred? — for singing “I’m all shook up” instead of the proper “all shaken up.”
I think the bolded part (my bolding of course) is actually quite interesting. Because I think it brings up a point in this whole debate that is often overlooked. Often when people piss and moan about these supposed solecisms, their complaint is that through inaccuracy, inconsistency, change and inattention we diminish communication; that if we let our standards droop pretty soon we will all be talking different monkey languages at each other. Their opponents disagree; people are always speaking different regional and class dialects at each other and communicating pretty well; no one who has heard ‘I could care less’ has actually taken that at its literal face without trying; and communication is actually a pretty tricky act of interpretation and pas de deux anyway, and avoiding sentence-final prepositions is a laughably minor gesture in one direction or the other. These are all true assertions.
Another Language Log post! This one quotes a review of a textbook, the review questioning some of the conventional wisdom within the field of linguistics about dying languages:
Much of the problem is apparent in the rhetorical stances of many of the authors in this volume. They are preaching to the choir in a church full of dull-witted pagans from another, very wicked planet. […] Apart from a few asides about the necessity for Americans to know second languages in the global village, [one author] nowhere explains to his readers WHY the USA would be a better place if the primacy of English were less than it is today, or WHY the apparent gradual death of Yiddish (his example) is such a great national loss […] Students—and liberal humanities professors, for that matter—know in their hearts that the linguistic melting pot has always been the great American tradition, and that it has been viewed almost totally positively by everybody but linguists, and that there are powerful common-sense arguments in its favor. Dismissive scolding has little effect against such engrained ideologies.
My answer to that question has always been simple: it is, like many other things about which I feel strongly, essentially a matter of aesthetics. Diversity is a simple aesthetic, for me—density and richness and variety resonate with my sense of beauty. I love language, and the more languages there are being spoken, the richer the linguistic biosphere, the more beauty and diversity I get to enjoy.
Of course this is self-serving, but what else is there? We all fight for our own vision of the world. I might note, however, that this reviewer’s dismissal of tribal languages might make sense to the desire for a world where everyone can communicate perfectly with everyone else—but even those people who would be served by more perfect acquaintance with the dominant language tend to feel a sense of loss—of culture and identity—as their languages die. So it’s not just the linguists, but also the speakers of those languages. Presumably they have some right?
So I finally went through one of my old and full notebooks and transcribed all the interesting parts onto my computer. I think of an entire Moleskine there were ten bits worth reading. I guess that’s not a terrible ratio, all things considered.
Anyway, among them were these two short notes that have something to say about the way my mind and my aesthetic sense works. Neither of them is particularly publishable, but for a couple hundred words written two years ago there’s a bit of interest there. I don’t remember how many days separate them when they were written, but they relate well enough.
Another Language Log quickie.
On the way back from the LSA meeting, having finished the light reading that I had brought with me, I bought Steve Berry’s The Alexandria Link. At pp. 418-419 we read:
These words were chiseled into the granite below.
CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA
“Prudence is the guardian of things,” he said, translating, but his Greek was good enough to know that the first word could also be read as “wisdom”. Either way, the message seemed clear.
Now, I don’t expect very many people actually to understand Greek, or even Latin, but is it asking too much for at least one of the people involved in the production of a book, if not the author perhaps an editor or proofreader, to know the difference?
I also appreciate, though, that this author’s notion being particularly adept at Greek translation is being able to swap ‘wisdom’ for ‘prudence’—without even having to look it up!
I had a Jaeger Bomb tonight—specifically, Jaegermeister dropped into Monster energy drink. It tasted like the interior of a glowstick. It tasted like it was designed by a six year-old wino. It gave me an enduring case of the hiccups.
(1)
