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. […]
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop, With the bright little boxes piled up neatly on the shelves
And the loose, fragrant cavendish and the shag, And the bright Virginia loose under the bright glass cases, And a pair of scales not too greasy, And the whores dropping in for a […]
“Maigret, showing no excitement, looked at the ears of the man in green. That settled it.” —Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett
Tenser, Said The Tensor (reference uncomprehended EDIT: see comments for reference gloss) has put up a rather thorough and thoroughly entertaining linguistic analysis of an old Star Trek: The Next Generation episode: “Darmok”. This is why no one ever called linguistics the dismal science.
I do always love the practice of performing scientific analysis on works […]
CRITIQUE NO. 1 The Toothbrush-of-the-Month Club is a terrible, terrible idea. Response: I hear this objection a lot. I take it seriously, because I believe it gets right to the heart of my proposal. However, contrary to this oft-articulated criticism, the Toothbrush-of-the-Month Club is not a terrible […]
На улицах рыжий туман. Падает рыжий снег. Никогда, никогда нет солнца.
Mother Maria Skobtsova
Novelists for many years now have delighted in wry and slightly bitter portraits of television hosts, movie executives, and the similarly shallow. This is because they despise facile shallowness and inauthenticity, and by wittily and insightfully depicting it may they best reveal and reinforce their own authenticity. This, of course, is something of a joke, as the act of writing a novel to underscore your own realness and integrity is a profoundly vain and shallow act. The truly authentic simply live out their authenticity, they do not write about it. Your humble author, of course, is a singular exception to this rule.
Matteo Sepulvicci, A Whore’s Apartment in Babylon
