Posts by Stephen Judd
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Someone on another site I frequent pointed out that this is a very basic response to feelings of loss of control. You can control your body, so you shave your head, get tatooed, whatever, thereby reaffirming your autonomy.
/goes back to compassionate ignorance
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Surely the most compassionate thing we can do for the Britneys of this world is ignore them.
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By way of peace-offering Tom, let me offer up two of my daily reads:
Both those blogs are by professional scholars, really interesting, and fairly accessible to an amateur like me.
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Sorry Tom. But you must admit horseshit IS Anglosaxon...
Seriously, Claiborne is absolutely wrong. Your point, or his point, rests on a factual assertion that every word in the passage quoted (and i'm being generous here) is "pure English", except for surrender. And that premise is not true.
Therefore the conclusion drawn - that Churchill's speeches are effective because the are based entirely on English words - is also untrue.
Claiborne is not the first person to make this claim. I have read it (in weaker and more defensible form) elsewhere. But look, he didn't verify it, which he could easily have done in 30 seconds with a dictionary. He simply repeated, half-understood, what he read elsewhere. This is a sin of a lot of popular writers, particularly on language, for some reason. I hope you didn't pay too much for the book.
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Another annoying feature of Auckland businesses is that few commercial premises have streets numbers visible so you can spend a long and fruitless search driving/walking up and down a length of road to locate the right building.
Oh yeah. And if a business' sign is parallel to the road, rather than perpendicular, you can't easily scan down the street for it. So if you are looking for a particular business that you've never visited before, you have to crawl and block traffic while you find it. Signage that can only be seen from across the road is next to useless in this scenario.
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Those are the two opposing strategies for rhetorical heft in English vocabulary: the biblical, with short and well-worn syllables; and the Johnsonian, with orotund polysyllables. Churchill knew both, of course.
It is true that the classic Churchill speeches draw far more on words with Anglosaxon roots. This is a consequence, as Lyndon points out, of choosing the shortest, plainest words consistent with dignity. The shortest words in English are generally the oldest and hence largely Germanic. In the next layer we have Norman French. Blood, sweat and tears are all Germanic, but toil is French.
If we were to strive for a thoroughly Anglosaxon style, maybe we would sound like Poul Anderson's Uncleftish beholding
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Horseshit,
Ocean, defend, confidence, cost are all Latin, Greek or French in origin.
There must be some sort of law of the internet that people who make sweeping pronouncements about language always screw it up.
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Some interesting commentary from a Dutch and a UK POV at Crooked Timber
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But if they all left with a qualification, it would just be a caucus race, where all must have prizes - and someone would complain about that.
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germany was highly liberal before fascism but history overtook it in the form of the depression.
That's just bollocks, I'm afraid. The Weimar state was pretty evenly divided between parties of the left and right. The depression lent traction to the communists as much as it did extremists on the right.
During its relatively brief life the Weimar republic did little to inspire confidence in democracy (it was consititionally unstable) and I think Craig is pretty reasonable to talk about democracy being imposed by the Allies. The same goes for Italy too...