Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Wisdom, from me, over at Rhymes With Girls and Cars.
I recall seeing somewhere someone made the point this is an aspect of modern leftism: An inordinate fascination with linguistics. Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics. To a liberal, if you find ten different ways to say the same thing, you and those around you become ten times more worldly. Naturally, expending the same magnitude of energy pondering ten different things with a single language, would make you an unsophisticated dullard.
Or, thinking about only one thing with one language, with ten times the diligence…maybe succeeding in anticipating some important facet, preventing a disaster.
We’re trying to figure out where this thing came from, where the word basura is used to describe trash. Sonic Charmer says it must be people who think Spanish-speakers are complete idiots. I agree with the logic in his theory, I can’t sign on to the theory itself just because I know better. It’s the danger inherent to all generalizations. My boss, the dead one, started the thing back in the old job of writing “basura” on the cardboard boxes to be discarded, and I know he was just being considerate. Efficient, too, probably. You put some big bulky box where you think it will get pitched, come back in Monday to find it still there, that’s annoying & counterproductive in an office environment.
But no, he didn’t have a condescending or mean bone in his whole body. Unless he thought all kinds of people were idiots and was just really good at hiding it…mmm, hey, waitaminnit…
But I do have to say, Sonic is right. You would have to be a complete imbecile if you spoke Spanish, and you saw something marked “trash” instead of “basura” and didn’t know what it was. I would think, if you’re in another country you should be ready to see some signs put down in a language that is not yours, and also be ready to figure out the easy ones & respond to them.
It raises a distinct possibility that some of our Spanish speakers are guests, are not supposed to be on this side of the border for some reason, and don’t think of themselves as being in another country. Now, that’s a problem. That pushes somewhat out of the field of illegal immigration, and into what could be called an actual invasion. Sort of a lazy, meandering “I don’t think of it as an invasion” invasion.
So no, I don’t agree because I can’t…but I definitely see where he’s going with this. It goes right along with having to Press One For English. We’re having a cold, soft civil war right now, trying to figure out if the United States is an English-speaking country or a multi-language country. It is a muted argument, because when people think of conservative-versus-liberal disagreements they tend to think of abortion and taxes. But this is just as important: Once you teach a child how to count to ten, should the next lesson be about how to add? Or should you go on to counting to ten in Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Swahili…
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They get this stuff in college, where a liberal arts degree is basically a four-year course on the omnipotence of words. They get a little postmodernism, a little lit-crit, a little feminist theory, maybe a brief exposure to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis… and bingo: they leave with this notion that if you just rejigger the words, you’ve somehow changed the world.
And it works — at least in college, where using seventeen different $5 words for “rob the rich to support the lavishly unproductive” gets you an A in 90% of humanities courses.
- Severian | 05/28/2011 @ 06:06[…] Language, Culture-Linguistics It raises a distinct possibility that some of our Spanish speakers are guests, are not supposed to […]
- Daily Dive Memorial Day, 2011 | adeliemanchot | 05/30/2011 @ 09:39