Grammar police, unite!

[AdamSmith]

And my favorite piece of all by Eberhart. The visionary intensities from this commonplace sight that he describes.

 

The Groundhog

 

In June, amid the golden fields,

I saw a groundhog lying dead.

Dead lay he; my senses shook,

And mind outshot our naked frailty.

 

There lowly in the vigorous summer

His form began its senseless change,

And made my senses waver dim

Seeing nature ferocious in him.

 

Inspecting close maggots' might

And seething cauldron of his being,

Half with loathing, half with a strange love,

I poked him with an angry stick.

 

The fever arose, became a flame

And Vigour circumscribed the skies,

Immense energy in the sun,

And through my frame a sunless trembling.

 

My stick had done nor good nor harm.

Then stood I silent in the day

Watching the object, as before;

And kept my reverence for knowledge

 

Trying for control, to be still,

To quell the passion of the blood;

Until I had bent down on my knees

Praying for joy in the sight of decay.

 

And so I left; and I returned

In Autumn strict of eye, to see

The sap gone out of the groundhog,

But the bony sodden hulk remained

 

But the year had lost its meaning,

And in intellectual chains

I lost both love and loathing,

Mured up in the wall of wisdom.

 

Another summer took the fields again

Massive and burning, full of life,

But when I chanced upon the spot

There was only a little hair left,

 

And bones bleaching in the sunlight

Beautiful as architecture;

I watched them like a geometer,

And cut a walking stick from a birch.

 

It has been three years, now.

There is no sign of the groundhog.

I stood there in the whirling summer,

My hand capped a withered heart,

 

And thought of China and of Greece,

Of Alexander in his tent;

Of Montaigne in his tower,

Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.

[+ quoththeraven]

It is just one of those stupid in-jokes.

 

 

Babbitt is an earlier version of the once fairly widely respected but irredeemably middlebrow cultural critic Hilton Kramer, whom Gore Vidal always referred to as the Hotel Hilton Kramer.

 

Or, less charitably, Mr. Smith is showing off his erudition. Again.

[AdamSmith]

Or, less charitably, Mr. Smith is showing off his erudition. Again.

http://www.madtoglad.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/scrabbled-message-word-never-620x270.jpg

 

[+ quoththeraven]

http://www.madtoglad.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/scrabbled-message-word-never-620x270.jpg

 

I haven't played Scrabble in a long time. Is a word worth 8 points considered impressive?

[AdamSmith]

I haven't played Scrabble in a long time. Is a word worth 8 points considered impressive?

My post that you quoted is the self-reflexive answer to your question.

 

http://philweb.rlwclarke.net/History/Twentieth/Continental/(Post)Structuralisms/Deconstruction/DeMan/DeMan.jpg

 

[gallahadesquire]

I haven't played Scrabble in a long time. Is a word worth 8 points considered impressive?

 

Somewhere in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Arthur and Trillian, I believe) are playing Scrabble. Arthur put e-x-q-u-i next to "site". "Exquisite," he said, "on a triple word score. Scores rather a lot, I'm afraid."

 

Any idea how much it would score?

[AdamSmith]

If the average Havardian understands this, then I guess it explains why my degree is from a state school.

 

Gman

P.S. The proper name for a Harvard graduate (this is true!) is a John.

 

(Just as a Yalie is an Eli.)

[gallahadesquire]

P.S. The proper name for a Harvard graduate (this is true!) is a John.

 

(Just as a Yalie is an Eli.)

 

Is there a name for someone from DUKE or, god help us, BROWN??

[Rudynate]

 

Besides, It's kinda hard for me to see why English, and English alone, dumped all these linguistic features when no other modern Latinate or Germanic language has done so.

 

 

 

Dutch, Frisian, Flemish and Afrikaans do also, more or less.

[AdamSmith]

Is there a name for someone from DUKE or, god help us, BROWN??

Best I know is a Dukie may be referred to as a Blue Devil, after their (of course ) basketball team moniker.

 

Your other one I won't touch.

[MsGuy]

Dutch, Frisian, Flemish and Afrikaans do also, more or less.

 

Thanks for the info.

 

Piddling around, I've also discovered Old English begin losing its case ending when it (rather forcibly) collided with Norse.

 

Well so far, so bad for my pidgin theory. No big cash award from the English profs, I guess. Maybe I could salvage something by arguing that Vikings and Normans have certain similarities as guests. Curiously the earliest loss of gender in English is recorded in records from Northumbria (the heart of the old Dane Law) in the Viking era and spreads west and south from there.

 

Coincidence you say? Evidence in support of of my pidgin theory (as newly revised and soon to be published in all leading academic journals) I say!

[AdamSmith]

Coincidence you say? Evidence in support of of my pidgin theory (as newly revised and soon to be published in all leading academic journals) I say!

However, your notion that there is any connection at all between the MLA and money...

 

See genteel poverty.

[+ Gar1eth]

Thanks for the info.

 

Piddling around, I've also discovered Old English begin losing its case ending when it (rather forcibly) collided with Norse.

 

Well so far, so bad for my pidgin theory. No big cash award from the English profs, I guess. Maybe I could salvage something by arguing that Vikings and Normans have certain similarities as guests. Curiously the earliest loss of gender in English is recorded in records from Northumbria (the heart of the old Dane Law) in the Viking era and spreads west and south from there.

 

Coincidence you say? Evidence in support of of my pidgin theory (as newly revised and soon to be published in all leading academic journals) I say!

 

Weren't the Normans Vikings who settled in what was to become France?

 

What's interesting to me is that #1. Other Indo-European languages like German (isnt German what they call a 'multicentric' language, and is this an example of that?) can vary so much that some dialects are unintelligible to other speakers. Of course the same thing can happen in the USA. But it's much less common. #2. Norwegian didn't really have a standard spelling until Nynorsk was developed in the 19th century to distinguish it from Danish. And nowadays there is apparently still a struggle between Nynorsk and (the majority)Bokmal.

 

Gman

[Rudynate]

Dutch, Frisian, Flemish and Afrikaans do also, more or less.

 

 

Nouns are not inflected in French - there's singular and plural, but they do not have different endings according to their function in the sentence. Don't know about Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, but if they do have cases, they are a lot simpler than cases in Latin or German. I believe the case structure for nouns in Finnish is hellishly complicated - I think I read that Finnish has something like seventeen noun cases, but of course, Finnish is not Germanic or Romance.

[AdamSmith]

Off the main topic, I read somewhere that the English vocabulary contains about three times as many words as most, or at least many, other languages, on account of having three big sources: Anglo + Saxon + Norman.

[+ quoththeraven]

Weren't the Normans Vikings who settled in what was to become France?

 

Gman

 

Yes.

[+ quoththeraven]

Off the main topic, I read somewhere that the English vocabulary contains about three times as many words as most, or at least many, other languages, on account of having three big sources: Anglo + Saxon + Norman.

 

The reason for the redundant nature of old-fashioned legalese (as opposed to plain English) is the use of synonyms: one derived from Norman/French and one derived from Old English, like "last will and testament."

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_and_testament

 

Not quite triple, but close.

[AdamSmith]

The reason for the redundant nature of old-fashioned legalese (as opposed to plain English) is the use of synonyms: one derived from Norman/French and one derived from Old English, like "last will and testament."

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_and_testament

 

Not quite triple, but close.

A slightly parallel (OK, tangential ) point is the observation that English words for animals skew by which of those 3 sources contributed them. E.g., 'lamb' is Anglo (I think) describing the animal in the field, whereas 'mutton' is Norman. Natural, in that under Norman subjugation, the Anglos tended the flocks, while the Normans had only to consume the culinary end-results of same.

[+ Gar1eth]

A slightly parallel (OK, tangential ) point is the observation that English words for animals skew by which of those 3 sources contributed them. E.g., 'lamb' is Anglo (I think) describing the animal in the field, whereas 'mutton' is Norman. Natural, in that under Norman subjugation, the Anglos tended the flocks, while the Normans had only to consume the culinary end-results of same.

 

In like manner cow and boeuf.

 

Gman

[+ quoththeraven]

A slightly parallel (OK, tangential ) point is the observation that English words for animals skew by which of those 3 sources contributed them. E.g., 'lamb' is Anglo (I think) describing the animal in the field, whereas 'mutton' is Norman. Natural, in that under Norman subjugation, the Anglos tended the flocks, while the Normans had only to consume the culinary end-results of same.

 

From grammar to vocabulary and philology: not that tangential considering where some threads here have wound up.

 

In legal terms, this is more of a detour than a frolic.

 

http://principalagenttort.blogspot.com/2008/07/frolic-v-detour.html

[AdamSmith]

From grammar to vocabulary and philology: not that tangential considering where some threads here have wound up.

 

In legal terms, this is more of a detour than a frolic.

 

http://principalagenttort.blogspot.com/2008/07/frolic-v-detour.html

Marvelous distinction!

 

(In, again , 2 or 3 self-reflecting ways.)

[Rudynate]

Off the main topic, I read somewhere that the English vocabulary contains about three times as many words as most, or at least many, other languages, on account of having three big sources: Anglo + Saxon + Norman.

 

Having learned Latin, French and German, I really appreciate the streamlined elegance of English. French is pretty good, but German and Latin are hopelessly clunky compared to English.

[+ quoththeraven]

Having learned Latin, French and German, I really appreciate the streamlined elegance of English. French is pretty good, but German and Latin are hopelessly clunky compared to English.

 

Give me Spanish any day. Much easier to pronounce (no dipthongs) and prettier.

 

Also no inflected nouns, though nouns are uniformly gendered.

 

My reaction to French is: get away from me, Satan. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to whether final consonants are sounded or not and spelling is the pits. Three vowels in a row? Vieux Montreal, Joyeaux Noel -- what's the point of those x's anyways? Or the final r in au revoir?

 

Latin grammar may be more difficult, but Latin pronunciation is a breeze.

 

From what I've read, Finnish is considered the hardest language in the world for a non-native to master.

[Rudynate]

Latin grammar may be more difficult, but Latin pronunciation is a breeze.

 

 

 

The stress marks are a little tricky and the way the separate words can run together depending on the final letter of the first word and the initial letter of the word following.

[AdamSmith]

My reaction to French is: get away from me, Satan. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to whether final consonants are sounded or not and spelling is the pits. Three vowels in a row? Vieux Montreal, Joyeaux Noel -- what's the point of those x's anyways? Or the final r in au revoir?

Let me publicly declare my love for thee!

 

There is some scholarship that French spelling owes much of its silly complexities to the fact of early Renaissance public scribes in the city marketplaces charging by the letter.