Cato's Grammar Grumble

[Ken B]

Your prayer is a micro aggression.

[zamyrabyrd]

Your prayer is a micro aggression.

"Aggressive" words:

https://pjmedia.com/faith/2017/04/19/college-bans-on-campus-christian-preaching-as-fighting-words/

https://www.adflegal.org/detailspages/press-release-details/georgia-college-sued-for-censoring-student-speech-restricting-it-to-0.0015-of-campus

[Cato]

Your prayer is a micro aggression.

GOOD!!!       0:)

"Aggressive" words:

https://pjmedia.com/faith/2017/04/19/college-bans-on-campus-christian-preaching-as-fighting-words/

https://www.adflegal.org/detailspages/press-release-details/georgia-college-sued-for-censoring-student-speech-restricting-it-to-0.0015-of-campus

Just sad!

On another note, which deals more with logic perhaps than grammar (but at times the two are difficult to disentangle) the local newspaper recently ran a curious subtitle to a headline:

"An Examination of the Future."    

Precisely how one examines something which has not yet happened - without the help of Doc Brown - is unclear to me! 

An Examination of Possible Futures, or some similar phrase, should have been used.

[kishnevi]

Posted about this in the Reading thread, but for the benefit of those who missed it there.

Masterfully snarkful look at how England is both a wonderful place to live yet falling apart at the cultural seams (in Bryson's view).
Including the English language.  This book will delight any denizen of Cato's Grammar Grumbles.

There are in fact a number of passages in the book which could be pasted here, but 1)they're usually too long to quote (one goes on for two pages or more) and 2)the book is a good read even on non-linguistic grounds.  Although Bryson might qualify as an honorary resident of this thread.

[Karl Henning]

That is a temptation, I do not deny it.

[Cato]

Posted about this in the Reading thread, but for the benefit of those who missed it there.



There are in fact a number of passages in the book which could be pasted here, but 1)they're usually too long to quote (one goes on for two pages or more) and 2)the book is a good read even on non-linguistic grounds.  Although Bryson might qualify as an honorary resident of this thread.

Many thanks for the recommendation! 

Latest grumble is another stupid name for a drug: Myrbetriq .

The obvious objection is that it sounds like the name of a cousin to a Superman villain!   

Number One: the "y" is NOT pronounced as a "y."  On the television commercial it comes out as a long "e." 

And why a "q" for a "k" at the end?!   0:)

Recently overheard, and spoken without a trace of irony by a 20-something:

"Me 'n' my friend's been growin' beards, but his is a lot more, like, fullest..."

Sigh!

[Ken B]

Recently overheard, and spoken without a trace of irony by a 20-something:

"Me 'n' my friend's been growin' beards, but his is a lot more, like, fullest..."

Sigh!

Recently overheard, and spoken without a trace of irony to a 20-something:
"Thanks for applying. NEXT!"

[Ken B]

Opinions sought

Empty cadences of sea-water licking its own wounds, sulking along the mouths of the delta, boiling upon those deserted beaches - empty, forever empty under the gulls: white scribble on the grey, munched by clouds. If there are ever sails here they die before the land shadows them. Wreckage washed up on the pediments of islands, the last crust, eroded by the weather, stuck in the blue maw of water ... gone!

and

Days became simply the spaces between dreams, spaces between the shifting floors of time, of acting, of living out the topical ... a tide of meaningless affairs nosing along the dead level of things, entering no climate, leading us nowhere, demanding of us nothing save the impossible - that we should be. [She]would say that we had been trapped in the projection of a will too powerful and too deliberate to be human - the gravitational field which [the city] threw down about those it had chosen as its exemplars ...

[Cato]

Opinions sought"

Empty cadences of sea-water licking its own wounds, sulking along the mouths of the delta, boiling upon those deserted beaches - empty, forever empty under the gulls: white scribble on the grey, munched by clouds. If there are ever sails here they die before the land shadows them. Wreckage washed up on the pediments of islands, the last crust, eroded by the weather, stuck in the blue maw of water ... gone!

and

Days became simply the spaces between dreams, spaces between the shifting floors of time, of acting, of living out the topical ... a tide of meaningless affairs nosing along the dead level of things, entering no climate, leading us nowhere, demanding of us nothing save the impossible - that we should be. [She]would say that we had been trapped in the projection of a will too powerful and too deliberate to be human - the gravitational field which [the city] threw down about those it had chosen as its exemplars ...

To quote George Takei: 

OH MY!!!

Egregious rodomontade and snake-oil-salesman twaddle pretending to be poetic and profound when, in fact, no poetry and no profundity are present!  Nor can they be present, given that the concatenations of the words contradict themselves, or are just ridiculously oblique, and communicate therefore nothing.

WHO is responsible for this?  (A horsewhip is being unraveled as I write!)

[ritter]

.

WHO is responsible for this?  (A horsewhip is being unraveled as I write!)

Those two rather exalted but actually quite beautiful and, yes, poetic passages are from Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet.

Quoting them like this, in isolation, is unfair  to the book(s) though, IMHO. Durrell's style varies widely form one novel to the other, and from one situation  to the next (and that's partly what the Quartet is all about).

Taken as a whole, I insist, the work is a splendid literary tour de force.

[Spineur]

Taken as a whole, I insist, the work is a splendid literary tour de force.

I did read the Alexandria quartet in my late teens and found it rather boring.  These sentences within sentences are (I find) an un-english way to express something.  In latin languages this is more common.

[DaveF]

Taken as a whole, I insist, the [Quartet] is a splendid literary tour de force.

Agreed completely, and in places extremely funny - especially the episode where the debauched ex-policeman Scobie becomes, thanks to a linguistic mix-up, venerated as a local deity.

[Cato]

These two rather exalted but actually quite beautiful and, yes, poetic passages are from Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet.

Quoting them like this, in isolation, is unfair  to the book(s) though, IMHO. Durrell's style varies widely from one novel to the other, and from one situation  to the next (and that's partly what the Quartet is all about).

Taken as a whole, I insist, the work is a splendid literary tour de force.

I can see where the passages - in the right context - could be taken as satirical or as some sort of commentary on a certain kind of character.

Still, certain things do make one wonder, e.g. "pediment" cannot possibly be an architectural reference, and therefore one must assume he is using the term from geology.  If so, then the islands must have mountains for the pediments to form.

And so...what is disappearing?  The wreckage, the pediments, or the islands?  Strictly speaking, the last singular noun to which the singular appositive "the last crust" can refer is "the wreckage."  But if something is "stuck," how can it also be "gone" ?  Or is "crust" somehow a collective singular referring to all of them?

And how do "empty cadences" "sulk" or "boil"...if they are empty?  And if everything is "forever empty," how can there be a "white scribble," since that would be a contradiction to the "forever empty" claim?

Agreed completely, and in places extremely funny - especially the episode where the debauched ex-policeman Scobie becomes, thanks to a linguistic mix-up, venerated as a local deity.

Thanks!  And so, I am willing to examine the context and hold my final verdict!  0:)

[ritter]

I did read the Alexandria quartet in my late teens and found it rather boring.  These sentences within sentences are (I find) an un-english way to express something.  In latin languages this is more common.

Yes, that is perhaps true (about the "unenglishness" of these sentences), but that is not a demerit per se, I'd say.

If you read Hermann Broch, as I've recently been doing, with his two and one half pages long sentences describing the sunset on a mountain  (in Demeter), those Durrell passages appear downright epigrammatic  . But in Broch (as is the case with Durrell), the exalted passages may be followed by some straightforward, even pedestrian paragraphs (e.g. of dialogue) which act as a counterweight so to speak (and provide the prose with a kind of musical--operatic?--flow).

What surprises me is that the Quartet bored you. I found the characters, the tangle of relationships, the shifting angles, and the historical and political background quite gripping.

Regards,

[kishnevi]

Let me add my applause for Alexandria Quartet.  Each book adds another layer to the story. I don't remember the prose as being very purplish.

[Ken B]

Taken as a whole, I insist, the work is a splendid literary tour de force.

It's better in its full 884 page glory?

[nodogen]

I've missed 207 pages of moaning? Clearly, I won't be checking back through them but the two current "favourites" in this household are:

1. Responding to a question by beginning with "So.."
Just answer the question, "so" is entirely redundant!

2. The perennial favourite: the inappropriate rising inflection. My partner used to helpfully scream at the telly "IT'S NOT A FUCKING QUESTION!" but I think she's given up.

[nodogen]

Posted about this in the Reading thread, but for the benefit of those who missed it there.



There are in fact a number of passages in the book which could be pasted here, but 1)they're usually too long to quote (one goes on for two pages or more) and 2)the book is a good read even on non-linguistic grounds.  Although Bryson might qualify as an honorary resident of this thread.

I would rather strongly suggest that possibly the largest reason for Britain "falling apart at the cultural seams" is the influence of America. Stick that in your pipe Mr. Bryson.

(I did enjoy Notes from a Small Island.)

[Karl Henning]

I've missed 207 pages of moaning? Clearly, I won't be checking back through them but the two current "favourites" in this household are:

1. Responding to a question by beginning with "So.."
Just answer the question, "so" is entirely redundant!

2. The perennial favourite: the inappropriate rising inflection. My partner used to helpfully scream at the telly "IT'S NOT A FUCKING QUESTION!" but I think she's given up.

So few telly's respond, these days.

[Karl Henning]

I would rather strongly suggest that possibly the largest reason for Britain "falling apart at the cultural seams" is the influence of America.

Something to that.  Though there may be the question of where egg ends and where chicken begins.