November 11, 2006
here’s something fun to read. actually, it may just be fun for me to read. and i started skimming. if that’s not your deal, maybe try this. germans. is there anything they can’t do?
Archived Entry
- Post Date :
- November 11, 2006 at 3:05 pm
- Category :
- referencing
- Do More :
- You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Blog at WordPress.com. — Theme: Connections by www.vanillamist.com
November 12, 2006 at 3:05 am
I dont know, maybe its just me and perhaps I’m oversimplifying, but Patrick White just seems like a ranting old language fascist to me. Considering the types that regular this blog, I’m sure we wont be short of an argument here (cue, Aden Rolfe: “Language - concomittant with empire.”) but aside from the whole language/power issue, I just dont understand why there is such an obsession with exactitude, rightness and wrongess. Sure, people fuck up the words they utter, people fuck up plenty of things, but if the language works to communicate something adequately, then hasn’t it done its job?
And even if we want to police language il duce styles, how could we?
November 13, 2006 at 3:05 am
[...] [i started writing this as a response to nick’s comment on this post. but as i got progressively carried away, i realised i should probably post it as a real post. if i were eligible for honours next year, if i had ever done and INDEPENDENT WRITING PROJECT, these would be the kind of ideas that i would probably want to play with.] ok, the sudafed’s kicked in, so i’m feeling a little more energetic and can finally reply to this. of course patrick white is being a silly old twat in this stuff. that’s why i posted it, because i enjoy a bit of histrionics. and i absolutely love the fact that there once was a ‘Standing Committee on Spoken English’. i have a simultaneous sympathy and repulsion towards someone who finds wrong stresses [FRUStrate for frustRATE, for example] ‘particularly distressing’. my sympathy towards it i suppose is due to having a sympathy towards anyone who cares that much about language. because of course, whilst language does at some level have that base index of ‘does it do what we want?’ that’s kind of not good enough. because of course, language never ‘works’ perfectly. we come up against the ineffectiveness of it with every articulation. some of the methods we employ to get around it are more successful than others. but i have a real aversion to reducing language to being merely functional, just about ‘communicating something [more or less] adequately’*. i once spoke to a science professor at my uni in spain who said: you’re so lucky to have english as your mother tongue, because really, the whole language thing is a real pain for all of us [translated general gist, of course]. for her, the gaps between languages were just unfortunate, cumbersome divisions to be overcome by decoding things. she seemed to think that when we all speak english adequately, everything will be ok. the raw data of her academic articles could just be translated straight across+. and of course, i think language’s relation with its ’subject’ is a little more intertwined. what we need, is not the decoding of language, but rather more coding. recoding. making obvious the mess in our own language. i think this stuff is really important not just as an investigation into language and communication, but also politically. making evident these things within a single language starts to pull apart the fascistic desires for monolinguistic nationalities. i imagine it as a refreshing opening up, like eucalyptus clearing blocked sinuses. [...]
November 13, 2006 at 3:05 am
how’s that for recursion/narcissism, pat? my blog thinks i gave myself a pingback. now that’s self-promotion.