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The Secret Diary of D. A. Carson.

Speech Is Magic

Some favorite topics of mine:

Cuss words
Back to the Future
Tintin
The Bible

All linked together by Lingamish. Read his post, then read the article Eddie links to: Toward an Evangelical Theology of Cussing.

One could add another section to Svigel's excellent paper covering the relevance of speech-act theory to cussing. More noticeably than most other words, curse or swear words do things. Taken at face value, they invoke a curse or register an oath. Of course, many people no longer believe that God, or the spirits, or the universe itself responds to their oaths and curses. But even when used by someone who believes that speech is potent only in the human realm, the words still act. They intimidate, shock, or impress. They grab the hearer by the collar and demand attention. That's why it's called strong language.

To forestall an inevitable response: the words do this to the extent that they remain strong language. If, in a given social context, the words become so common that they become accepted, inoffensive, even expected, then their status as "cuss words" is thereby diminished. Doing things with words is essentially magic, and you can't deploy the most powerful magic indefinitely without diminishing returns.

Conversing with Chesterton's Portrait

An interview with Chesterton about Dan Brown (HT: American Chesterton Society). The editor who pieced that together did an excellent job. More than anything, though, the piece reminds me of how great Chesterton himself was. How many authors have a body of work that is unified, vibrant, and vast enough to make this kind of reconstruction plausible?

As the title of the post indicates, the article makes me think of conversing with Chesterton in a portrait from the Potterverse. You're talking with an echo of the person; nothing truly new can emerge from the conversation. At least, nothing new from your interlocutor--you are free to experience new thoughts and insights.

I've imagined doing a sort of stitched-together exchange like this in which Chesterton and Oscar Wilde volley wit and witticisms at each other. Of course, Wilde joined Chesterton's church before the end, so it's not inconceivable that they've had a raucous ongoing conversation in the afterlife.

Sterile Irony

Lileks, writing about MadMen's depiction of the 60s, drop kicks the greatest metaphor ever:

"It may seem impossible to some, but people played the accordion without making sure everyone knew it was being done ironically, or was intended to be understood with a certain amount of irony. God knows I love irony, but it’s the condom the culture puts on when it doesn’t want to enjoy something completely for reasons it will regret in the morning."

I want to bank here

You know that scene at the end of The Shawshank Redemption when Andy hands a bank teller some envelopes and says, "Could you put this in your outgoing mail?" I have always wanted to do that: hand off my mail at the bank with an air of confident sophistication. It's like dropping off your laundry at the gas station. Banking + Mail = Awesome. Seriously, I think about that scene every time I slide a letter into a mailbox or drop it into the bin in the mailroom at work. I would so much rather hand this to a gracious, smiling teller, knowing she would dispatch the task with efficiency and discretion.

But I bank at the grocery store. Banking + Food = Not so cool. Can you imagine handing a letter to a twenty-something, stubbled, mumbly teller in an ill-fitting suit from Target, a half-inch gap between the top of his tie-knot and the top of his collar? Inconceivable. It's off the script. He couldn't ask me if I want my balance with that, or if I want to open a savings account. The steely glares of the five people queued up behind me (heretofore directed at the two tellers busily doing something other than assisting customers) would cut through me like samurai blades.

Yes, I'm waxing wistful and snarky about a two-second scene from a movie. But you got to admit, it is a good movie.

Evasion

Last night I saw part of a game show while visiting a friend's apartment. The show ("Lingo") was clearly a word game, but I couldn't follow how it worked. The TV was muted and I was making some effort at conversation.

In the wee hours of the night, I dreamed I was on the show. There was a lot of set-up in the dream: people arriving, explaining who they were, finding their seats. When the time came to actually play the game, various delays popped up--more spectators arrived, the host left the stage, contestants disappeared and we couldn't proceed till they returned.

I got impatient and tried to gather the wayward characters. I started grilling my competitors on the rules of the game, since I hadn't played before. They became evasive, started talking nonsense. I got angry, thinking they were trying to make sure I lost.

Suddenly I realized this fact: The characters in your dreams, being contained entirely within your head, have no knowledge that you do not already have. They couldn't give me a straight answer because I didn't know the rules. I awoke laughing.

My question for you is, have you ever heard this point made before? I feel like I've read it somewhere or seen it in a TV show (sounds like something that would show up in a Star Trek episode). Any ideas?

Fancying Footnotes

I love footnotes. I know they drive some people crazy; some people want them banished to the end of the book, or at least to the end of the chapter. Some people even want to scrub them out of books all together.

Me, I like footnotes in my fiction. Eaters of the Dead was good for that, though not as good as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I never finished Infinite Jest, but if I remember correctly, it had endnotes. An unfortunate decision, I fear. It's hard enough to read a thousand-page novel without having to flip back and forth between parts of the book. Actually, with that many pages, you're not flipping back and forth. I think flipping has a three-hundred-page maximum. At a thousand pages, you're flopping. Or maybe floupping.

Another of my favorite footnoted figures of fiction is The Annotated Alice. I was rereading it today, enjoying the lengthy notes on "Jabberwocky," when I stumbled on this tidbit:

"A magnificent German translation [of "Jabberwocky"] was made by Robert Scott, an eminent Greek scholar who had collaborated with Dean Liddell (Alice's father) on a Greek lexicon."

Both the book and my jaw dropped into my lap. Alice Liddell's father was that Liddell? Liddell & Scott Liddell?* I guess I should have expected the Dean of an Oxford college to have accomplished something other than making friends with fairytale writers, but I didn't expect Alice's dad to have edited one of the Greek lexica. Talk about being overshadowed.

*Incidently, I don't know why the Wikipedia page about Liddell & Scott claims that Liddell accented the second syllable of his name. Carroll repeatedly puns on Liddell as "little." Gardiner claims the name "rhymes with fiddle" (p. xviii in my edition) and argues, "We know how "Liddell" was pronounced because in Carroll's day the students at Oxford composed the following couplet: I am the Dean and this is Mrs. Liddell. / She plays the first, and I the second fiddle" (p. 75).

Delhi 2 Dublin

Heard about these guys on NPR's The World last night. Good stuff. Some people might think that Celtic fiddle and Indian music are a strange combination, but linguists know that it's just a reunion of distant cousins: the westernmost and the easternmost branches of those prolific proto-Indo-Europeans (see chart). I wonder if they could record a song that consisted of a call and response of Sanskrit and Gaelic cognates (I stole the following from Metro Gael; more of the same to be found in published books as well):

Raja - Ri
Arya - Aire
Badhira - Bodar
Pibati - Ibid
Minda - Mend

You could do a song about a deaf king who gets drunk with a freeman and ends up disabled or stammering.

Smells Like Money

I first ran across the proverb Pecunia non olet (Money doesn't stink) in a book about Aldi.
What I didn't realize until today was that the proverb is also a pun. Pecunia means both "money" and "cattle," and of course, cattle do in fact stink (HT: Liberman).

If you've ever been on a farm with livestock, you may have seen this scene played out:

City Slicker: This farm smells.
Farmer: {Inhale}: Smells like money.

It's nice to know that my Uncle Mike has the same sense of humor as the ancient Romans.

"While shooting yourself in the leg is by no means the most glamorous thing a man can do . . ."

". . . if you must do it, it seems best to do it while shark hunting."

From AoM's recap of Hemingway's life. I've always assumed that Dos Equis's "Most Interesting Man in the World" is a rip-off of Ernest.

Up My Alley

Read this news with interest: Lewis on Language (Unpublished).

I'm about a quarter of the way through Planet Narnia, incidentally. (I decided that having accepted its thesis on the basis of an article each in Touchstone and Books & Culture, and having enthusiastically passed it on to others, I ought to read the bookitself.) It's living up to my expectations.

It's also reminding me of works that I need to read (or read again): The Divine Comedy, Shakespeare's works, Canterbury Tales . . .

What's Twitter good for?

Like many innovations, Twitter is a good angle to use to talk about something that's been talked about a thousand times before. To keep you updated on the "they"-as-a-gender-neutral-pronoun debate, I give you this article from the New York Times Magazine. (HT: Adam from ElShaddai Edwards from Mike Aubrey)

It makes all the claims that have driven the good Professor Liberman to distraction: "Writers as far back as Chaucer used ['they'] for singular and plural, masculine and feminine." "Many great writers — Byron, Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope and more — continued to use they and company as singulars." Merriam-Webster accepts it. No examples are cited, though, disappointing my hopes of seeing a true clash of the titans as the Times rose to accept Liberman's challenge.

The article's authors (Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman) make an argument I've not heard before, which is that the idea that "he" can refer to both genders stems from "Anne Fisher, an 18th-century British schoolmistress and the first woman to write an English grammar book." They cite the delightfully named Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade for this fact (I assume to chase it down and find examples, one would have to read her book. Ooo, it's only $137 at Amazon!)

It seems that it ought to be incredibly easy to decide between O'Conner/Kellerman and Liberman on this point: one side claims that "he" was never used as a gender-neutral pronoun before Anne Fisher; the other claims that "they" was never so used before the mid-20th century. This calls for some collating. This calls for a dissertation.

On second thought, before I send in my application for Ph.D. programs, I can think of one data point off the top of my head that seems to blow O'Conner/Kellerman out of the water: the earliest English Bible translators used "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun. Now, maybe one could argue that that usage was a carry-over from Greek and Hebrew, and that the English Bibles reshaped the language and paved the way for Fisher's declaration . . .

I've been compulsively listening to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me for the last few months (funniest show on radio), and I notice that Peter Sagal always says to the Not My Job guest, "Answer two of the questions correctly and you'll win our prize for one of our listeners: Carl Kassel's voice on their home answering machine." That sheds no light on the subject, I guess, since I think Liberman would accept using "their" with "one."

Husserl and the Hyrax: Part I

First, let me pay my debts. Adam directed me to the Economist article, and my descriptions of Husserl's categories come from James K. A. Smith, "Tongues as 'Resistance Discourse,'" in Speaking in Tongues: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives, edited by Mark J. Cartledge.

So what are hyraxes singing about? According to the article, they sing about their vital stats: weight, size, hormones, and status. Not as interesting a topic as the pangs of unrequited love, but musical tastes do differ.

Of course, the article tries to draw inferences about human singing from animal mating calls, eventually suggesting that when you sing about unrequited love, what you're really singing about is yourself--your size, anatomy, and hormones.

Let's consider this understanding of meaning or "aboutness." You see a teenage boy playing guitar and singing "Hey There Delilah" in front of a teenage girl. You could say that his song means "I am a suitable mate," that the song is about his sexual maturity and dexterity. There seems to be something to that understanding, but by itself, it's a very narrow and monochromatic definition of meaning. A richer understanding of meaning would be able to say (at least) that the song is about a woman named Delilah, beloved by the narrator, who is in school in New York City, far from her lover. One should also be able to say that the song means, "Isn't love a beautiful anguish?" or "Remain faithful to me as I remain faithful to you," or any number of other statements.

The first level of meaning, in which the song is about the singer's vital stats, seems much farther removed from the second and third levels (in which the song is about the people named in the song and about other people by extension, respectively).

In future posts we'll explore these different levels of meaning, bringing in some vocabulary drawn from Husserl in particular.

In the meantime, ponder the following ways of referring to meaning or "aboutness," all taken from the article (my italics throughout). Do they all mean the same thing? Do some correspond better to the first level? Others to the second and third?

"Zoologists have worked out the meaning of some [animal] calls . . . the rattle made by a male barn swallow indicates his testosterone levels."

"what hyraxes were singing about."

"correlations between the pattern of a hyrax's song and other details of its anatomy and behaviour."

"Wailing . . . indicates weight."

"A mid-song sound . . . communicates size."

"snorts . . . are connected to . . . hormones."

"peaks in snort-frequency provided information on . . . dominance."

"these are all honest signals."