PARVUM
OPUS
Number
261
Bill R. wrote
regarding “his blood’s worth bottling”:
May be derivative of "Nelson's Blood,"
the Royal Navy's slang for rum. (In fact, Nelson's body was sent home in a
barrel of brandy, but fact is mutable when sailors are involved.)
Bill also said:
I would commend to you David Kahn's The
Codebreakers. He addresses the Baconians and other Shakespearian
conspiracy theorists in a chapter entitled, IIRC, "The Pathology of
Cryptography."
I think this
book cropped up in PO quite a while ago, and I got it from the library but
didn’t read it, to be honest, because it’s more than 1,100 pages long. Maybe I
should get it again just for that chapter. Fred is sure that Shakespeare was
not Shakespeare.
Mike Sykes wrote
more on the Koran blog:
I found http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=299
to be an interesting critique of its literary qualities; and should you still
want help in choosing a translation, you might gather from http://www.meforum.org/article/717
that if you choose carefully you can probably find one that confirms your
prejudices.
So,
for comparatively light relief I'll refer you to a review of a book: How
to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. If that isn't enough to be able to
talk about it, try Non-fiction:
To read or not to read.
Just what I
need. Actually once I tried to write a paper in college on a book I hadn’t
read. It didn’t turn out well.
And I’m sure I
don’t know what Mike means by my prejudices.
>>>
The University of
Michigan’s English Department offered a course called How to Be Gay.
Really. I had a link to the UM course description but in the last few days it’s
disappeared. Why is this an English class since it’s focused on something more
like sociology? Asked and answered: the course is or was given by a visiting
professor of sociology from Australia. Oscar Wilde wrote of the love that dare
not speak its name, but Dr. David Halperin not only speaks its name, he draws a
schematic. Furthermore, if you have to learn how to be gay, or how to act gay,
doesn’t that weaken the argument that “gayness” is genetic rather than a choice
(or “lifestyle”)?
>>>
A divorced man in Kentucky who’s an
atheist doesn’t want his son to attend a Catholic school. He and his lawyer
want the judge to recuse himself because he’s a Christian, but wouldn’t an
atheist judge be equally biased? Do they have to get an agnostic judge?
Mark Steyn wrote a good
article on his troubles with the law in Canada, caused by their “one-way
multiculturalism” as he named it elsewhere. I’ll be interested to see how this
pans out.
Sometimes my
foreign students give me proverbs that are similar or even identical to English
ones, but some of them are quite different.
I am the equal of myself.
(French)
The example
given was, Suppose I give my wife flowers every week, and my friend says I
am very gallant, I say, “I am the equal of myself.” This seems to mean, “I
live up to my ideal self or my idea of myself.”
The golden house and the silver house are not more
than my dog’s house. (Chinese)
More or less,
“There’s no place like home.”
That which is of the priest goes to the church.
(Venezuelan / Spanish)
Some things are
meant to be together; a student told me this when I talked about how Fred and I
got together.
I just had to
buy the 1965 William Shatner movie, Incubus,
filmed entirely in Esperanto. It’s a horror story, sort of a poor man’s Ingmar
Bergman film, with demon seductresses dressed like middle-class artsy-craftsy
types (coarse linen fringed top over long black skirt and turtleneck, Chanel
bow made of black feathers on the short ponytail). The new film cut has
subtitles. I didn’t bother to try to understand the Esperanto, but here are a
couple of examples, at least this is what I think I heard:
“He is a great
and good man.”
The Esperanto
word for great sounded something like graven. We hear the word
gravitas used now, particularly in regard to whether or not presidential
candidates have it, but it’s not the same as great.
“Ne [go] non
proxime” translated to “Don’t go far” but in English “far” is not exactly the
same as “not proximate” or “not near”. It seems that an artificial language
cannot have the nuances and richness of a real language.
Coincidentally,
I just read about another artificial language called Interlingua (Leland B. Yeager, Liberty,
January-February 2008, p. 33). Yeager says this language is not artificial as
it’s derived from European languages, but so is Esperanto. I won’t go into all
the reasons he thinks this would be a boon to communication. I agree that
studying this or any language would help a person to understand language and
grammar in general, but the flattening of the complexities of the Germanic and
Romance languages is not appealing. When Fred went in the Army, the test he
took to qualify for the NSA language school included an exercise in briefly
studying and applying the grammar of an invented language. He’d studied Latin
in high school so he grasped the concepts. If you’re going to study another
language, why not study a real one (living or dead) that has some literature or
history or real usefulness attached to it? Here’s a sample from an Interlingua
translation of a great document:
Quando in le Curso del Eventos human,
il deveni necessari pro un Populo dissolver le Bandas Politic que les ha
connectite con un altere, e assumer inter le Poteres del Terra, le Position
separate e equal al qual le Leges del Natura e del Deo de Natura les da titulo,
un decente Respecto al Opiniones del Humanitate require que illes declare le
causas que les impelle al Separation.om
Like the
Esperanto in Incubus, this seems to call for an Italian or Spanish sort
of pronunciation.
Recently a young
teacher wrote to the newspaper saying that we could have peace if we could just
all learn other languages and all speak the same language, which was a
rationale for Esperanto. When you look at all the internal conflicts among
people who speak the same language and even share the same religion, you
see that just isn’t so.
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