Number 68
I can't remember where I found this, but on a scrap of paper on my desk is a notation about the Bad Writing Contest sponsored by "Philosophy and Literature Daily". I couldn't write Parvum Opus if I didn't love bad writing, and this is real bad, and real good. I'm not sure if they still hold the contests, but you can find winners from 1996, 1997, and 1998, selected from real scholarly journals. The PALD editor, Denis Dutton, writes:
As usual this year’s winners were produced by well-known, highly-paid experts who have no doubt labored for years to write like this. That these scholars must know what they are doing is indicated by the fact that the winning entries were all published by distinguished presses and academic journals.
Dutton invites everyone to post and pass on the content, so here's the 1998 winner, by Professor Judith Butler, whose first-prize sentence appears in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997):
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Dutton remarked that “it’s possibly the anxiety-inducing obscurity of such writing that has led Professor Warren Hedges of Southern Oregon University to praise Judith Butler as ‘probably one of the ten smartest people on the planet’.”
Well, Professor Butler probably has a good job making more money than I do.
But lest you think the problem is just that you don't know her subject, whatever it is, read this entry explaining what it all meant when an Olympic ice-skater hired a hit man:
Finally, the Canadian David Savory found this lucid sentence in the essay by Robyn Wiegman and Linda Zwinger, in "Tonya's Bad Boot," an essay in Women on Ice, edited by Cynthia Baughman (Routledge, 1995):"Punctuated by what became ubiquitous sound bites ~ Tonya dashing after the tow truck, Nancy sailing the ice with one leg reaching for heaven ~ this melodrama parsed the transgressive hybridity of un-narrativized representative bodies back into recognizable heterovisual codes."
In at least two old books I've proofed for Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders project (see PO 65), I've run across "situate" used as we use "situated" (e.g. "[Philadelphia] is situate on the west bank of the Delaware River.") I don't have the publication date for this example, but it would have been no later than 1915, and the other book was from about the same period (i.e., not long out of copyright). This usage is called archaic in www.yourdictionary.com, while www.yourdict.org, on the other hand, says that although it's less common now than situated, both situate and situated are "well authorized." Don't know why, unless it's the timeless desire to add syllables.
A friend sent me a news story about the county Department of Human Services in Portland, Oregon, which advertised for a Klingon interpreter. It seems that some mental health patients speak only Klingon, the language created for "Star Trek." There's a Klingon Language Institute, by the way. I wonder if Berlitz would give classes in Klingon if a client asked for it; they claim to offer every living language.
A friend asked me how I thought a person who knows little about the New Testament might be expected to interpret the movie, "The Passion of the Christ." Well, I don't know. But I think it behooves movie reviewers to know something about the subject. And the rest of us, as educated people, ought to know at least the basics of the foundation of Western culture, which is largely Jewish and Christian history.
The actress who played the Virgin Mary is Maia Morgenstern, a Romanian Jew. She prepared for the role by reading the New and the Old Testaments, and some of the Koran and Bhagavad-Gita. "I wanted to read more about Mayan and Incan civilization, but unfortunately, I did not get the chance." She did not think the movie was anti-Semitic. As for the violence, she compares the movie to ancient Greek theater: "The ancient concept of catharsis [the purging of pity and fear] is very present in this film . . . . Those are the roots of show business."
See, we all should have stayed awake in those Western Civ classes.
I mentioned earlier that "elite" comes from a French root meaning to choose. I just learned that "heretic" comes from a Latin root meaning to choose.
FYI: I am getting married in a month, and here's a heads-up: I'll take a couple of weeks off from Parvum Opus in April, so you may want to start planning now.
Meanwhile, let us consider some words pertinent to this occasion: I will be going from unwed to wed; unmarried to married; single to ~ well, not double; spinster to bride.
The bride status is temporary, of course, but the wife status is till death (no, don't be cynical; this is so).
Why and how did "unwed" get to be applied to the delicate situation of unmarried mothers, who are now more often called "single" mothers, with a concomitant transformation of social cachet?
As you know, "spinster" goes back to pre-industrial days when women did the spinning, a huge cottage industry and a nearly universal domestic skill. The word also became a legal term for an unmarried woman, although I'm not sure if that carried over from England to America. "Spinster" took on the connotation of an unfortunate, unmarriageable old woman, but I (along with Florence King) think it's an appealing term, certainly vastly better than the World War I era term, "superfluous women," whose superfluity was created by deaths of so many eligible men in the war, although actually the term goes back much further than that in England. How could a spinning woman be superfluous? If today I am superfluous, a month from now I will not be.
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